Nurse the Hate: Hate The Grammys

Something I almost never do is watch awards shows of any kind.  This is probably because I don’t really care who wins a Golden Globe or a Grammy as I generally find that the awards celebrate the ordinary and predictable.  The other reason is that I also begrudge the wild success of many of these artists for creating works of such blandness.  This is what happens when you create a world for yourself where you believe Roky Erickson should receive a lifetime achievement award, and you have no idea of who Sara Bareilles is…  I literally have no idea who many of the people are when the telecast does the “celebrity crowd shot reaction”.  The first time I heard three of the five “songs of the year” was when the award was being presented.  I have slowly slid into being the almost completely out of touch old man. 

Watching the Grammys was in many ways like being an unfrozen caveman, or a visitor from another culture.  I can see that people are very excited about the two guys in the space suits, but I’m not exactly sure why.  As far as I could tell, those guys don’t actually do anything.  They sort of move around in their outfits, which I can see as being entertaining, but shouldn’t they actually play an instrument or sing or do something tangible?  I know not everyone is Bob Dylan, but repeating “We’re up all night to get lucky” is setting the bar about as low as possible.  That makes the Ramones first record seem like Dostoevsky.

I saw Beyonce’s big opening number with Jay-Z.  I had never heard the song before, but people seemed to go apeshit.  Of course, they may have been going apeshit because Beyonce essentially performed a table dance while lip syncing with an outfit that said, “I’d like to introduce you to my thighs and ass.  Please note them while I lip sync this poorly conceived song about me riding a surfboard, which you may notice is a thinly veiled sexual allegory.  When I talk about grinding on my surfboard, I am actually talking about grinding my genitalia on a male partner of my choosing.  You can tell by the way I am dry humping everything on this stage”  That’s when Jay-Z walked out and started rapping about the same thing.  As far as I can tell, every song involving a black female vocalist now by law must include a part in the middle where some guy talks over the melody as some sort of male counterpoint.  I think Usher and John Legend are the only black guys on the planet that still sing, but as you may have noted, I am pretty out of it.  I would also like to note that for being a big superstar, Jay-Z has almost no stage presence and appears very awkward in his movements.  He’s a great businessman though.  I know this because he tells everyone about this fact on talk shows.  I don’t know what it is that he manufactures though…

I saw the Best Country album awarded to some girl that wore a dress that looked like a lampshade.  She had really long legs too.  The hit, which seemed awful, was called “Same Trailer Different Park”.  It was probably written by some super talented guy that writes shit like that so he can make pillowcases filled with money.   He knows they are shit though.  It’s like writing advertising jingles.  Every one of the country songs that are big hits now all appeared to be about having a lot of fun in your truck here in America with your best girl by your side while a train goes by as you drink beer.  While every R&B song is about fucking, every country song is about “good folks getting’ by”.  The contemporary country fan base is without a doubt, the biggest group of morons in any room.  They are the same people that like the comedy of Larry the Cable Guy, Tim Allen movies, Wal Mart and Transformers 2.  Like it or not, they are what most Americans are to their core.  It is incomprehensible to me that they don’t pay enough attention to those songs to notice their woeful content.  I can't wrap my head around why anyone would like any of these utterly predictable pieces of shit.

Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson played with Blake Shelton on some of their old hits.  They sounded awful, except Shelton who looked and sounded like a caricature of what a “country star” is supposed to sound like.  Merle Haggard looked surprised the whole time like he was suffering from dementia.  Kris Kristofferson did that move where you are laughing at the good fun you’re having up there with the boys while pretending that you don’t care how bad it sucks.  They all tried to sing along with Willie nelson, which is impossible.  There was a crowd shot that showed Sean Lennon clowning on the country songs.  I would like to see the roles reversed and see a crowd shot of Willie Nelson watching Sean Lennon play his music.  Willie should get really high first.  I mean really, really high.  That stuff is terrible.

Out of the five songs nominated for “Best Rock Song”, I had only heard one of them, that weak Stones afterthought tune “Doom and Gloom” they tacked on to yet another of their Greatest Hits packages.   Black Sabbath and Paul McCartney nominated?  I’m not saying that the Grammys are out of touch because I don’t have to.  That says it all right there.  The Grammy nominated rock categories are always embarrassing, like when you check out somebody’s record collection and find Def Leppard and the Top Gun soundtrack.

I almost fell asleep before that really odd moment where Macklemore and some big girl with tatted doughy arms played some song I never heard before about gay rights.  A quick aside, if you are only talking the lyrics like this Macklemore fella, are you still considered a musician, or are you something else like a poet or public speaker?  What’s the difference between Macklemore and William Shatner’s incredible body of work?  That was when Queen Latifah married a bunch of gay couples in the middle of the song, and then Madonna hobbled out in a cane wearing a white cowboy outfit.  I thought the Madonna part was a put-on and then she would start dancing around, but that never happened.  I know how important it is for her to look young a vibrant.  A cane is probably not the best prop for that, though better than a walker or wheelchair.  Then all the gay couples paraded through the venue, many of them crying as they came to grips with the fact that Madonna had played their wedding.  The crowd all applauded themselves for how liberal they were, pretending not to notice how terrible the song was or how opportunistic and exploitative the whole episode had been.  Had Lady Gaga shot across the room on a unicorn, it would have been the best.

I fell asleep after that.