When the Grammy nominations for Album of the Year were announced, I knew right then and there that the award would go to Steely Dan. It was a simple process of elimination problem. Beck: released a year and a half ago (Grammy eligibility protocol has always been supremely screwy, my personal fave is the honoring of Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" in the 1995 Grammys even though it was honored by the Oscars TEN months previous and was released in 1993), and a clear case of trying to make up for lost time by missing the boat by five years with the vastly more acclaimed "Odelay". Radiohead: far too leftfield, the token foreign nominees (along with the infinitely more tame and mainstream -- at least to the Academy -- U2). Eminem: yeah, right. The Grammys might think they're hip by showering Alanis Morrisette with awards for the supposedly raw and controversial "Jagged Little Pill", but, to them, giving a top award to Eminem would be like giving the award for Best Gospel Recording to Satan. Still, just nominating the guy is a step in the right direction, because you just know that there was a significant faction of the Academy that wanted to see another old fart get nominated, my gut feeling is that they wanted the Eric Clapton/B.B. King album in there. Paul Simon: the usual mainstream awards show principles apply here. Paul Simon gets nominated because he's Paul Simon, the same way that Tom Hanks or Al Pacino are nominated for Best Actor every time they do a movie. But he's already won a zillion Grammys so there's no need to give him one here. Of course, the fact that nobody bought or liked the album should eliminate the need to resort to these political truisms, but these are the Grammys, who are probably dismayed that Will Smith didn't release an album last year so they could have nominated it for Best Rap Album and possibly allowed them to circumvent Eminem altogether. Which leaves Steely Dan. Old farts, check. Never won a Grammy = "sentimental favourite", check. Comeback album = "Santana 2001", check. These three measures easily trump more relevant measures, i.e. anybody owning or caring about the album, which nobody does. At least the Best Album award is now presented last, golly, it only took them THIRTY YEARS to figure out that albums are more important than singles nowadays. Until next year, here's hoping that the anti-Eminem protesters took solace in Mr. Mathers' half-assed embrace of Mr. John following their "we hate the guy, and we wish he'd drop dead, and we're here to recognize the best music, but let's exploit his white ass so we can keep our TV ratings high by hyping the degenerate's performance THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SHOW, since anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that he's one of the few people here tonight that anybody could give a crap about" performance.

On an otherwise uneventful day, I was listening to the free sampler CD with my January Select magazine and I heard

"Now that you've made me want to die, you told me that you're unboyfriendable"

and I pulled the double-take to end all double takes as I almost choked on my toothbrush while rushing over to the CD player to rewind the track to check if I really had heard those lyrics. The track was "All My Little Words" by the Magnetic Fields, and with it, I was near ready to proclaim Stephan Merritt a genius based one one single solitary track. I've read that the strength of "69 Love Songs" lies in the lyrics, which perfectly encapsulate those moments in love, moments which we replay in our heads at regular intervals in life because those memories are frozen somewhere in our heads in suspended animation. Well, clearly it wasn't good enough for Merritt to stop there, he had to MAKE UP A NEW WORD in the process. The word "unboyfriendable" is so obvious that you have to wonder why it was not invented until now, but the best ideas are simple ones, which is precisely the genius of it all.

There is some music that I absolutely hate. In some cases, I don't so much hate the music as I resent the fact that it is vastly overrated. This resentment can easily come across as hatred. For instance, I don't really hate Oasis, but Blur were the better band in 1994-5. I went to bat for Blur in the Britpop wars and we got smoked, first by the record buying public, and then by the critics, who were duped by the record buying public into believing that "What's the Story Morning Glory" is a excellent album, merely because it sold by the truckload. Similarly, I don't hate Daft Punk or Air, it's just that the true godlike talent in French house is Etienne de Crecy, and yet he receives far less publicity. In 1996, Etienne de Crecy and Phillipe Zdar created a blueprint for the Paris sound which has never been bettered -- the debut Motorbass album. From the muffled hi-hat in the opening strains of "Fabulous", through the smooth and funky "Ezio" and onward, this music was unlike any house music I had yet heard. The beats were too straight-ahead to be hip-hop, it was too slick and breezy to have come out of Chicago, such a combination could only have come out of Europe. 1998's "Prix Choc" (by de Crecy as a solo artist) added an impossibly catchy jazz piano riff to the proceedings, resulting in the most, um, addictive house sound of the year. Now, he's changed the rules again with the album "Tempovision", which is as soulful and funky as any house recording you'll hear this year. The beats have been stripped back, so that few of these tracks are likely to provide the 4/4 thrills that the average house fan is seeking. Phat, dirty basslines are present in abundance, which please even the most cynical R&B cynic who may initially scoff at much of the vocal work featured here. This infectious stew combines the best soul and funk (and on the closing 14 minute stomper "The Other Line", even a bit of minimalist electronic weirdness to go with the endless beat crescendo) to produce something that doesn't come close to taking the form of anything that the average fan (myself included) associates with the term "house".

