Grammys = Death

And so the silly season is once again upon us. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, the Grammys have not decided to stop being monumentally idiotic in honor of their 50th Awards program.

It's really a struggle to determine the one thing that most drives me up the wall about the Grammys. There's so much wrong with them that it boggles the mind, while at the same time confirming the fact that the music industry is dying a self-imposed, long-deserved death. Is it their inability to accurately define and enforce their regimented genre definitions, as exemplified this year by Beck's nomination in the "Solo Rock Vocal" category, instead of the "Alternative" category in which he would seemingly clearly belong, as well as by (reggae/hip-hop/Pop-with-a-capital-P artist's) Lily Allen's inclusion in the "Best Alternative Music Album"?

Is it their ever-predictable nomination of musicians who released their best work decades and decades ago to a deafening orchestra of awards-show crickets, as in the case of Herbie Hancock, nominated for Album of the Year for his album of Joni Mitchell covers? (One imagines the voters positively slavering over the opportunity for a twofer on that one).

Is it the show's basic inability to understand that musicians who have only recently established a mass-market public identity, such as Feist and Amy Winehouse, are not necessarily "New Artists?" (Both are nominated in the category this year.)

After much deliberation and hand-wringing, I think that the worst thing about the Grammys is the fact that albums and songs that are generally critically accepted to be awful, or at best mediocre, get nominated for what seems like no reason save that the artist's name won't make television viewers go "Huh?" See: Daughtry's "It's Not Over" being nominated for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song. The Chemical Brothers' "We Are the Night" being nominated for Best Dance Album. The Shins' "Wincing the Night Away" being nominated for best Alternative Album. For this reason, the Grammys are what the Oscars would be like if Spider-Man 3 were to be nominated for Best Picture. Every year. It's enough to make you wish to be deaf.