It’s Grammy time again, which means a handful of people get to tell us what handful of albums are deserving of our attention. The Grammys are dead but nobody has bothered to tell the dinosaurs that still run this stale, trash-ridden, sleep-inducing, celebration of banality. CBS will milk this beauty pageant for all its worth, and Credit Card #1, Popular Cola #2 and Car Insurance #3 will be happy to throw dollars at the festivities for a bit of brand recognition. Are you buying?
What I’m not buying are the endless pointless categories, the familiar names, and the overall best dressed popularity contest. The best Album of the Year nominees are Arcade Fire, Eminem, Lady Antebellum, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. I’ll give Arcade Fire and Eminem a pass, because both released original albums. But the last three nominations are an absolute joke that most people apparently don’t get. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry made the best albums of the year like the glass of soda I had for lunch is the best glass of soda of all time. They’re all the same glass of tobacco-colored backwash that were produced in the same factory. They are interchangeable and were made for mass consumption and minimal enjoyment.
Then you go down the list to the categories that less and less people care about, like Best Metal Performance. For all the metal albums that came out in 2010, four out of the five nominees could have been the same nominees 15 years ago. The nominees are Megadeth, Slayer, Korn, Iron Maiden and Lamb of God. Metallica has won this award six times since this award was created in 1990. Soundgarden won it in 1995 for “Spoonman,” of which you could draw the conclusion that apparently no heavy metal was released in 1995. Judas Priest won this award last year for a live cover of a Slayer song. Let me repeat that. The best metal performance of 2009 was Judas Priest covering a Slayer song. That has to be the biggest slap in face to anyone who actually gives shit about metal. There was a plethora of metal albums release in 2009 by bands with stupid names like Dead and Devine and The Project Hate, and somehow not one of them was better than Judas Priest covering a Slayer song.
There are so many categories that your head could explode by simply attempting to read all the nominees. Aside from the main categories of Best Album, Best Recording, Best Song and Best New Artist, there are about 31 other genre categories and endless subcategories. There are 22 different awards under the genre of Gospel, 11 for Jazz, 14 for Classical, nine for American Roots, five for Rap, and on and on. The only award missing is the Best Flute Player in Bombay.
The Grammys, along with American Idol, are the last gasps from an industry that’s hanging on by a thread. Instead of taking chances, the major labels (most of which are not very major anymore) tried to craft and mold musical trends into personal moneymakers. They still exist in the cracks created by bad taste and lazy listeners, but the days of musical authority dictated by the muscle of money are dead. And the Grammys is a festival for musical dinosaurs to come together once a year and remember the good old days when they could tell us what was good and we believed it.
