Grammys 2018 - The Aftermath

Out of this world!

Bruno Mars won six Grammy Awards this past Sunday night, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year (both for "That's What I Like"),  and yes, for Album Of the Year (24K Magic), infuriating rap fans who thought that a rap album should have won the top prize.  Screw 'em.  While rapper Kendrick Lamar did win five Grammys overall, and while rock's increasing irrelevance was highlighted by the failure of rock artists to be even nominated for the big awards (at least it has its own category), Mars' wins prove that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, while misguided in acknowledging rap as music, is not completely insane.  Though I am not a fan of Mars, I will say that he is a musical talent to be reckoned with.  He arranges his songs with real musical instruments, he actually sings the words, and his performances are high-spirited affairs in the tradition of James Brown and Michael Jackson.  Equally as important, his songs can withstand being pared down to a vocal accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.  Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, once said that, as a rock musician who started out in folk, he knew the value of a well-written song; when he got out there on coffeehouse stages with just an acoustic guitar and his own voice, he knew the material had to be good because there was no band or choreography to hide behind.  Bruno Mars' songs, with the electric music and the dance moves taken away, can stand up to a solo acoustic arrangement.  I'd love to hear someone cover "Locked Out of Heaven" with just an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a voice - with some good ol' fashioned foot-stomping!

A lot of folks weren't happy with the injection of politics into this year's Grammy ceremonies, I'm led to understand.  Several recording artists spoke out against sexual harassment and for the child-immigrants currently under the DACA program.  But the political segment that got everyone's attention was a filmed skit in which Grammy ceremony host James Corden auditions celebrities to read from Michael Wolff's Trump book "Fire and Fury" for the audio version that would qualify for the 2019 Grammy for the best spoken-word album . . . and Hillary Clinton makes a surprise appearance as one of the auditioners.  Corden tells her she has the gig.  Responding to the skit, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley wrote on Twitter, "I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists read the' Fire and Fury' book killed it. Don’t ruin great music with trash. Some of us love music without the politics thrown in it."

So, I assume that Nikki Haley doesn't like Crosby, Stills and Nash?  Solo John Lennon?  Early Bob Dylan?   Peter, Paul and Mary?  Every other folk singer that's ever been?  Good grief, how far back do you want to go?  Pete Seeger was singing political songs in the 1940s. 

And, Ambassador Haley, apart from Bruno Mars, there was no great music to "ruin."  What's so great about hip-hop?  Heck, I would argue that there was more trash at the Grammys than great music. 

Be that as it may, Hillary Clinton's cameo was wildly cheered by the live Grammy audience, confirming her status as the most beloved and respected person in the Democratic Party.  Which beings me to the subject of Martin O'Malley, perhaps the least beloved and respected person in the Democratic Party.  O'Malley wasn't invited to the Grammys - indeed, he's the kind of guy that the bouncer would have tossed out head first - and he demonstrated the reason why the week before, when he made his own surprise appearance at Ryan's Daughter, an Irish pub in his hometown of Baltimore.  He stopped by with his guitar and played and sang a set of Irish folk songs and American folk-rock tunes.  In other words, the very sort of music that  - like O'Malley with Democratic primary voters in 2016 - fell out of favor with record buyers decades ago.  (A picture of O'Malley in the bar is below, taken from a smartphone video;  I apologize for the poor quality of the image.)  As if symbolizing the plight of white guys in the twenty-first century - they're not wanted in either pop music or the Democratic Party these days - weren't enough, O'Malley (below) performed songs that could symbolize his own political career, like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" and Don McLean's "American Pie."  "The Boxer" is about a city boy who can't make it on his own, and "American Pie" chronicles a rise and fall.  Now if he had only included Steve Goodman's "City Of New Orleans" - the song about the decline of passenger rail in America that was covered by Arlo Guthrie in 1972 - the symbolism would have been perfect.  To add insult to injury, Ryan's Daughter is no longer in business; O'Malley dropped by to be a part of its last weekend of operation.  Again, how symbolic.

Except that O'Malley's fellow barflies happily sang along to every song he performed, and at the end,  someone yelled out, "O'Malley 2020!"  So, there is an audience for good music and a constituency for good presidential candidates.  They can't get good music from the record business so much these days, but O'Malley - who could probably play and sing "Locked Out of Heaven" or "Just the Way You Are" (the Bruno Mars song, not the Billy Joel song) with aplomb - can give them a good presidential campaign, one that can lead him right to the White House.  The Democratic Party might try to stop him like it did in 2016 - mainly because Democrats fear that, if he's elected President, he'll offend the hip-hop generation by inviting the Chieftains to play at his inaugural gala ("No, not that corny Irish crap!"), or worse, being his own headliner - but this time we ain't gonna let them.  Some people might call those of us who like folk and folk-rock music nerds.  I call us Martin O'Malley's base.  We're there, and we're square.  Get used to us.

