Blues-rock band the Black Keys and their frontman Dan Auerbach were the big winners at the Grammy Awards Sunday night, walking away with four statues, but folk-rock group Mumford Sons won the album of the year for “Babel,” James C. McKinley Jr. writes. Belgian-Australian songwriter Gotye won three trophies, including record of the year and best pop duo, and Fun. won best new artist and song of the year for “We Are Young.” Adele became the first woman since Barbra Streisand to win the award for best pop solo performance two years in a row, Frank Ocean won for best contemporary urban album, and Kanye West and Jay-Z won three awards for their collaboration album, “Watch the Throne.” The nominations for the top four awards favored rock and folk while ignoring electronic dance music, hip-hop and country.
The Grammy Awards were an exercise in anachronism, Ben Ratliff writes, and the big winners were strummed strings, whomped drumheads and massed, inexact unisons. The awards are a perennially flawed metric for honoring popular music because the winners invariably conform to the biases of older voters who are well past their prime in the industry, Jon Caramanica gripes. If the Grammy narrative is to be believed, the last time there was musical innovation to be celebrated was in the mid-1980s. The Grammys of 2045 will probably not be any different. Think of the complaints future critics will lodge: the Grammy Awards favor familiar modes! Youthful innovation is not being rewarded!
The public and Congress did not seem engaged in debate over the Obama administration’s frequent use of unmanned drones before the confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s prospective head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The lack of interest was not because journalists ignored the issue, David Carr writes in The Media Equation. Perhaps the reason we remain in the dark is because we want it that way — if the bad guys are on the run without boots on the ground, what’s not to like? The government has carefully shielded the drone project every step of the way, he writes, but the fact remains that drone strikes will require a new legal framework, much like nuclear weapons in the 1940s.
NBC Universal will announce Monday that it has concluded a deal with Hearst magazines to rebrand one of NBC’s cable properties as the Esquire Network, after the magazine of the same name, Bill Carter writes. Bonnie Hammer, NBC’s top cable executive, said the channel G4, currently devoted to gaming, would be changed into a kind of “upscale Bravo for men.” The channel will not be duplicative of the magazine, though there will be some crossover. The Esquire network will feature two new original shows and will rebroadcast the comedies “Parks and Recreation” and “Party Down,” both of which star Adam Scott, who is something of an ideal for the network.
The women’s magazine Self is rebranding in hopes of reaching a somewhat younger audience, Tanzina Vega reports. Self, published by Condé Nast, is broadening its tight focus on exercise and wellness to become a more general lifestyle magazine infused with beauty and fashion, an effort that will include editorial changes, a new cover design and logo. The editorial shift is most evident in the chatty headlines for subsections of the magazine and more fashion-focused images. The redesign has already interested new advertisers like LeSportSac.
The Financial Times is celebrating its 125th birthday on Wednesday and, unlike many newspapers, may actually have cause for celebration, Eric Pfanner reports. The F.T. appears to have adapted to the changing media landscape — last year the number of digital subscribers, 300,000, surpassed the number of people who subscribe to print; subscription revenues are expected to surpass ad sales this year; and mobile devices account for one-quarter of the paper’s digital traffic. Analysts said that the boom in digital subscriptions hides the fact that online advertising has yet to catch on in a big way, which helps explain why The F.T. continues publishing a print edition to appeal to luxury advertisers.
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