To some Grammy fans, the award show of 2011 may have passed over some of the bigger names in music to honor a few lesser-known gems such as Esperanza Spalding and Arcade Fire. Spalding collected the Grammy for Best New Artist, while Arcade Fire won the equally noble Album of the Year.

As social networking sites have displayed, throngs of distressed Top 40 disciples, plus Rosie O’Donnell, have expressed their resentment of the win. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and YouTube have been used as channels for declarations of hate, some attacking the so-called hipster culture more generally. A Tumblr blog, which serves as a reservoir for these seemingly ceaseless irate updates, has been getting attention from those who enjoy equating the displayed level of music appreciation with that of the grammar, admittedly in which I include myself. Perhaps in the creation of the blog such an audience was unintentional, but for those of us who take pleasure in asserting our superior music knowledge, the website yields a hearty chuckle. A YouTube video sharply named “Arcade Fire Hipster Attack,” in which a horde of hipsters abruptly emerge from their underground burrows, violently assaulting a guy who doesn’t know Arcade Fire, leaves the threatening message that if you don’t know Arcade Fire, hipsters will kill you. From where I stand, I’d like to posit that the creators of the video took an axiom of hipsterism too literally with the way they interpreted “underground”.

The intention of the Grammys is to honor great music, and in the eyes of the Recording Academy members who vote for the nominations, Arcade Fire’s “Suburbs” was worthy of the Album of the Year. In exploring this win, it’s beneficial to distinguish between widely appreciated music and quality music, as the two may be too often equated. Beating out Katy Perry, Eminem, Lady Antebellum, and Lady Gaga for Album of Year seemed an extraordinary upset to some, but it’s possible that the outraged, contemptuous by reason of ignorance, are berating the win with the idea in mind that popularity based on rankings on Billboard, iTunes, MTV and elsewhere is what establishes a nominee’s award-winning quality. Yet, Grammys are awarded on quality alone, and when the popularity of an artist does not match the musical value, it is outrageous enough to initiate a social networking fad. Part of the issue may originate from the fact that the award nominees span the spectrum of popularity; so comparing them may be damaging to such an evaluation.

Somehow, songs about the misery of the suburbs sung by unusually coifed but profoundly talented musicians triumph over the California gurls who try to say hello world, but really just spend wasted hours trying to be at least almost famous. Fame can be such a monster sometimes.

We shan’t worry, fellow Arcade Fire fans, it appears that the band will remain just as obscure as my contrived sentence made of track titles from each nominations for Album of the Year.