The Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental was an award presented at the 31st Grammy Awards in 1989 to honor quality hard rock/metal works (albums or songs). The Grammy Awards, an annual ceremony that was established in 1958 and originally called the Gramophone Awards, are presented by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to "honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales or chart position."
The Academy recognized hard rock music artists for the first time in 1989 under the category Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental, combining two of the most popular music genres of the 1980s. Jethro Tull was given that award for the album Crest of a Knave, beating Metallica, who were expected to win with the album ...And Justice for All. This choice led to widespread criticism of the Academy, as journalists suggested that Jethro Tull's music did not belong in the hard rock or heavy metal genres. In response, the Academy created the categories Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Metal Performance, separating the genres. The incident is often considered an example of the Grammy Awards being out of touch with popular sentiment, and was even named the biggest upset in Grammy history by Entertainment Weekly.
From 2012, the combined Hard Rock/Metal category will return following a major overhaul of Grammy Awards categories. The separate Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Metal Performance categories will be merged into the slightly renamed Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance category.
Read more about Grammy Award For Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal Or Instrumental: Award, Controversy and Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words award, hard, rock, metal, performance, vocal and/or instrumental:
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Still be kind,
And eke out our performance with your mind.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Prayer is
The world in tune,
A spirit-voice,
And vocal joys,
Whose echo is Heaven’s bliss.”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)