The Grammys are worthless, despite what Bono extemporaneously said…
The big winner this weekend was Chris Stapleton. Who has not only been anointed god of country music, but our single hope for rock and roll and guitar-based tunes.
Not only for his victories, but his appearance on Saturday Night Live with Sturgill Simpson. He’s not afraid to share the spotlight – he got the hip-hop memo and he’s got sales/consumption too.
Stapleton is real music and he’s the toast of Nashville.
What could be wrong with that?
And despite trying to keep Ed Sheeran down, he won for Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album.
And Portugal The Man won for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
Yet there were so many faux pas and guffaws it was mind-bending.
Do the Foo Fighters win whenever they’re nominated? Is their retread rock the only known entity in this moribund field?
Speaking of which, what kind of bizarro world do we live in where Leonard Cohen wins the Best Rock Performance.
However the greatest crime of all was Bruno Mars‘s victory for Album of the Year. “24k Magic” is utterly meaningless, well-honed pop for the mindless. Not challenging, not cutting edge, not as good as what came before, but he’s safe enough to play the Super Bowl twice so let’s give it to him.
HUH??????
Talk to NFL players, THEY ALL LISTEN TO HIP-HOP!
I would have been angry if Jay Z beat out Kendrick Lamar, but this is positively INSANE!
They’ve got a #metoo segment – the Grammys get all touchy-feely – and then they end up being RACIST???
Believe me that’s true.
Its members hate hip-hop.
The organization must be decimated, superseded. Come on, when comedians and Presidents win Grammys you know it’s messed up.
And the endless categories which ultimately ensure that too many people with their heads up their (you-know-whats) vote in categories they’re clueless about, no wonder the awards are irrelevant and ignored by the younger generation.
Time marches on, but the Grammys remain stuck in the past.
Jethro Tull was not an exception.
If you didn’t know that Kendrick Lamar put out the Album of the Year, then you don’t have your ear to the ground, which Grammy voters don’t.
And where’s the apology?
Get 70 year-old Recording Academy pressdent Neil Portnow on morning TV and have him explain this: How he runs a white-dominated racist organization.
Hell, there’d be riots in the street if anybody thought this award meant anything.
But in a year where hip-hop dominated in a way rock hasn’t in decades, where no other sound has in decades, to shut it out and disrespect it this way is a travesty.
It’d be one thing if only African-Americans listened to it. But the white kids eat it up, they even rap in country…BUT HIP-HOP CAN’T GET ANY RESPECT!
You’ve got white dudes saying racism is passe. Bitching about reverse racism. Saying you’ve just got to put your nose to the grindstone, anybody can succeed, and then you shut hip-hop out?
What kind of message does this send?
That hip-hop and African-Americans are second class citizens and no matter what they do they deserve no respect.
This is a serious issue.
You may not be black; you may not like hip-hop; but the world only works when we’re united and we all get respect, we’re all treated equally. But we’ve got a government trying to jet us back two centuries; Charlottesville was not an anomaly; we’re willing to stick up for white women abused by powerful men, but when it comes to African-Americans…SCREW ‘EM!
That said, the joke is on the Grammys and the government. They’ve got no sense of history. They don’t know it’s about hearts and minds. That’s how North Vietnam beat the United States. You can’t break passion.
And hip-hop is where it is in music today.
What doesn’t break us only makes us stronger.
This kick to the face, this spit in the eye…
Hip-hop will emerge victorious and should boycott next year’s Grammys completely.
Hell, the Grammys show needs rappers more than rockers. Sometimes you’ve just got to say I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!
Sometimes you have to go on strike.
Sometimes you need a new organization and new awards.
This is a black eye on the Grammys.
They think they can duck and cover, push back, but that didn’t work for Harvey Weinstein and Steve Wynn and it won’t work for Neil Portnow and the Grammys.
Portnow should step down and put an African-American in charge, he’s been in power long enough.
But no, nothing can change in the overcompensated white music business.
Same as it ever was.
DISGUSTING!!!
I was disgusted by the Grammys too. We must cleanse this nation of “White Privilege” and I had hoped that there would be NO white people allowed within 500 feet of the “Safe Space” known as Madison Square Garden. Disgusting that the Grammys was held in a building named after a person of the White Patriarchy, James Madison. It disgusts me that this building has not been renamed Louis Farrakhan Center.
Here is a picture of two really great men together, Louis Farrakhan and Barack Hussein Obama.
http://lifestylesoftoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/dems-tried-to-hide-secret-snap-of-obama-and-farrakhan.jpg
“Talk to NFL players, THEY ALL LISTEN TO HIP-HOP!”
Like DUH!!!!!!!!
When will white people start getting on board with the choir boys in the NFL??? Disgusting!
“You’ve got white dudes saying racism is passe. Bitching about reverse racism. Saying you’ve just got to put your nose to the grindstone, anybody can succeed, and then you shut hip-hop out?”
Chuck told me, that if there was ever a case for reverse racism, it had to be my career. He thinks that there can be no, ZERO reason on earth, that I make more money than the most underprivileged, uneducated, black person that ever lived on this earth. It MUST be racism, or, I would just be another guy in line at McDonalds behind my own personal (If he would just NOTICE ME!!!!) bete noire, Donald Trump. I feel so guilty, hell, I might eat a fuckin salad tomorrow.
“What doesn’t break us only makes us stronger.” That kinda says it all for me and Bobby. He butchered Superman up a little, but it still says the same thing. Goddamn are we important!!! (I once met Eminem, so did Bob. He is just as pissed as I am about the Donald’s snub. Eminem is great, but he is white, so I don’t listen to his ‘music’.)
“I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!” Lefty is very, very particular, a lack of originality is DISGUSTING!
Next year, I hope my two favorite artists, Harry Belefonte and Danny Glover will lock arms and march right up to the stage when a white person like maybe Taylor Swift DARES to take the stage and sing, acapella, “We shall overcome” during Kanye’s attempt to wrestle the microphone out of her hands.
I am off to Popeye’s to drown myself in a swimming pool full of gravy. So sad.
This year was DISGUSTING!!!
“And hip-hop is where it is in music today.” Except for the fact that it IS NOT MUSIC. It may or may not be creative, or compelling or whatever. Its noise/primitive rhythms may attract some people and repel others. But it is not music.
That’s quite a rant-fest, but you’re mostly right except for two things.
Who cares what NFL players listen to?
St. Vincent’s “Masseducation” is the true record of the year.
These “events” — SAG, Foreign press, Golden Globes, Tonys, Oscars, Emmys, Grammy’s– are just self-congratulatory industry shows; they are no more or less important than an annual podiatrists’s convention.
People watch what they like, listen to what they like, read what they like. The rest is just people hawking Tupperware…