Monday, February 9, 2009

The Grammys

Last night I sat through almost 3 hours of the Grammys.  I was a little lonely because Kevin wasn't interested in watching, but he did come down for the last 45 minutes after I told him about the GREAT performance by Radiohead and the USC marching band.   I had the newspaper in hand to read during the commercials and acceptance speeches, but was quite pleased when the speeches were short and boring.   Some performing highlights for me were, of course, the Jonas Brother (performance unavailable on Youtube :(); Jennifer Hudson (very moving--brought a few tears to my eyes as the song was very fitting for the  fairly recent tragic events in her life);  Alison Krauss and Robert Plant; and finally, Adele.   As loyal as I am to the Jonas Brothers--so entertaining--Adele beats them all in the vocals department.  

I missed my old favorite U2 perform as well as Coldplay (I have and love their Viva La Vida album).  I was, however, disappointed a bit when I heard that they may have copied Joe Satarani's "If I Could Fly."  It seems too similar to be coincidental.   What do you think? Rumor has it that Joe Satarani's people were going to serve Coldplay with papers during the Grammys since they have been "dodging" them thus far.  Wouldn't THAT have added some tension to the show :).  

As far as winners of actual awards go, I would have liked it if my boys had won an award and Allison Krauss and Robert Plant could have shared the wealth, but I didn't really care that much.  I was mostly just wanting to watch a "concert" since it has been soooo long.  And seeing so many artists, often combining, very successfully, with artists of different genre's--it was well worth the three hours of couch potatohood.  






2 comments:

  1. I don't know why your comment thing is different than mine... but when I went to publish this BIG LONG comment... it disappeared... so here is the abbreviated version.

    1- We watched. Loved MIA - her pregnant belly=LOL!
    2- After listening to both songs, though exactly alike, I'm still convinced Chris Martin did not copy the song. Why would such a talented songwriter copy a song? Paul can write out all his defenses... which include:
    a)tempo
    b) songwriting - chords - used in music writing
    c) what the addition of lyrics could've done to Satriani's song.

    3 - Loved Adele too.

    4 - All in all, fun.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I didn't give it too much thought, but here's what I thought.

    #1 If they'd copied it, they'd probably have changed the matching tempo so that it wasn't so obvious.
    #2 There are only so many musical keys and chord changes available. The same ones in the same sequence get used all the time.
    #3 The rhythm of both chord changes is the same, but it's a bog-standard one, one chord per measure in a 4 bar loop.
    #4 If you took away the vocals from songs you'd find many of them sound almost alike because of #2. So, if Satriani's song actually had vocals instead of a guitar solo you wouldn't the similarity of the songs so much because the mind has a predisposition to focus on the vocals.

    So I think it's a coincidence, but stranger things have happened.

    ReplyDelete