Now. Then. Later.

I stopped paying attention to the Grammys when it became apparent that the musical crimes of white males - prog, metal, Pat Boone, Michael Bolton, yacht rock, etc., etc., etc. - finally caught up with any musician with pale skin and a Y chromosome, leading to my fellow honkies being shut out of the big Grammy awards . . . Record of the Year, Album of the Year, whatever.  And this year, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar dominated the big awards.  (Who won Record of the Year and Album of the Year, you ask?  Ahh, I don't give a twit.)  But the Best Rock Performance Grammy winner of 2025 definitely raised my eyebrows.

It went to the Beatles for their last single, "Now and Then," from 2023.

This made quite an impression on me.  Hey, why fib?  "Now and Then" is a pretty nice song, even if it's more of a ballad, a song that has more in common with a Neil Diamond MOR tune than with a Neil Young rocker.  And Paul McCartney's use of artificial intelligence to finish a song that was culled from John Lennon's vast accumulation of demos of songs in various states of completion (an accumulation that, thanks to AI, might one day produce a few new John Lennon solo albums), which was slated for the Beatles' 1996 Anthology 3 compilation but shelved because George Harrison had a problem with how it sounded at the time, was certainly a worthy innovation.  But let's be honest.  The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences actually selected a Beatles song that was recorded and mixed piecemeal over a 45-year time frame over more contemporary rock performances from current artistes who are struggling to be heard as rock and rollers in a hip-hop/R&B world.  And, like the last John Lennon album released in his lifetime - his and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy, the 1982 Album of the Year Grammy recipient - "Now and Then" is a good record that nonetheless would not have won a Grammy on its own merit if the insect (as Bernie Taupin called him) who murdered Lennon had been fatally run over by a speeding taxi on Central Park West in Manhattan on the afternoon of December 8, 1980, before he had the chance to commit his evil deed.  In fact, had Lennon lived, "Now and Then" likely would never have become a Beatles song.

Or, in other words, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences would rather celebrate rock's past than even acknowledge rock's present.

It's bad enough that today's rock bands should consider themselves lucky if they can acquire a recording contract.  Now they can't even win an award if a band that broke up more than half century before is their competition.  Or Beyoncé, who won a Rock Performance Grammy awhile back and just won the Best Country Album Grammy, so desirous is she to be represented in every musical form except classical music.  (Maybe Ringo Starr's recently released country album will win next year.)   Such hapless bands would include TV On The Radio or the Alabama Shakes, both black rock bands, as much as Dirty Honey or Greta Van Fleet, so the turn away from rock is not completely racial.  It's mostly aesthetic.  Guitar music just isn't as cool as it used to be, if indeed it is still cool at all, though part of the reason for that is that it's associated with honkies.  And quite frankly, that's the fault of white male rock fans and radio programmers who wouldn't accept black rock artistes as rockers back in the seventies.  

And so, as long as electric-guitar groups are perceived to be on the way out - a phenomenon Decca Records' Dick Rowe predicted in 1962 when he rejected the Beatles for a recording contract, making him far ahead of his time - the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will continue to stress rock and roll's history because rock and roll is history.

As I write this, Beatles fans on social media are celebrating today's anniversary (the 61st) of the fabulous foursome's first performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show."  That's because there's nothing current in rock to celebrate.  It's not about now . . . it's about then.

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.