Music's Biggest Night!

So the 57th Grammy Awards were on last night.

Who knew?

People I guess.

I was far more interested in a plate of lasagna and the mid-season premier of The Walking Dead.

No spoilers.

But it was tough to avoid the tales of Kanye West and his merry band of nonsense in this morning's news. It would be hard to find a better moment in the Obama Administration than when he called Kanye a jackass.

Now I wasn't surprised that I couldn't recognize most of the winners. I'm old like that. I think at some point I owned more than one Kenny G album.

But I was kinda surprised that there were entire categories that I wasn't aware of. Like, yeah, there's a Rap category, and an R&B category . . . but Best Urban Performance? I don't even know what that means. There wasn't a Best Rural Performance . . . which seems unfair . . . but there was a Best Reissue of a Classic Album Category, so apparently adding more cowbell to "Blonde on Blonde" could conceivably get you a Grammy nod.

I was glad that Beck got Top Album (he's a name I know), but was disappointed to see that  Pharrell won Best Solo Performance for "Happy"

I don't care how infectious your groove is . . . if you rhyme the word 'Truth' with the word 'Roof', I'm of the opinion that you don't get to sit at the big kid's table. It's as simple as that.

Tenacious D got Best Metal Album. Poor Metallica can't catch a break.

(That was a historical reference to when Metallica lost out to Jethro Tull in 1989, the first year that Metal was introduced as a category)

I'm not sure if you get to sit at the big kid's table if you have a flute player in your band either.

I think Beyonce won the We Just Love You So Much But Even Though Your Album Wasn't Very Good We Still Want to See You Make a Speech Award, while her husband JayZ got the Best Placement of a Parental Advisory Sitcker on an Album Cover Award, and, I'm not sure of this one, but I think Kim Kardashian got an award for Least Likely to Be in This Room if God Was Reasonable Lifetime Achievement Award.

Weird Al got another Grammy. So did Joan Rivers . . . post-humorously.

I've waited a lifetime to write that joke.

Feels good. Feels real good.

Anyway, I was thinking that back in my time, I was critical of "Music's Biggest Night" because it was so obviously behind the times. It was a John Denver performance at a Nine Inch Nails Concert. I wonder if that's still the case.

I spent the morning scouring through the YouTube Videos of the winners and their songs and I didn't find anything that mildly turn me on, nor did I finish listening to any of the songs passed the first chorus or so. 

It's funny, now that music is so democratized in the last stages of the Fall of the Label Empire, institutions like the Grammys are in the same boat that pop radio stations are in. There's just so much stuff out there that it's virtually impossible to find a pulse so they keep just throwing the same party for the same people.

And the underground isn't rebelling against it this time. There are no Sex Pistols, Megadeaths, or Rages Against the Machine.

The underground doesn't care.

The underground is just ignoring it because nobody aspires to star in what is virtually an auto-tuned reality TV show. The new music makers are casually indifferent.

It's not so much a train wreck as it is watching a bus running out of gas and slowly coming to a halt on the side of the freeway.

In my day (again with the old man speak), we caught a glimpse of what a revolution might look like when MTV's Music Awards superceded the Grammys as the coveted pop-culture currency, but honest to god, it only lasted two maybe three years after MTV debuted "The Real World" and stopped dilly-dallying with the whole music thing.

You don't have to listen to a Kanye West album to know that he's good television.

In fact. . . you probably shouldn't.

Just like you shouldn't rhyme Truth with Roof.

Sorry Pharrell. But if you want to send me your address I'll be more than happy to pick you up a rhyming dictionary along with a thesaurus, which is a word you can rhyme with adore us, deplore us, not for us, chorus, and porous, but not brontosaurus because that's ridiculous.