Fixing the Grammys: Who Should Have Won Every Year’s ‘Best Rock Album’ Award
The Grammys have been handing out awards for Best Rock Album for more than two decades now – and by our count, they've chosen the correct record very few times. So, we held our own vote to decide who should have taken home a trophy each year.
There's one particularly important concept to consider when looking at the results. The category is Best Rock Album, not Best Classic Rock Album. As much as we love our chosen genre, if we didn't cop to the fact that a given year's best rock record wasn't necessarily created by one of "our" artists, we'd be just as narrow-minded as whoever decided to choose Jethro Tull over Metallica for 1988's Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance honor.
So you're going to see Led Zeppelin's 2014 Grammy taken away, and the Rolling Stones, John Fogerty and Santana are going to lose theirs as well. But don't worry, classic rock comes out ahead overall, with Van Halen, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Robert Plant and Tom Petty all getting new (and yes, we remember, fictional) Grammys following our new votes.
For more gleeful Grammy bashing, be sure to check out our list of 10 Times the Grammys Got It Wrong, or our video countdown of the Worst Grammy Snubs.