THAT’S IT. I’ve had enough. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to pack up all of my 500 or so CDs — including the 492 of them with broken, splintered cases, and the other eight that refuse to play in my car stereo — and sell them to Amoeba Music, the second-hand record store on Sunset Boulevard.
I don’t ever want to see another piece of circular plastic in my life.
Yes, it’s that time of year again: the Grammy Awards. Now, my opinion of the Grammy Awards has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they wouldn’t let me in this year. No, Sir. Or, for that matter, that I wasn’t invited to the legendary pre-Grammys party of Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records. Absolutely not. I have no interest in free vodka martinis, sequined rock chicks, loud music and celebrities. Eew.
To put it in the mildest, most diplomatic terms, my problem with the Grammy Awards is that they are . . . well, crap. And I don’t just mean bad in a cheesy Brit Awards kind of way. They are crap in a veteran-Vegas- showman-plays-one-more- night-at-the-Bellagio kind of way. They are tedious, predictable and, unforgivably for a music awards ceremony, culturally irrelevant.
Before I switched the television off on Sunday night and went to bed (I wasn’t allowed in, you see), Alicia Keys and Jamie Foxx, an actor, were singing a tribute to Ray Charles, who won best album even though he’s dead. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Just don’t expect the kids to tune in. After the tribute, an award was given to someone called Prince, who my grandmother tells me was big in the Eighties. He didn’t even show up to collect it.
Let’s face it: there’s nothing cool about being a Grammy Award winner. Just ask Milli Vanilli, who won best new artist in 1989, shortly before that nasty incident with the lip-synching machine (the pop duo’s award was withdrawn). An Oscar still means something . . . just. A Grammy? It just means that several million old people bought your album from Starbucks because they got bored waiting for their triple skinny soy latte with vanilla.
Still don’t believe me? Consider the most important man in the music industry today: the aforementioned Clive Davis. How old do you think he is? He’s 71. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. But he is the man who signed Barry Manilow.
Part of the problem with the Grammys is its interminable format: 107 categories and counting. And let’s not forget the decisions: two years ago it gave nominations to Justin Timberlake and Evanescence while forgetting about The Strokes and The Rapture. The judges have as much taste as the people who came up with the McDonald’s salad menu.
The Grammys are just part of a wider malaise in America’s music establishment — the same establishment, you’ll remember, that fought so long against online music that Apple, a computer company, had to show them how to sell their own products. America’s radio stations, which play the same four market-tested songs on rotation, are partly to blame. Even MTV gave up playing music videos a long time ago because they don’t sell enough advertising. Hearing new music in America is almost impossible today, unless you live next door to a musician.
Yet if you talk to a middle-aged record company executive, he’ll complain about how rock’n’roll is corporate and stale, and how no one writes protest songs these days that fit with their liberal, BMW-driving, alimony-paying, John-Kerry bumper sticker view of the world.
These executives should go to England, where they’ll hear the best of America’s new bands, such as The Killers, all over the radio. (The Grammys’ judges gave The Killers a nomination, but ended up handing the award to an exciting group of youngsters called U2.)
They should also go to Baghdad, where some of America’s troops are coming up with the kind of freestyle hip-hop that makes gangsta rap lyrics sound like nursery rhymes. Some of these future rap stars, if they make it out alive, are featured in Michael Tucker’s brilliant documentary Gunner Palace.
There’s one other thing, of course, that could be done to make the Grammys a whole lot more exciting: they should let me in. I’ve always wanted to meet Clive Davis, after all. I’ve heard he’s a genius.
AT LEAST the Grammys are breaking some new ground: for the first time in history, the judges handed out gongs to Brian Wilson and, er, Rod Stewart.
