The Grammy show has become a two hour long advertisement for whatever manufactured pop mannequins the corporate moguls are pushing on us this year. They try to legitimize the whole mess by standing an established fogey up next to their pop mannequins and by shedding a few false tears for the latest victims of old age or their own success, but all in all it's a pathetically shallow exhibition of how greed ruins any hope of artistic creativity.
I like Adele as an artist but I'm not much impressed by her actual songs. Even still, she was probably the only glimmer of hope among the rest of the corporate mannequins. At least she wasn't trying to be the next Madonna, as every female corporate mannequin in the last five decades seems to have been told they must become. If I never see another strutting slut song and dance act as long as I live, it'll still be three or four lifetimes too soon!
The real value of the Grammys almost never makes it onto these pathetic Grammy Award "shows". And that's the recognition of all the really great creative expression that's going on in the medium of music beyond the idiotic world of the 'corporate music moguls'. You have to look up on line to find out who was doing what in the areas of music that we actually like; like country, folk, jazz, blues, latin, and all the others. That's where the musical gold is.
I haven't done my homework, there, yet, because it takes some time to really explore it. But I try to do so every year and it seems like every year it reveals some great musical discovery (for me) that makes the effort worth the trouble.
A couple things I'd like to mention this year was Robert Plant's Band of Joy. It was a collection of excellent musicians reinterpreting classic American Roots music with a contemporary twist. Great stuff. And they even threw in some of the old Zeppelin classics (most of which came from old American blues traditions) presented in an interesting and new way.
Kasey Chambers and her husband Shane Nicholson made a really good album called "Rattlin Bones" - of new songs they wrote based on classic American country duets, with a bias toward that "high lonesome" Appalachian sound.
And Fred Eaglesmith made an interesting album that sort of mixes extreme grunge with hillbilly with - I don't know what. But it's good. And it's innovative. Fred is always ... different. The album is called "Cha Cha Cha".
There is a theme, here, of course. That's an interest in what's now being called "American Roots Music" that's been going on for several years, now. It probably began back with the soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" some years ago.
But there's lots of other great categories to investigate as well.
