Here's an album cover from 1974 featuring models who had nothing to do with the music. Here's one from 1989. And here's one from 2017. They're all representations of, or comments on, beauty, perfection, fantasy, sex and escape. All, in different ways, helped sell the album. That's one of the essential things album covers do. The producer of the 1989 album famously went one or two steps further. He told his band to stay home and he sent the models out on tour, to continue to look beautiful, to dance and to pretend to sing. To extend the fantasy. There have always been pop stars who don't sing 100 percent live 100 percent of the time. There always will be. Different circumstances demand different degrees of illusion. Here's an artist who's nominated for BEST NEW ARTIST at the 2018 GRAMMY AWARDS who is not singing 100 percent live—in front of an audience that probably knows and probably doesn't care. (If you need a couple minutes to call your congressman or your local RECORDING ACADEMY chapter, go ahead, I'll wait.) I have a feeling the 2018 nominee is not going to win Sunday; he has tough competition. But no one will complain if he does. It would be a defensible choice. The 1989 charade was defensible, too. Think of those models as human versions of the wall of MARSHALL cabinets at an IRON MAIDEN or JUDAS PRIEST show that have no speakers in them and emit no sound but look very metal and very fabulous. And cause no harm. Just a sweet, sweet fantasy, as 2016 lip-syncer MARIAH once sang. Give those GRAMMYS back to MILLI VANILLI. The album was, and remains, as real as a STEINWAY piano... Speaking of which: Does Best New Artist still come with a curse? Or was that a little overblown in the first place? MusicSET: "Best New Artists of the 21st Century, According to the Grammys,"... On the eve of a Grammy ceremony that will put a major performance spotlight on KESHA and feature #METOO white roses (in place of the GOLDEN GLOBES' black dresses), my RSS feeds delivered these stories on Thursday: Another woman has accused RUSSELL SIMMONS of rape. Two more women have accused NELLY of sexual assault. Ex-REAL ESTATE guitarist MATT MONDANILE posted a long, rambling FACEBOOK note detailing his own s***ty man behavior and then lamenting how he and other abusers have been "cut off and abandoned from public life." And then, and this is completely related, this: 90.7 percent of Grammy nominees in the past five years have been men... The team behind the BILLBOARD POWER 100 has made a slight improvement over past years in noticing women in the upper echelons of the music biz. Kudos for the effort, and a special congrats to our friends SUSAN GENCO and ELIZABETH COLLINS (AZOFF MSG ENTERTAINMENT) and ANTHONY SALEH (EMAGEN ENTERTAINMENT GROUP and WNDRCO), who made the list for the first time... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from MIGOS (why weren't they ever nominated for Best New Artist?), TY SEGALL, NILS FRAHM, PAYROLL GIOVANNI & CARDO, DREAM WIFE, STEEP CANYON RANGERS, NO AGE, RICK SPRINGFIELD, HOLLIE COOK, CALEXICO, SHEKU KANNEH-MASON, NIGHTMARES ON WAX, JAMISON ROSS, GHOSTFACE KILLAH & APOLLO BROWN, SONNY DIGITAL, MACHINE HEAD, MARY GAUTHIER, BEN MILLER BAND, EVIDENCE, LOUDNESS, DJANGO DJANGO and CRAIG DAVID.
