There’s something strangely disrespectful about the Grammy Awards keeping some of the decade’s best albums under the alternative umbrella until they’re proven commodities, only to acknowledge them as rock acts once they’re so obviously past their prime.
If I were to tell you that The White Stripes were nominated twice for best rock album at the Grammys between 2000 and 2010, you might believe this. It’s an entirely conceivable notion. I could also tell you that the Raconteurs were nominated twice in that category during that same stretch of time.
Only one of those statements is true.
Here’s a quick list of acts that were nominated multiple times for best rock album between 2000-2010: U2, Foo Fighters, Matchbox Twenty, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Green Day, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Neil Young, and (drumroll) The Raconteurs. If you had guessed earlier that The White Stripes would have earned more nominations, you were wrong.
But should you be? Should “Elephant” have been nominated over the Evanescense and Nickelback records released in 2003?
Going off Grammy rock nominations alone, the Foo Fighters and U2 owned the aughts. The Foo Fighters won three times (three times!) on four nominations, with Bono and company coming in second with two wins on three nominations (three nominations!) I was 100 percent OK with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” preventing Ryan Adams from taking home hardware in 2002. It’s “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” topping the Foo Fighters’ “In Your Honor” at the 2006 awards that caught my eye (one, because of how many times U2 and the Foo Fighters were nominated during that stretch, but also because of how Bono uses the Spanish language on “Vertigo”).
Knowing what we know now, what should the nominations and winners have looked like at the beginning of the Millennium? How many legitimate snubs were there, in hindsight? Uno? Dos? Tres? Catorce?
Who was the Best Rock Album category trying to reward?
Let’s work through it.
Best Rock Album nominees at the 2000 Grammy Awards
Part of this thought experiment was to see if Grammy rock noms at all matched up with the burned CDs my sister was passing down to me through middle school and junior high. Do the real nominees look like these years felt at the time?
Now, there was a lot going on in the year 2000. It was the year that Limp Bizkit album with “Break Stuff” on it lost to that Santana album with the Rob Thomas collaboration. The other nominees that year were, in no particular order:
The Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Californication”)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Melissa Ethridge
Were there any snubs? It’s hard to say, it was a weird time, but here’s what else was going on:
Human Clay (Creed)
Soft Bulletin (Flaming Lips)
Astro Lounge (Smash Mouth)
Clarity (Jimmy Eat World)
Enema of the State (Blink-182)
If Creed was ever going to do it, this would have probably been it. Instead of a Grammy nomination for “Human Clay,” however, they were dealt a chance to perform at the halftime of a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game. The performance was, if nothing else, spectacular television.
The powers that be, you could argue, were pretty close with the 2000 Grammy awards. A Rob Thomas/Santana collaboration dethroning Fred Durst at the height of nu-metal is a pretty complete story. Matchbox 20 would be nominated for rock album of the year again later in the decade, and classic rock radio acts like Tom Petty and Neil Young were also multi-time nominees during that stretch.
But looking at the list of winners throughout the decade, you’re faced with bands like, for example, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. If we handed out 10 awards to 10 different bands that defined the decade, would RHCP be one of them? Would U2 be one of them?
“Stadium Arcadium” was RHCP’s lone Best Rock Album win that decade (2007). Records like “Stadium Arcadium” and the Foo Fighter’s “In Your Honor” are almost frustrating, because what are you supposed to do with a band’s sweeping, mid- to late-career double album? Do you owe them an award for records like “Californication” going up against acts like Rob Thomas featuring Santana in previous years and losing? It almost would have made more sense for “Californication” to have defeated both Santana and Durst, leaving room for records like “Sam’s Town” and The Hold Steady’s “Boys and Girls in America” to have a fair shake in 2007.
This take has been attributed to Paul Scheer, but these awards, particularly the Oscars and Grammys, should probably be given out 10 years after the fact. Which records would that 10-year test be friendlier to: There is Nothing Left to Lose (Foo) or Enema of the State (Blink) or even Astro Lounge (Smash Mouth)?
