Yawns at the Grammys

I used to like watching the Grammy Awards. The annual show always exposed me to new music and new performers.

I’m so over it.

This year’s 3.5 hour borefest (including about 1.5 hours of commercials) included enough awards to have paid tribute to just about everybody in the music world and a few outside it. What’s next? An award for Best Cleaning Performance by an Illegal Immigrant Janitor Cleaning a Men’s Room during a Tejano Performance?

Viewers got a taste of the recording industry’s anti-Bush agenda (after all, it is a requisite component of the Hollywood ethic) when the Dixie Chicks were so richly awarded—ostensibly for their music but in reality for their anti-Bush posturing. Their not-too-subtly named record titled Not Ready to Make Nice, a supposedly courageous venture, made all the infantile recording executives happy.

The industry also rewarded Jimmy Carter, just because.

Too bad that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth didn’t have a soundtrack album. It would have won its category hands down. Perhaps a category should be established to recognize the best non-album, so Al doesn’t feel left out of the Grammys’ political posturing, although they did have a spot for him on the podium before the night was over. After all, Hillary Clinton had won a Grammy a couple of years ago, so why should Al be slighted?

What’s next? A Grammy for Barack Obama Recites the Poetry of Allen Ginsburg?

Never mind that. Gore is still up for an Oscar, not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize, another “award show” that has become a vehicle for European sneering at the US of late. We should all be zero-growth socialists, just like them, or draw their sneers.

Um, Joan Baez? Bob Dylan? What the hell is wrong with the recording industry? Dredging up these geriatric 1960s protest acts seems to be sending me a message. Bring in Steve Jobs and the shock troops. The music industry has gone off the deep end.

Bob Dylan’s award demonstrates that the more the times they are a-changing, the more they remain the same

Dylan wasn’t the only nostalgia trip. The Grammys kicked off with a performance by the reunited 80s band The Police, featuring mega-rocker and movie icon Sting. An early award went to octogenarian Tony Bennett and baby boomer Stevie Wonder. The show also featured a tribute to The Eagles. So, the old farts had their day.

I won’t even dignify the 1,800 categories of rap awards with an excoriation here. I hear that Gnarlz Barkley won an award. Who the hell is Gnarlz Barkley?

This year’s show just plain bored me. I turned it off after a couple of hours, thinking that I would read today’s morning newspaper about who won what. I tried that, too, but I got bored about a third of the way down the interminable list of awards.

The highlight of the show for me was Shakira’s ass. Next year, perhaps they should feature Shakira shaking it for fifty minutes, show a ten minute stream of commercials, and call it quits.

Hey, baby, when I talk like that—it makes a woman go mad.

Or get mad, even.