AC/DC won the first Grammy of their career on Sunday night when they won the best hard rock performance award for the song "War Machine". Of course, despite being from one of biggest selling albums of 2008 they were "honored" with the award during the non-televised portion of the show, which is reserved for the "acceptable," though often lesser selling artists. AC/DC are a case in point about just how out of touch with the record buying public that the Recording Academy and thus the Grammy Awards really are. Consider that this is their first Grammy, given to them 30 years after they released Back in Black, which holds the honor of being the biggest selling album by a band across the globe (second biggest selling album of all behind Michael Jackson's Thriller) and the fifth largest selling album in the U.S. They didn't receive their first Grammy nomination until 1989, when they lost out to those hard rockin' flute playing badboys of Jethro Tull. In case you were wondering, Christopher Cross took home the top honors in 1980.
Consider for a moment that both AC/DC's latest album "Black Ice" and Beyonce's "I Am Sasha Fierce" was certified double platinum. So each album was just as popular with fans but who got all of the attention by the Grammy folks? What about the album that won the Rock Album honor? Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown" has only been certified gold (500K copies sold), a fourth of the amount of AC/DC. And let's not forget the "Record of the Year," Kings of Leon's Use Somebody, which has only gone platinum, thus it sold half as many copies as AC/DC's Black Ice.
We point all of this out, using this one example to simply show how meaningless awards like the Grammys really are, when they are basically as credible as a high school election. But the real award that counts is at the cash register where the fans place their votes and while artists like AC/DC might not get their due among the self congratulating music insiders, the fans continue to honor them with their loyalty and that is worth far more than a silly statue.