I find myself wondering how Foo became such Grammy darlings in a decade when rock revival acts like the Strokes, White Stripes and Killers were all bursting onto the scene. That’s not to mention the pop-punk bands who seemed to be largely ignored. I mention this subgenre because they weren’t always ignored — Blink would go on to earn a Best Rock Album nomination years later with “California,” which is kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Who is the Best Rock Album category trying to reward? Let’s back it up a little more.
The 2001 Grammy Awards: “Alternative to what?”
The Best Rock Album was an award that debuted at the 1995 Grammys. It was given to the Rolling Stones over Pearl Jam, REM, and Soundgarden. (Neil Young was also nominated). Almost 20 years later, in 2014, the award was given to the Led Zeppelin reunion effort “Celebration Day” over releases from Bowie and Black Sabbath (and Neil Young). The 2019 award was given to Greta Van Fleet, a band who, fairly or unfairly, would be less famous if they did not sound exactly like Zeppelin.
With these examples in mind, it would appear the category was created for a very specific reason: to retroactively give hardware to classic rock radio acts, because they represent was rock was, what rock is, and what rock should be. But as you read through the nominees for Best Rock Album each year, you get the sense there is an effort to strike a balance between the old school and new school.
The 2001 awards are a really cool (maddening) example of this, particularly when juxtaposed with the “Best Alternative Music Album” category (a category that was created in 1991).
Let’s look at a few of the 2001 Grammy nominees:
Paul McCartney
Radiohead (“Kid A”)
Foo Fighters
Bon Jovi
Fiona Apple
No Doubt
Rage Against the Machine
Matchbox Twenty
Beck
The Cure
Can you find the rock acts? How about the alternative acts?
This was the “Kid A” year for Radiohead. You know how this one ends: they managed to score a humble victory over Paul McCartney in the (*checks notes*) Alternative category.
Again, it would be easier if the Best Rock Album category was named the “Congratulations on the late-career effort, aging guitar group” category. But it’s not. The lines are insanely blurred, and U2’s Alternative win in 1994 and Blink-182’s Rock nomination in 2017 muddy the waters tremendously.
Ellen Page’s character in Juno says a lot with only three words when she utters: “Alternative to what?”
This all must have been, and still be very confusing to people like Moby, who was nominated in the Alternative category in 2000 only to lose to Beck. The category feels right for an act like Moby but feels decidedly wrong for an act like The White Stripes. We mentioned earlier how The Stripes missed out on a Rock Album nomination during this decade.
They did, however, prove to be Alternative darlings by winning that award three times from 2000 to 2010.
I can only imagine how hard this was for Moby, watching Beck eventually go on to win Best Rock Album for “Morning Phase.” Beck was no longer alternative. (Moby also would have to go on and defend his stance on whether Natalie Portman had been willing to be seen in public with him for a short time in the early 2000s. I believe he was promoting a book at the time.)
Were there any snubs in 2001? Well, there were eligible efforts by The White Stripes, Marilyn Manson, and Neil Young. It will forever be amusing to me that Neil Young, a very talented person, has been nominated for Best Rock Album seven times since 1995 without a victory. It is even more amusing to me how there were other albums of his that went unnominated in that stretch. I guess you could say “Moon and Antarctica” by Modest Mouse was another snub candidate.
At the 2001 awards, The Foo Fighters won best rock album for “There Is Nothing Left To Lose” and Radiohead won best alternative music album for “Kid A.”
It’s easy to imagine what Courtney Love might say about this win for The Foo Fighters, but let’s take it in this direction instead: there’s something strangely disrespectful about keeping some of the decade’s best albums under the alternative umbrella until they’re proven commodities, only to acknowledge those bands as rock acts once they’re so obviously past their prime.
It feels like one last “fuck you” from the Boomers before they go. Fuck us? Fuck you. (And fuck Bon Jovi.)
