The Grammy Awards: Making Music Seem Boring Since 1970

The 2009 Grammy Awards were a bad night for Chris Brown, for CBS and for nearly the entire music industry. BLENDER isn’t mad at Morgan Freeman – the dude’s voiceover work in March of the Penguins – has set an industry standard for animal documentaries – but WTF was he doing onstage at the Grammys?

Here’s one explanation: The host network was CBS, the least qualified network to host a music event. Putting CBS in charge of “music’s biggest night” is like asking Ryan Seacrest to emcee the Nobel Peace Prize. Here are some of the famous musicians who appeared on the Grammy broadcast: Simon Baker, the blonde chick from CSI Miami, Jay Mohr, Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump. Right, those people don’t have music careers, but they are on CBS series, and CBS decided to treat the broadcast as an opportunity for product placement, where the products are their own shows. Which might be okay if CBS didn’t have the demographics of a cruise ship – none of their actors had even the meager sex appeal of, say, Chris Martin. (A huge percentage of the ads were for medications: Plavix, Orencia, Flomax. Apparently, CBS viewers are prone to heart attacks, strokes and arthritis, and need to pee every 10 minutes.) When I see Gary Sinise, I have one thought: Hi, narc. It’s a good thing Angela Lansbury is dead, or CBS would have wheeled her onstage to present the award for best hip-hop album.

In order to reach the widest possible audience, the Grammy producers strive for demographic balance at every moment, adjusting the program to suit the old and the young, the black and the white, the Macs and the PCs. That’s how we ended up with Morgan Freeman introducing “my friend, Kenny Chesney” and Samuel L. Jackson bringing out “my buddy, Justin Timberlake.” Here’s Timberlake (white, young) with Al Green (black, old)! Here’s the Jonas Brothers (white, young, questionable talent) with Stevie Wonder (black, old, genius)! Here are the four greatest living rappers (Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, T.I. and Kanye West) dressed like white lounge singers from the 1950s and shot in black & white! But if this strategy works so well, why is Grammy viewership so much lower than it used to be? Here’s why: Because people tune in to watch a show about music, and they get GARY FUCKING SINISE.

Paul McCartney’s great performance with Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl joyfully crashing away on the cymbals, lasted a few ticks longer than three minutes; that’s about the same time Grammy frontman Neil Portnow took to make his borrrrring speech. In the first five minutes, Clive Davis was thanked twice. Hey you, person who doesn’t work in the music business – do you know or care who Clive Davis is? Did you tune in to the Grammys to hear about Clive Davis? To see some black and white archival footage of Brenda Lee? Or would you rather hear some live music from some actual living musicians on “music’s biggest night”? This is what Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails meant when he denounced the Grammys on his blog as “Out of touch old men jacking each other off.”

The Grammy Awards: Making music seem boring since 1970.

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