The Grammys were held last night, and as usual nobody in their right mind gave a rat’s ass. Considering the awards are chosen by industry insiders, the divergence between between what the voters like and what’s liked by people who—oh, listen to music—is pretty amazing. The Grammys have been slipping farther and farther out of sync with popular taste ever since 1959, when Perry Como walked off with the award for Best Male Vocal Performance. (He picked up another Grammy posthumously in 2002, which shows just how edgy these awards are.) If you don’t believe me, check out Wikipedia’s list of Grammy winners by year and compare it to what you were listening to at the time. Last night’s self-congratulatory industry circle jerk was no exception to this pattern.
The night’s big winners were the Dixie Chicks, who got—I don’t know, 15 or 20 of those little gramophones. At current exchange rates, that’s nearly enough to swap for one MTV Teen Choice surfboard. I could say that I disliked the Dixie Chicks after they morphed into a slimmer, female, countrified, three-headed version of Michael Moore, and it would be perfectly true. Of course, it’s also irrelevant since I never liked them in the first place. At any rate, winning big at the Grammys is usually the kiss of death to a pop musician’s career, so that’s probably the last we’ll hear of them.
Moving on from the irrelevancy of the actual awards, A Socialite’s Life has a nice roundtable discussion of the manifold Grammy fashion disasters (including the lovely Imogene Heap, seen here). And there were a couple of good musical performances. Christina did a salute to James Brown that might have been a little overdone, but showed she’s still got a helluva set of pipes. And Shakira is still insisting those hips don’t lie. Nice dance moves, but the hips have been telling us they don’t lie for quite a while now, and I’m beginning to think the hips doth protest too much. Time for the hips to find some new talking points.