Apologies to Bon Jovi: The Grammy Awards, 2002-2003
There’s a sad movie you can stream called “Life Itself” that came out in 2018. In it, Olivia Wilde’s character tries to convince Oscar Isaac’s character that despite the state of Bob Dylan’s voice, the record “Time Out Of Mind” would be worth his time and meant a lot to her. She describes it as a “Fuck you” record, citing that it won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 1997.
Dylan had one left in the chamber, she argued. And it won, she continued, because of a “fuck you, I’m Bob Dylan” factor.
Her point suggests that not all of Dylan’s late-career efforts are of this quality. It’s an important distinction, particularly when looking at the Grammy nominations for Best Rock Album between 2000-2010. These efforts can be unspectacular. Sometimes they’re just signs of life from a band that knows the end is nigh.
(You know that thing where you bring your dog to the vet to be put down, and despite months of declining health, it behaves very playfully in the waiting room? No? Too personal?)
Bands will obviously continue to tour and create music (and age). That’s one of the only things we know for sure. But this leaves us with countless late-career efforts to sort through, some of which wind up getting nominated for Best Rock Album at the Grammy Awards. But if Bob Dylan can have a less-than-spectacular late-career album, then this can certainly be true for Bon Jovi, who was nominated for “Crush” in 2001. (The album featured “It’s My Life” etc.) Similarly, Aerosmith snagged a nomination in 2002 for “Just Push Play” (an album that featured “Jaded” etc.)
“It’s My Life” rips, but Crush probably isn’t a “fuck you” record.
I do think there’s a difference between “Crush” and, say, U2’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” and Springsteen’s “The Rising,” records that won Best Rock Album in 2002 and 2003, respectively. “The Rising” for example, was probably the best Sept. 11 we got. It felt important at the time for The Boss to release music on the topic, let alone a late-career album that went as deep as “The Rising” went.
That’s what’s so maddening about the “Best Rock Album” category -- just when it makes no sense at all, there will be a two-year stretch when it all feels right. “Fuck you” records allow for the category to both give hardware to aging guitar groups, but also award some of the year’s best rock music.
But this doesn’t mean the category’s relationship with the “Alternative” album award is not flawed.
U2’s run as an alternative darling in the 90s remains puzzling. Coldplay’s rise from an alternative winner in 2002 and 2003 to rock album winner in 2009 with “Viva la Vida” is also strange. What changed?
More confusingly, perhaps, is the fact that Elvis Costello snagged a Best Rock Album nomination in 2003, and Elvis Costello and the Imposters were nominated in the Alternative category that same year.
It’s nice to see that albums like “American Idiot” and “Hot Fuss” were nominated for Best Rock Album in 2005, but it’s dumbfounding to scroll farther and find U2 won another Best Rock Album award in 2006 for “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” (a record that was dumb and bad).
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Here’s a list of the Alternative nominees from the “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” year: The White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Beck, Deathcab For Cutie, and Franz Ferdinand.
In lieu of snubs, I’ll leave you with a list of albums that didn’t receive Rock or Alternative nominations in 2002 and 2003:
The Strokes (Is This It?)
The White Stripes (White Blood Cells)
The Shins (Oh, Inverted World)
Sum 41 (All Killer No Filler)
Blink 182 (Take Off Your Pants and Jacket)
Flaming Lips (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots)
Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot)
Interpol (Turn on the Bright Lights)
Maroon 5 (Songs About Jane)
The 2020 Grammy Awards
This year, Cage The Elephant has solidified its position in the dad-rock realm with a late-career Best Rock Album nomination. It is also worth noting Vampire Weekend seems to have figured out how to bend space and time, as Elvis Costello did in 2003 — the band is nominated for Best Rock Song (“Harmony Hall”) and Best Alternative Music Album (“Father of the Bride”).
My suggestion is simply this: nominate the best rock albums for the Best Rock Album award. And maybe give Neil Young a hug.
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