Grammy Nominations 2012: Who is Bon Iver?

The scoreboard for music’s “golden honour” are (drum roll, please) –  in first place, Kanye West with seven, coming a close second are Adele, Foo Fighters and Bruno Mars with six a piece… and hold up! Skrillex with five! and Bon Iver with four!!??

Representin’ (flickin’ a ‘gangster’ hand gesture in the air)!

After Arcade Fire (Who is Arcade Fire?) won Album of the Year last year, the Grammys are now throwing around big gold gramophones at the indies. This year it’s indie-folk rocker Bon Iver – nope, it’s not a guy called Bon, but the stage name of Wisconsin-local Justin Vernon, whose album For Emma, Forever Ago was Indiecision’s Best International Album of 2008. His latest self-titled album of undulating harmonies and folk ballads has been nominated in fat categories like – Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist.

The easiest and safest bet, Adele, swooped six nominations this year with her heartbreak album 21, which got nominations for Record/Album/Song of the Year, along with Best Short Form Music video along with two in the Best Pop category. Sometimes a break up can be good for record sales (ref Alanis Morisette’s career pre-2004) – 4.67 million copies to be precise.

Hip hop leads the Grammy noms again, with Kanye West getting seven nominations – for Song of the Year, all the Rap categories (including two out of five nominations in the Best Rap Song and Best Rap Album – for Watch the Throne and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy).

The finger-lickin-good Foo Fighters are sitting on Grammy spots for Album of the Year, and all four rock categories (of course) – Song, Album, Performance (Rock and Metal) – and Best Long Form Video. Not that they need a Grammy to measure the scale of their awesomeness. Soak up a bit of Foo radiance here.

Other revelations include

• Five nominations thrown at one of the most hated man in dubstep – Skrillex. Tarnished with the name of “sellout” by many lurking in internet opinion quarries, he is now dubbed “Grammy-nominated Skrillex” as he gets mixed in with newcomers Nicky Minaj, Bon Iver, J. Cole, and The Band Perry for the Best New Artist nominations, along with a pile of dance category nominations (Best Dance Recording, Best Remix Recording, Best Dance Electronica Album).
• NH7 favourites, Mumford and Sons get nominated for Record/Song of the Year, Best Rock Performance, and Best Rock Song. If you missed them on their India tour, we’ve got a video of them at Bandra Fort.
• Milling around the Best Alternative Music album category are Bon Iver (again), Death Cab for Cutie, My Morning Jacket, Radiohead (our review of King of Limbs here) and Foster the People. Check out the latest, freakie-deakie video from Foster the People for their song ‘Call it What You Want’.

In 1959, the Grammy’s only had 28 awards, and last year there were 109 categories. This year they overhauled a whole pile of categories and whittled it down to a total of 78 categories. So why don’t we check out some random nominations

• Tina Fey’s been nominated for Best Spoken Word Album (last year Jon Stewart won, while Woody Allen, Craig Ferguson, Sarah Silverman and Michael J. Fox were nominated).
• Best Comedy Album has Weird Al’ Yankovic, The Lonely Island, and Kathy Griffin battling it out.
• For all those Zooey Deschanel fans (more twee-cuteness here), she’s been nominated for her song ‘So Long’ in Winnie the Pooh (does it really matter what category?)
• Barbara Streisand got nominated… No no no, not the 60-something actress/ singer, but the song by Duck Sauce for Best Dance recording. For that wiggle-in-your-seat satisfaction, check the video out below.

This year’s Grammy nominations have just caught us off guard with this motley crew. All we can say is expect the unexpected at the perhaps the most relevant irrelevant awards show on February 12, 2012.