What Makes An Award Winning Song?

Switched on Pop

Vox Media Podcast Network

Music Interviews, Music History, Music, Music Commentary

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if music awards were given out for only musical qualities? It may seem like celebrity and spectacle are more important than ever at the 61st Grammy Awards, but we believe many of this years winners earned their accolades with noteworthy music. Still, we thought the winners should be heralded by new, more musical categories. Find out how And The Awards Go To: Best Chord Progression: H.E.R. - "Hard Place" & "Focus" Best Throwback: Silk City & Dua Lipa ft. Diplo & Mark Ronson - "Electricity" Worst Metaphor: Lady Gaga ft. Bradley Cooper "Shallow" Best Conceptual Song: Childish Gambino - "This Is America" Best Bridge: Kacey Musgraves - "Rainbow" Also Featured The Weeknd - "Often" Khalid - "Location" Alison Limerick - "Where Love Lives" Cher - "Strong Enough" Elton John - "Mellow" Bonus Listen to Ezra Klein's discussion with Jill Lepore on America's two revolutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:17.0	Chevy is making EVs for everyone, everywhere.
0:20.0	Go to chevrelay.com slash electric to learn more.
0:31.0	Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm Slangrader Charlie Harding.
0:41.0	And I'm musicologist Nate Slone.
0:43.0	Here's what I want to do today.
0:45.0	So award shows. We just had the Grammys recently.
0:48.0	And award shows are so heavily focused on showmanship, celebrity, fashion, and spectacle.
0:53.0	But rather than do a sort of Grammys recap show about how did it all go down,
0:58.0	I thought it'd be much more interesting to ask what musically makes an award winning song.
1:03.0	We kind of forget these massive pop songs are winning because they're also music.
1:07.0	And we get wrapped up in all that spectacle.
1:10.0	So what I've done today is I've established some new categories.
1:14.0	Oh, okay. New award categories.
1:17.0	Adacious.
1:18.0	We're going to take some of the award winners and we're going to assign them some new...
1:21.0	Yeah.
1:22.0	New stuff new hardware.
1:23.0	Exactly. So we got Best Throwback.
1:25.0	Best Throwback.
	...

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