The Grammys were last night and, let me tell you, a lot of stuff happened. Fashion happened, spectacle happened, music happened a lot. Other not-so-expected stuff also happened, like gay marriages, but for the most part the Grammys played just like how you’d expect an award show which gives out subjective awards to a select group of pre-screened artists in broad categories so as to celebrate as a nation, united in song, but mostly on Twitter.
Unlike, say, the Oscars, or even a middle school talent show, the Grammys mean practically nothing, and everyone knows that. Except, due to the ceremony of it all, you could almost be convinced that this stuff, like, matters — that LL Cool J needs to man-splain the importance of music(???) and that we are going to settle once and for all what the best song of the year was.
With all the coverage and conversation and tweets taking place before during and after the Grammys, you could totally understand someone forgetting that this stuff has absolutely no bearing whatsoever to anyone other than small country artists who sing the national anthem at baseball games, so that they can be announced as a”Grammy-Award-winning recording artist.”
Music is a very personal experience that is hard to quantify. Part of the reason we love the Oscars so much is because you can only really watch around 20 new movies a year. So when we have to decide which of those were the best it’s much more realistic to make a selection based on a small pool. Music has a completely different model because a song is like four minutes long on average and I can listen to 500 artists over the course of the week and it’s mostly free and democratic process unless you listen to the radio. No one will ever be happy with the Grammys. Such a small percentage of the music that was produced in the past year is represented on stage that we should just not even try, right? There’s no way to do this correctly when, in 2014 everyone curates their own music experience on the computer that fits in your pocket.
Even the most uninteresting, basic people you know aren’t even accurately represented at the Grammys. Instead, the nominees feature a hodge podge of pop semi-relevancy. The Grammy artists are what your recently-divorced older cousin has on her iPod touch. It’s a mess. It’s horrible, it’s embarrassing, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.
So I’m not going to talk about Macklemore here because it doesn’t matter. No one cares. The Grammys haven’t been poignant arbiters of music in two decades, and you know that. Don’t let anyone else try to convince you otherwise.