Oh yeah, someone at the Grammys suggested that Carter run for President in 2020.  Not Jimmy - Shawn.  You know, Beyoncé's husband?  Can anyone explain to me how Shawn Carter and Kanye West are taken more seriously as presidential candidates - and as musicians - than Martin O'Malley?  This country needs an enema.

You can find the video of O'Malley's appearance at Ryan's Daughter here. 

Grammys 2018: Who The Hell Cares?

So who are going to be the big winners at the Grammys tonight?  I don't give a twit.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has moved to honor rap and hip-hop records to the point where it's no longer part of American popular music.  It is American popular music.

I can't stand it.  Everyone is talking about how "diverse" the Grammys have become, and how NARAS is catching up to the culture, and how acknowledging spoken-word rants set to computerized beats as art (indeed, as music!) is long overdue, and if this is indeed the future of American music, we might as well seal our ears right now.

Call me a bigot.  I don't care. I don't want to hear about how inner-city blacks created rap and hip-hop as a way to express themselves musically when arts and music programs in urban school systems were eliminated or pared back by budget cuts, and how that enriched the culture . . . I want to hear about how people are going to restore the music programs in the schools to get kids interested in playing music on real instruments and learning complicated chords and fingerings so they don't have to make sounds with turntables and laptops.   I want to hear how young people are going to be imbued with an appreciation for music that takes real skill and intense practice - classical, jazz, everything else - rather than excuses for creating a form of pop that is merely a high-tech equivalent of beating on pots and pans.

No, I'm not going to hear any of that, because so-called intellectuals are too busy studying hip-hop and trying to find some deeper, intellectual "meaning" to the phenomenon.  Harvard - Harvard - has actually taken the initiate to do just that.  The Hiphop Archive & Research Institute (yes, "Hiphop" as one word, capitalized!)  describes its mission as being "to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through Hiphop. We are uncompromising in our commitment to build and support intellectually challenging and innovative scholarship that both reflects the rigor and achievement of performance in Hiphop and transforms our thinking and our lives."

There's so much navel-gazing here, yet they can't see the disgusting lint in their midst.

You want an intellectual dissection of music made with dissected electronics?  How about this observation from cultural critic James Howard Kunstler, written in 2005 but as true now as it was then?  "Hip-hop has to be taken seriously because it is so pervasive," he wrote, "and it presents a range of compelling cultural meanings. The most threatening, of course, is its association with criminal behavior - the rhetoric of gangsterism, the glorification of gunplay and murder, and the grandiose imagery of unearned riches. Street mythology has it that hip-hop clothes, accessories, and lingo are extensions of jailhouse fashion. Less obvious is how much these childish conventions of manner - exaggerated clumsy body language, pants many times too large, hats worn sideways - infantilize their followers."

But, no one cares about that, because rap is still so lucrative after all these years, and of course there's big money to be made off it.  Only the narcissistic and the clueless, Kunstler tells us, could possibly welcome rap as "just another species of entertainment."

Some smug hip-hop fans are quite happy to see white male artists pretty much shut out for the Song Of the Year or Album of the Year, because they don't want more "diversity" (however, award NARAS points for Bruno Mars' nominations), which merely means wanting less of us - more to the point, they want nothing to do with us.  They want us completely out.  Although I'm sick of it, I have to get used to the fact that we male Caucasians are always viewed as the bad guys.  I know the lack of a tune.  We're the guys who ruined rock and roll after we stole it from black musicians and brought it over to England, we're the guys who overproduced, sanitized, and just plain ruined popular music, we're the ones whose best music is derivative and whose most original music is made up of pompous, turgid, interminable instrumentals played in gilded concert halls by ninety-piece orchestras, the guys whose most original pop is that corny cowboy music called country, or that annoying, self-important acoustic-guitar protest music played by guys like David Crosby and Tom Chapin, and whose music is so lame that we can't dance to it so we mime guitar playing to it.  We get it - you hate us!  You don't want us!  You're glad to see us go!  

Well, if rappers want to dominate the Grammys, they can have them.  If NARAS has no interest in white guys, well, I have no interest in them.  Keep your stupid awards.

