4 perfect albums that never won a Grammy Award
By Lee Vowell
The Grammy Awards can be great. But let's not mistake entertainment for art. Many times the Recording Academy - the ones who vote on who is nominated and who wins Grammys - is simply behind any creative art form.
The albums that follow were all ahead of their time and underappreciated by the Grammys. The great thing is that we listeners can still appreciate them now whether they won an award or not. Ultimately, music is not made to win awards but simply to be loved by those who choose to love the work.
Two of the excellent albums that follow were not even nominated for Grammy Awards. The other two lost out to lesser works. But fans of the music that follows should not care because they know greatness when they hear it.
Four albums that deserved more Grammy Awards love
Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)
This was not a Beach Boys album but instead a Brian Wilson album that Wilson was nice enough to enough to slap the band's name on and ask the rest of the group to just add some vocals. The entire album was written, produced, and conceived of by Wilson after he was inspired to create such a record after listening to the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Wilson wanted to make an orchestral rock album with elements of a barbershop quartet and Wilson made something unlike anything before or since.
Beach Boy Mike Love gave Wilson a lot of pushback for Wilson's concept. The Beach Boys had made a lot of money off of singing songs about teenage love that were safe and summery. Wilson still used that slight concept but fleshed it out and included animal sounds and borrowed from Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."
There is no way to listen to a track such as "God Only Knows" and how its melody is deconstructed in the last minute and not get an idea of what Wagner's theory on music was. Only Wilson did it all in 2 minutes and 56 seconds of pure perfection. The Beach Boys might have been a safe band for parents, but there was a lot going on below the surface. And yet, the Recording Academy was not wise enough to include this album among its Best Album nominees in 1967.