Grammys 2019 - PAH!

The Grammy Awards are on TV tomorrow, and I won't be watching.  A cursory look at the nominees for the major awards left me more disinterested than I already was.

This Grammy ceremony is being touted as the Girl Power Grammys, since most of the nominees in the major categories open to both sexes - Album of the Year, Song of the Year - are women.  It's all about diversity, right?  But when you look at the lists of nominees, you notice that a good deal of these women are hip-hop/R&B singers (the initials for rhythm and blues are tacked on to hip-hop as if soul music itself were an afterthought these days), pure pop singers, and a few country performers.  Not an all-out rocker among these women - no one who reminds us of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Stevie Nicks, or Suzi Quatro.  And certainly no nominations for Australian rocker Courtney Barnett's latest album, which came out in May 2018, and Courtney Barnett is considered a spiritual successor to Bob Dylan.  The only female nominees who seem to stand out are Kacey Musgraves, who likes to mix country with pop and electronica, and - wait, Brandi Carlile?  The folk-rocker?  Eight nominations for her, including Album of the Year?  How did an indie queen like Brandi Carlile get in?

Okay, I did not see that coming.  But when Courtney Barnett got a Best New Artist Grammy nomination in 2016, only to lose to Meghan Trainor - that I saw coming.

Meanwhile, the male nominees in the major categories are mostly rappers.  The simple truth that the Grammys are going to be dominated, as they have been in recent years and will be for the foreseeable future (which I define as the rest of the century), by musical forms that require a computer science degree to perform - but don't require singing lessons.  Anyone of a musical persuasion other than pop or hip-hop/R&B will have to be content with selling one record for every one thousand records a hip-hop/R&B or pop act sells, and so their records won't get noticed by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.  The commercial success of Brandi Carlile's By the Way, I Forgive You album has to be considered a fluke, and there's no guarantee that she'll win anything.

This all means that rock and roll is clearly out of the running for the major Grammys, and besides, rock and roll is dominated by white guys with guitars.  Gary Clark, Jr., the black blues-rocker from Texas, is a rare exception - incredible, since black guys invented rock and roll in the first place.  In fact, white males of any musical persuasion are by and large shut out of the nominations for major Grammy categories this year, though hip-hop fans aren't rubbing it in our faces this time.  Oh, some of us honkies got nominated as tokens.  The rock band Greta Van Fleet is up for a Best New Artist Grammy, and they'll probably go the way of Courtney Barnett.  Oh, and Beck did get a nomination for best Pop Vocal Performance for "Colors," and he may yet get that award.  But don't bet on it.  

Don't expect to see a white male artist nominated for any major Grammy in the near or far future, not even an R&B type like a couple of dudes named Justin that I could mention.  Everyone else is just not into them, and folks immediately suspect that racism or misogyny must be involved if one of us honkies wins an Album of the Year Grammy, as happened in 2015 when Beck won for Morning Phase over Beyoncé's self-titled release. Which is why Kanye West discombobulated Beck by walking on stage and then walking off in the middle of Beck's acceptance speech to protest Beyoncé's loss.  West knew what he was doing; by pulling that stunt, he ensured that Beck would be the last white man to win the Album of the Year Grammy for a long, long time.  After that, no one wanted to cross hip-hop fans or female pop singers by giving that award to another pale male.

Ahh, who cares?  Because I'm less concerned about the Grammys than I am about the possibility of an ice storm this coming Tuesday.  Suffice to say that this will likely be the last time I comment about the Grammys at all.  My musical tastes have nothing in common with what the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has been honoring of late.

Oh, well, maybe Gary Clark, Jr.'s upcoming album, This Land - to be released this month - will fare well in the 2020 Grammy nominations.  But probably not.  Because, though Clark won the 2014 Best Traditional (Traditional?) R&B Performance Grammy for "Please Come Home" and got a nomination that same year for Best Rock Song (the Rock category is a mere sideshow at the Grammys nowadays) for "Ain't Messin' 'Round," the folks at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences probably can't figure him out.

A black guy playing rock and roll?  It must seem weird to them.