The Eighteen Year Anniversary of the 46th Annual Grammy Awards
An absolutely loaded year of awards and nominees.
What a year in music in 2003. While I was just a toddler crawling around in my living room, Outkast was busy dropping one of the fifteen best hip hop albums ever, Eminem released Lose Yourself, and The White Stripes gave us one of the all time pump up songs.
The duo of Andre 3000 and Big Boi were dropping their fifth album of an unreal run. They had released Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik in 1994, ATLiens in 1996, Aquemini in 1998, Stankonia in 2000, and after a three year hiatus, they blessed our ears with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. You could make the argument that that five album run in less than ten years by the Atlanta based duo is better than any musician or band ever.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was nominated for Album of the Year, Urban/Alternative Performance, and Rap Album of the Year where it took home all three awards. In addition to those three categories, Hey Ya!, which released as a single and appears as the ninth track on the second half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, was nominated for Record of the Year but lost to Clocks by Coldplay.
To this day, no other rapper/rap group has won Album of the Year. There funky style of music paired with genius lyrics made it a trailblazer to other rap albums that could hopefully win this award in the future.
When you look at Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, it’s absolutely loaded. Side one of the album includes groovy jams like The Way You Move which is a masterpiece. “The whole room fell silent, the girls all paused with glee, Turning left, turning right, are they looking at me?, Well, I was looking at them, there, there, on the dance floor, Now, they got me in the middle, feeling like a man-whore”.
Side two had hits like Roses, Hey Ya!, and Draculas Wedding. This forty song sensation, in my opinion, is a top five hip hop/rap album from the 2000’s which was a loaded era with projects like Stankonia, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Blueprint, and College Dropout.
While Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the only rap album to win Album of the Year, there are many other years where I’d argue that a rap album should have won. For example, in 2018 I think 4:44 by Jay-Z and DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar should have beat out 24K Magic. I’d say the same with 2013 where Channel Orange by Frank Ocean should have beat Babel by Mumford and Sons or in 2005 when Genius Love Company by Ray Charles won over College Dropout by Kanye West.
With 2005 and Kanye and College Dropout not winning, I do think that it has to partially do with the voters not wanting to have back to back rap albums win, which is a shame.
When it came to another category that Outkast was nominated for, Record of the Year, Coldplay took the cake with their hit single Clocks that also appeared as the fifth track on the British bands second studio album, A Rush of Blood to the Head.
The piano melody in the background accompanied by great electric and bass guitar playing makes for a “heavenly” feel to the song, especially in the last minute and forty five seconds of the hit.
Again, we saw a stacked class where Clocks beat out a plethora of hits which included Lose Yourself by Eminem, Hey Ya! by Outkast, Crazy In Love by Beyonce and Jay-Z, and Where is the Love? by the Black Eyed Peas and Justin Timberlake.
In this instance though, I have to agree with the voters because Clocks is a fantastic song by a tremendous group of musicians.
Other awards saw Best New Artist goto Evanescence who beat out Fountains of Wayne who was coming off the heels of Stacys Mom, 50 Cent after dropping Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and Sean Paul who was fresh off releasing the album Dutty Rock.
While I probably don’t agree with this pick by the committee, I don’t hate it because Evanescence was on fire at this time. In the same 2004 Grammys, they won Best Hard Rock Performance for their song Bring Me To Life which was also nominated for Best Hard Rock Song.
Evanescence also received nominated in 2004 for Album of the Year and Best Rock Album for their album Fallen which includes Bring Me To Life. They were beat by Outkast for Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in Album of the Year and the Foo Fighters hit project One by One. It was a tough category for Evanescence as they were against the Foo Fighters, Nickleback, Audioslave, and Matchbox Twenty.
I mean really, what a year in music? All around this was one of the best Grammy classes headlined by Coldplay and Outkast. It doesn’t get much better than that.