By Daniel J. Flynn on 2.10.09 @ 6:07AM
Why liberals rule the spoken word category.
Liberals are better than conservatives at the spoken word.
Don't believe it? Just ask the National Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences (NARAS), who are experts in these matters. On Sunday
night, the audio rendition of Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient
Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can
Do About It, won a Grammy in the "spoken word" category.
An Inconvenient Truth edged
spoken-word albums by gay humorist David Sedaris, comedian Steve
Martin, actor-activist Sidney Poitier, and faux-news anchorman
Stephen Colbert.
Were An Inconvenient Truth's victory an
aberration, then conservatives might have reason to hope for
redemption at next year's award show. But as far as rivalries go,
this one is Globetrotters vs. Generals, dogs vs. cats, Germany
vs. France. Prior to An Inconvenient
Truth's triumph, Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope,
Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values, Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee's With Ossie and Ruby, Barack Obama's
Dreams from My Father, Bill Clinton's My Life,
Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and
Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven all garnered
Grammy Gold.
As if losing last year's election weren't bad enough,
An Inconvenient Truth's Sunday-night victory reminds
conservatives that the Grammy for spoken word has been lost to
them since the Nixon presidency. Once the domain of aging actors,
quirky storytellers, and hot comics, the spoken word Grammy has
become the property of liberal politicians and activists reading
from their autobiographies and manifestoes. Now that the Grammys
prefer politics to poetry, comedy, and all other spoken word
categories combined, conservatives seem clueless as to what it
takes to read a book at a Grammy-winning level.
What can conservatives do to end decades of humiliation and
defeat at the Grammys?
The period of 1968-1970 was the Golden Age of Conservative
Spoken Word. Since the NARAS issued the first
spoken-word Grammy at the 1959 awards show, the spoken word
Grammy has been awarded to just two right-leaning
recipients -- in 1968 and 1970. During the
height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the Grammy went to Senate
Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, whose Gallant Men album (one of
four he would release) celebrating America's fighting men
actually peaked at #29 on Billboard's charts. The 1970 winner
We Love You, Call Collect, the father-daughter pairing
of Art and Diane Linkletter released a few weeks after
drug-troubled Diane ended her own life, featured a father's plea
to his countercultural daughter to come home on the A-side and
the ill-fated daughter's haunting response on the flipside.
Since then, conservatives have been shut out
by the likes of Christopher Reeve, Hillary Clinton, and Jesse
Jackson.
What do liberal authors do so well when reading from their
books that merits Grammy after Grammy?
"God chose me to write this book," Al Franken informs in
the opening lines of his Grammy-winning Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them -- before a booming God-voice
interrupts the author. That dry humor might be what's missing
from conservative offerings. Perhaps it is Bill Clinton's
on-again-off-again drawl in My Life or Barack Obama's
affected ebonics when quoting ghetto activists in Dreams from
My Father. Maybe it's just those darn
intangibles.
Their winning formula is downright confusing to many
Hollywood conservatives. "This has nothing to do with the
so-called liberal bias," suspects conservative Hollywood
organizer Andrew Breitbart. "If George W. Bush were to release a
spoken-word album detailing all of his administration's
accomplishments in the fight against AIDS in Africa, with
Ladysmith Black Mambazo humming in the background, I am sure he
would win the spoken-word Grammy next year. Right?"
Whatever qualities make for a great spoken word album,
conservatives clearly lack them. What else could possibly explain
their four-decade long drought at the Grammys?
topics:
Grammy Awards