Because usually when you do give the Album Of the Year Grammy to white guys, you give it to hacks like Toto anyway. :-p

"But Steve," you say, "wouldn't you agree that, thanks to hip-hop, today's popular music is more colorful and innovative than it was in the early eighties, when pop was dominated by awful bands like Toto?"  I never thought I'd say this, but when I hear some of today's popular music, I almost miss Toto. 

Rap It Up

The Grammy Awards nominations just came out, and white male artists were shut out of Album of the Year, which shocked a lot of people. 

Quite frankly, I don't know why anyone was so surprised by the fact that none of us honkies got nominated for Album of the Year.  The truth of the matter is, white men in popular music have been marginalized by mass taste, and the Grammys are trying to reflect mass taste.  It doesn't matter if a white man makes a superior album (and today's fans and critics will tell you that he can't).  Today's pop audience likes music that makes you want to dance, and we white men aren't good at that sort of thing. We're good at making music you can play air guitar to, or writing boring artistic songs (as Britney Spears would put it) about the meaning of life.  But today's pop audience wants nothing to do with that.  And unless one of us is a cute guy named Justin, they want nothing to do with us.  I don't know how Ed Sheeran got anywhere.

The 2018 nominees for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences' most prestigious award include Melodrama by New Zealandic singer Lorde and 24K Magic by Bruno Mars.  If either one of those LPs wins, I'll have no problem with that.

But here's the problem I do have: The other nominees are rap albums - Childish Gambino's Awaken, My Love!, Kendrick Lamar's DAMN and . . . 4:44 by Beyoncé 's husband, Mr. Shawn Carter.

The preponderance of rap records in the Album of the Year Grammy nominations for 2018 is nothing short of a calculated insult.  Never mind race or sex here.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has not only embraced rap with fervor, it's also told us rock fans that our music doesn't matter.  It's also telling us to get over the fact that rap is the dominant form in pop today and deal with it.  We can complain all we want that rap isn't real music, but we're going to be told to keep our damn traps shut because we're obviously racist.  

One guy on Twitter pretty much set the tone of the attack on anyone who dares to suggest that rap isn't music. "White racists are shook that no white men got nominated for AOTY [Album of the Year] at the Grammys this year. They have the nerve to ask how 4:44 was nominated. How was Beck nominated? How did he win AOTY over Beyoncé?"

How was Beck nominated for Morning Phase back in 2015?  How did he win the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy over Beyoncé?  Maybe it was simply a better album, you twit.  I'll wager that Morning Phase is even better than 4:44 because Beck uses real instruments and actually sings his lyrics.  And to respond to the inevitable point that Beck uses electronics and rap verse in some of his songs . . .  yes, and those are my least favorite Beck songs.  The only thing more painful than listening to a black rapper is listening to a white rocker trying to rap.

I can't deal with people like this anymore.  I am sick of seeing dislike for rap always being explained as a racist rather than an aesthetic issue, and I'm tired of seeing rock acts dismissed and written off for being anachronistic and antiquated.  (One online article I recently read made fun of the current crop of rock bands by talking about how lame they are.  I almost threw a garbage can at the desktop monitor!)  The asinine political correctness in popular music that celebrates rap as a shining, innovative example of America's rich musical "diversity" and the dismissal of complaints about rap as some sort of bigoted "rockism" is unnecessary, misguided, exclusionary, and unbearable.  And if NARAS is going to celebrate rap as music while diminishing rock, then, as far as I'm concerned, they're as wrong to celebrate rap as they usually are when they award the Best New Artist Grammy - an award that has gone to folks like Debby Boone, A Taste of Honey, Milli Vanilli, and, of course, Chance the Rapper.

Oh yeah, Beyoncé's husband got eight Grammy nominations in all this time.  He's bound to go home from the Grammys with something.

In many ways, this is a victory for Kanye West, who's known for sticking up for Beyoncé on her behalf and for hip-hop/R&B in general.  After he interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 when she won an award he thought should have gone to Beyoncé, he was dissed for being a jerk because he interrupted a woman, and Beyoncé herself took the stage with Swift to show that there were no hard feelings.  But when West interrupted Beck's Grammy acceptance speech by momentarily getting onstage with him, Beyoncé and her husband were laughing and applauding wildly in response to the gesture. Although West apologized after charging that Beck was not a real artist, he got what he wanted.  Rock music, whether it's alternative rock performed by a white guy like Beck or traditional rock performed by a black guy like Gary Clark, Jr., is no longer thought of as artistically or culturally relevant.  Kanye doesn't just want rock to fall by the wayside, he wants to push it there!

There may be a new alternative-rock station in New York City, but it's merely one battle won in a war that continues to be waged.