Where Academy Voters Fell Down

You had the feeling backstage at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night that the Grammy organizers themselves were waiting to exhale.

After changing the nomination system last year to help generate more relevant choices in key categories, the brain trust surely held its breath to see just how the 9,200 members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences had cast their ballots.

Make no mistake: The artists and their record companies may covet the awards for the prestige and added record sales they may bring, but the academy worries about credibility.

There have been too many nights over the last four decades when conservative bestsellers have won over innovation, so they wouldn’t be taking anything for granted, even on a night when four of the five nominees for best album lived up, to varying degrees, to the Grammy ideal of excellence in pop music.

And we eventually learned why they must have been anxious.

In an evening when it looked as if the Grammy process had truly come of age, the voters ended up giving the top award--best album--to Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You.” It’s a work that epitomizes the worst aspects of the record industry award show: a favoring of mainstream, non-challenging bestsellers over the truly innovative forces.

For the Grammy team that had worked so hard to bring respect to the award system, it must have felt like getting beaten in the final seconds of a basketball game by an off-balance three-point shot.

Who would have figured?

There was considerable cheering last year when the recording academy introduced a new system, one that took the final nomination process away from academy members in top categories and gave the power to a blue-ribbon committee.

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The move helped set the stage for Alanis Morissette’s daring “Jagged Little Pill” to be named best album. It was a clear victory for progressive forces among the academy membership.

A victory for best album by any of the other nominees would have let the Grammy team breathe easily.

The “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, written and produced by Babyface, was traditional pop craft at its best. Beck’s trailblazing “Odelay” would have represented one of the boldest choices in Grammy history. A win by the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness” would have been the first best-album victory for a rock group since U2’s “The Joshua Tree” in 1987. The Fugees’ ambitious “The Score” would have been the first best-album honor ever for a rap act.

The Dion selection was all the more dumbfounding on a night when there had been many decisions so sweet you wanted to cheer out loud--times when the votes showed the voters weren’t being intimidated by reputations or sales.

Among the signs: Bela Fleck & the Flecktones over such bigger names as the Smashing Pumpkins and Stevie Wonder in the pop instrumental category; Lyle Lovett over a variety of bestsellers in the country album balloting; Toni Braxton over runaway bestseller Dion for female pop vocal; and young maverick Beck over the legendary Clapton and Bruce Springsteen in male rock vocal competition.

In the end, it’s important not to let the Dion victory overshadow the other signs that the Grammys are making progress. Her album likely benefited from the more discerning voters’ splitting their ballots between the other nominees.

The telecast itself helped make up for the disappointment. It was an evening filled with special moments--from the intimacy of Babyface’s acoustic guitar duet with Clapton on “Change the World” to the warm tributes to the late Bill Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald.

But perhaps the most powerful moment was the performance of “Where It’s At” by Beck, who joked earlier in the week that his mix of hip-hop and country-blues tradition was going to appear so strange to the average television viewer that it was going to look like something from outer space.

And so it did. It was the equivalent of seeing Dylan onstage in the mid-’60s when he, too, would have looked like a man from another planet as he turned folk tradition into hard-driving, electric rock.

Watching that and other inspiring moments Wednesday, you had the feel of change in the air.

After years of putting on a telecast and competition that seemed to salute commercialism in pop music, the Grammys--give or take a wrongheaded award now and then--seem to have the spotlight where it belongs. On artistry.

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