FEBRUARY 6, 2001. One of the truly wonderful things about music is admitting that you're wrong. And I've been wrong enough times to start my own reality program, "In the Confessional with Father". You see, sometimes I slam a band for making horrible music, only to have my tastes change, the band hit a comet of creativity, or the passage of enough time to let my pangs of prejudice/ignorance/nearsightedness subside, which leads to me reformatting my opinion and declaring said band to be the shiznit after all. Consider this: having spent my adolescence with my ears glued to alternative radio (and my twitchy fingers a record button), certain supposed truisms were instilled in me, one of which was the notion that "good" music was birthed in 1977 and thus, the bloated, arena rock which necessitated punk had to be garbage. I've never been a huge fan of punk, but I believed in that underlying concept: punk cleared out all of the interminable crapola made by aging egomaniacs posing as musicians, which opened up the avenues for me to purchase Depeche Mode cassettes in any nearby mall, so I wasn't complaining. And as every original punk should know, when punk took the UK by storm in the so-called Year Zero, those silly Americans were getting off to Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours", an LA and cocaine drenched hissy fit of an album made by a spoiled former blues band whose life was so terrible that they could live in the finest houses and still afford to annually sniff a middle-class families' income, while whining about how much they hated each other and how abominable it was to live with the spectre of having created the biggest selling album ever (to that point). Clearly, Fleetwood Mac were five Beezelbubs incarnate.

This piece isn't about Fleetwood Mac, it's supposed to be about the Dandy Warhols, so I'd best try and move things along. Incidentally, I was also very wrong about Blur, but for different reasons. In 1991, I dismissed them as 3rd rate Madchester ripoffs (which I still believe was justified by the singles "There's No Other Way" and particularly the lame "Bang", a song so humiliating that Blur themselves won't acknowledge it nowadays). In 1993, I practically laughed my way through an NME article with Damon Albarn expounding on his plans to kill off grunge with Blur's new "we are the new Kinks and we are sardonic" manifesto. Less than one year later, I couldn't help but gleefully admit that Blur had turned things around in spectacular fashion, and "Parklife" was unquestionably the top album of 1994. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up today nearly as well, but that's another issue. Oh yeah, by 1996 or so, my mind had opened up to the degree that I could more easily accept the vast amount of treasures in rock's rich and varied history, so I decided to face the enemy and I borrowed the "Rumours" CD from my dad (we didn't have a vinyl copy in my house as a kid, partly because it would have resulted in some poor disco record going homeless, but likely in more part due to the songs from "Rumours" being on the radio ALL THE TIME in those days, so who needed to buy it when all you had to do to hear was flip around the FM dial?). I was shocked (and delighted) to discover that "Rumours" was, and is, a sensational album, sure, it bears the mark of drab 70's music production that homogenized so much rock music back then, but the songwriting is flawless, just one great tune after another. "Rumours" is a million times better than any punk album, and if there had been another Fleetwood Mac for every Peter Frampton back in '75, then punk wouldn't have needed to happen.

A few years back, the Dandy Warhols opened for Spiritualized in Toronto. The first song they played was a sprawling, gorgeous mess of guitar noise. The second song was "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth", if memory serves me correctly (it may not, but for the purposes of this story let's just take it as a given). The rest of their set proceeded to descend into tuneless drivel. To make things worse, I had to open up the music papers and read the UK press' fawning words, as they fell all over the DW's when they toured over there, equally enamoured with their pop psychedelia and the band's reputation as substance abusers/quotation fountains. Look at them, doing and saying such outrageous things, I sneered, just to draw attention to themselves, although I had to admit that their antics were more than a little amusing. Soon afterward, I fell in love with "Junkie", which embarrassed me, because it was like having a crush on the town slut, in either case, I didn't want to admit my feelings about something so trashy. I remained skeptical despite the glowing praise for last year's "Thirteen Tales of Urban Bohemia", despite the infectious snippets I heard in record shops, despite the hilarious nudity-flaunting video for "Bohemian Like You". Finally, on January 20, I snapped, and bought the CD, and even then I copped out on two fronts, first, it was a used copy ($$) and second, I was enticed by a limited edition set with a four track bonus CD, one of those tracks being a live version of that guilty pleasure of yesteryear, "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth". Zero surprise -- it's a great album, in the same way that the Breeders "Last Splash" is a great album: it rocks like nobody's business; it's daring, bonkers and yet still cohesive (a very difficult combination to pull off); and it's a heck of a lot of fun. It's equally at home with psychedelic stomps and sensitive balladry. So there you have it. I admit, I was wrong, The Dandy Warhols: not bad, not bad at all.