Point: The Weeknd
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon was not 2011’s Best New Artist, no matter what’s engraved on that Grammy he just won. And that’s not because the group’s music sounds like the mumbled verse of a late-era Nirvana song layered over the soundtrack to Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” and played through a wall – sorry, the wall of a cabin deep in the Wisconsin Woods. That’s neither here nor there.
No, Bon Iver was not last year’s Best New Artist because it wasn’t new. Bon Iver was that band’s second album; it’s been around for four whole years. So though we may differ in our own picks, Allegra, we can at least agree that the entire Recording Academy deserves to be labeled lex-offenders for that perversion of language. Yes, that means they’ll have to stay away from English classes; their temptation to sully minds with poor usage is apparently too strong to control.
That aside: The Weeknd, right? Few other artists, new or experienced, had a stronger 2011, and no other artists had a stronger debut last year than the Canadian project’s series of three free mixtapes, each polished enough to be considered an album.
Even once you scrape away the hype, The Weeknd built up through that carefully cultivated web presence – the mysterious Tumblr, the carefully guarded personal identity (and really, shouldn’t that stuff count in a modern evaluation of an artist?) – the fact remains that The Weeknd has taken a genre of music long thought too popped-out to be truly relevant, and roughly shoved it back into the conscious of people that don’t spend seven hours a day pressing spring-noise sound effect buttons in a Top 40 studio.
Good music evokes an emotional response. So how terrifying is this, from “Initiation” on December’s Echoes of Silence: “And the clocks don’t work, you don’t gotta check the time/ And the blinds don’t work, you don’t gotta check the sky.” It’s an R&B ballad stripped bare of any pretense of suave, with singer Abel Tesfaye’s vocals modulating wildly across a spaced-out waterbed of a beat. And absolutely nothing is creepier than a waterbed.
R&B was dead, and The Weeknd revived it. But, as is so often the case, the reanimated corpse was a little darker, a little harder to control. The Weeknd brought a harder edge to songs that, recently, had been the audio equivalent of “Jersey Shore”: vacuous, club-obsessed bullshit. That’s a far cry from the predatory, yet occasionally self-conscious persona present in the lyrics on House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence. For its highly-detailed invention of the party scene’s pitch-black reducto ad absurdum, The Weeknd is 2011’s Best New Artist.
Counterpoint: Knife Party
Every year I psych myself up to watch the Grammys, hoping to catch a best-of-career performance, a heartfelt acceptance speech or at the very least some regrettable comments (I’m looking at you, Kayne). While I’ve totally given up on the first and am halfway to giving up the second, the Grammy Awards Show at the very least provides some entertainment. But every year when the little envelope is opened, at least one of my reactions is “What the hell”?
The Best New Artist award is usually one such moment.
It seems like the Recording Academy is hell-bent on throwing its audience for a loop with the category, choosing jazz musician Esperanza Spalding last year and the country Zac Brown Band the year before that. Although watching Justin Vernon of Bon Iver awkwardly tell the country he was “uncomfortable” accepting the award for Best New Artist was close to priceless, it would have been refreshing to see the artists most deserving of the award clutching their Grammy.
Cue Knife Party.
While lex-police Lin may get on me for the fact that Knife Party’s members Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen are anything but new artists, the duo from the legendary Australian electronic band Pendulum has gone in a completely different direction with its recently-formed side project.
Even though Knife Party just dropped its first EP at the tail-end of 2011, the handful of tracks has already sparked a cult following, upcoming collaborations with DJs such as Steve Aoki and a slot at this year’s Ultra Music Festival. Pendulum was most successful with UK audiences, and now Knife Party has already proven to be music to at least one American’s ears: The duo’s remix of Porter Robinson’s “Unison” was used in a trailer for Director Anthony Hemingway’s “Red Tails.”
Knife Party doesn’t deserve the Grammy for defying history by landing a trailer for a World War II movie. However, where its members have truly proven their worth of the award is through the production of electronic music’s new breed. Knife Party’s music currently defies classification, combining drumstep, electro and dubstep to produce a sound that essentially has no peer.
Skrillites could argue that Skrillex has done the same and done it so well that the Academy actually nominated him for Best New Artist. But what sets Knife Party on a higher plane is not that it hasn’t sent electronic into the land of “Is this Avicii”? as Skrillex has (though that by itself deserves an award), but the fact that this is not Swire and McGrillen’s first foray into electronic music.
The duo formed Pendulum along with Paul Harding in 2002, starting as a drum and bass band but revamping its sound to include everything from metal to industrial to electro. Knife Party only emerged after Swire and McGrillen had nine years of success producing electronic music. That the new project can come out swinging with a sound unlike any other leaves no question as to who deserves Best New Artist.
In the coming months, don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking “Where’s the bloody Knife Party”?
