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Dave Grohl had a good time at the Grammys on Sunday. The Foo Fighters won pretty much every rock-oriented award possible, he reminded everyone that he's got the power-ballad game on lock, and he even got to show off his sweet Slayer T-shirt. Once again, everything came up Grohl. The most likable man in rock wins again, right?

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via Cats Who Look Like Skrillex

Will this cat win Best New Artist?

​Welcome to Sound of the City's liveblog of the 54th Annual Grammys, coming to you live from a couch in Astoria. There are quite a few questions lurking around tonight's ceremony. Will Adele sweep the three major categories in which she's nominated, thus putting a cap on the megaselling, incredibly popular 21—and how will she sound in her live return? Will Skrillex (above, sorta) put a wub-wub-wub on the Best New Artist category? Will Bon Iver pout his way to the podium if he upsets Adele in Record or Song of the Year? Will Adam Levine upstage the Beach Boys when they share the stage? Will LL Cool J make at least 10 cross-promotional references to other CBS shows? Will Kanye West show up? Will the Whitney Houston tribute be okay? Tune in belooowwww!

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​For the last twenty years, the award for Album of the Year, the biggest Grammy honor of them all, has tended to go to two types of people: young women and old men. Female solo artists under 30 (Lauryn Hill, Taylor Swift) and male veterans over 40 (Tony Bennett, U2) have dominated the category for two decades with only a few exceptions: the youngish male rappers in Outkast, the wide range of musicians on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and the thirtysomethings in the Dixie Chicks and the Arcade Fire. This year, that pattern's unlikely to be broken, with only one of the five nominees falling outside either of those two categories.

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​The 54th Grammy Awards mark the combination of the Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Metal Performance awards into the single category Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, which is why Mastodon and Sum 41 are up for the same award. Historically, the metal category has been one of the most confounding, with oddities like Judas Priest winning for a new live version of a song originally released 23 years earlier, Motörhead winning for a cover of a then-22-year-old Metallica song, and Metallica actually being honored for a track from St. Anger.

In addition to the pros and cons of each nomination, we've helpfully included whether each group is listed on Metal-Archives.com, a database that serves as the genre's gatekeeper by barring its doors to those bands deemed not brutal enough to ride to Valhalla.

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​Back around 2001, a Transatlantic cabal of music critics led a media hype machine declaring that rock was "back." To further this thesis, it grouped together a disparate set of bands offering variations on the stripped-down "garage rock" template who were often cheekily referred to as the "The" Bands—The Strokes The White Stripes, The Vines, The Hives, and so on. I always thought that was kind of a silly way to label those bands, since a huge number of band names have always started with the word "The," with a slightly smaller subset of that group naming their bands "The [blank]s."

Looking at Billboard's year-end Alternative Songs chart for 2011, however, you might wonder if a decade later we quietly experienced a new wave of "The" Bands, only this time with names that had words on both sides of the "the." The top two spots on the chart are occupied by Foster The People's "Pumped Up Kicks" and Cage The Elephant's "Shake Me Down", with Young The Giant's "My Body" at No. 14. Like the "The" Bands of 2001, there's not much uniting them other than the fact that they're all fairly new (only Cage The Elephant enjoyed any chart hits prior to 2011) and offering major-label-sanctioned, radio-friendly versions of musical and vocal styles usually associated with indie rock.

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​The two big formats that have long ruled over popular music are the single and the album. They have a great duality between them: the song and the collection; the sliver and the whole; the appetizer and the main course. Albums are the full-length format long considered pop music's ultimate artistic medium, while the hit single is the galvanizing force that sells albums while blaring from millions of radios, televisions, YouTube windows and cell phones. I've long been fascinated by a slightly more ephemeral concept that exists somewhere in between: the singles campaign for an album. The way an artist or label chooses which songs are released to radio to promote an album, and the sequence in which they're released, often forms a kind of narrative just as much as the running order of the album itself.

Of course, that narrative is often largely about how successful those songs are as singles, and they are often chosen and judged purely by their charting potential. But at its best, a singles campaign is as much an art form as it is a marketing tool. There are formulas and clichés—lead with the stylistic curveball and follow it with the surefire hit; start with an uptempo first single, then bring out the ballad second; and, of course, throw songs at the wall for the fourth and fifth singles if the artist has the profile and the promotional budget to go that far.

Just as sports fans often play Monday morning quarterback, analyzing how their home team did in the big game and how they would've made better choices, music fans are prone to imagining a more ideal world, one in which their favorite albums had better production and their cult favorites were worldwide superstars. For me, that often means speculating on and critiquing which songs were released as singles from an album.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

For more photos from the show, check out our gallery.

​Foo Fighters w/Social Distortion, The Joy Formidable
Madison Square Garden
Sunday, November 13

Better than: Some band with only two guitar players playing for only two hours.

Dave Grohl is often called the nicest guy in rock. Don't think he doesn't use this to get away with murder. During their performance at Madison Square Garden last night General Grohl led his Foo Fighters through "Stacked Actors," one of the deep cuts fans point to whenever detractors complain about "Learn To Fly." It's a great song. It has pointed lyrics, an insistent groove and just enough pop-polish to make the slash and burn riffs and throat shredding go down easy. It is not a song that benefits a great deal from instrumental vamping. But that didn't stop Grohl from running across the MSG floor to a second stage in the middle of the arena and then indulging in an extended back and forth solo off with lead guitarist Chris Shiflett. And it just kept going.

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His band may be called the Foo Fighters, but Dave Grohl wants the world to know that said nomenclature does not serve as carte blanche for people to get their conflict on during his concerts. During the Foos' Monday night show in London, he stopped mid-song to eject someone who was causing a ruckus in the crowd: "You don't come to my show and fight, you come to my show and fucking dance, you asshole!" he shouted as the guy was shamed/escorted out. I think that'd be a pretty good t-shirt slogan! Also, how lousy do you have to feel after being kicked out of a free show by virtue of nothing more than your ragey ways? Here's hoping the guy went home and looked up the origins of the Foos' name to alleviate his confusion over the night's purpose. [Via]

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The Foo Fighters' seventh album Wasting Light became the band's first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 upon its release in April, following a mountain of pre-release hype that included some of the best reviews of the band's career, a documentary about the making of the album, and the inevitable publicity surrounding Dave Grohl collaborating again with Nirvana-era pals Butch Vig, Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic. But there is one respect in which 2011 may not represent the apex of the Foo Fighters' career: "Rope," the first single from Light, couldn't quite beat the record for most weeks at the top of the Alternative Songs chart, which is still held by the band's own "The Pretender." That track, from 2007's Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, topped the chart for 18 weeks.

Last week "Rope" was dethroned after 13 weeks at the top spot by an unlikely newcomer, Foster The People's "Pumped Up Kicks." If the Foo Fighters represent '90s alt-rock survivors, Foster The People are decidedly new school: the L.A. band has turned its debut single into a chart-topper less than two years after playing its first show. Even the sound of "Pumped Up Kicks" is like a quick tour through 21st-century indie-crossover success, with Muppety vocals reminiscent of MGMT (on a chorus that prominently features the word "kids," no less) and a whistling hook that recalls both the Black Keys' recent Alternative No. 1 "Tighten Up" and Peter, Bjorn & John's "Young Folks."

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