Grammy Record of the Year

I remember my first impressions of the Grammy awards were that they were the musical equivalent of the Oscars, but it turns out that they're not viewed in such high esteem.

I've picked up on a lot of references to them being seen as a bit, well, rubbish, and remember one particularly funny jibe in The Simpsons. The fact that there are soooooo many categories also doesn't help the credibility.

But still, people seem very happy to win and as an institution they seem to have given British music in the US a helping hand quite a lot in recent years, but none more so that this year's recently released nominations.

The one category that's known as 'the big one' is record of the year - and by record, they mean song (which is odd because they also have a song of the year category, the difference of which isn't entirely clear to me). And the reason why I wanted to write about that is that all five of this years nominees are British artists, which frankly is remarkable. I think it's pretty awesome actually. They are:

Adele's Chasing Pavements
Coldplay's Viva La Vida
Leona Lewis's Bleeding Love
M.I.A.'s Paper Planes
and Please Read The Letter by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (admittedly she's American, but Plant's from the Black Country so more than makes up for that).

Well done to all of them - now let's sit back and wait for the ridiculous media claims that we're taking over American music. Bet we're still not selling any actual records, but there you go.

Also good to see Coldplay, Radiohead and Plant/Krauss also get nods in the album of the year category.

If you want to see all the categories and nominations you can visit the official Grammy site here.