Classic Rant #444 (February 14, 2011): Music, Music, Music (Not)

Since I spoke about Valentine's Day in a previous rant, I am going to bypass that subject and speak about something else that is not really near and dear to my heart.

The Grammy Awards.

I have never liked the Grammy Awards. This is supposedly the showcase for the current hot acts of the moment. The Grammy Awards have always strived to be hip, with it, and now, but they rarely are.

And it is even moreso now, when the talent level of today's most popular acts is so thin.

Let's be honest about it; the music that kids listen to today is awful. There isn't an original chord in the whole mess, and mix that with c(rap), where everything is out there, and, well, you have a lot of garbage that passes for music today.

Yeah, I am speaking like an old fuddy duddy, but c'mon people, I don't see any Beatles on the horizon, nor do I see even an American Breed in this mess.

What you have are a lot of performance acts where the music is secondary.

Take Lady GaGa (please), a Madonna wannabe who came to the Grammy Awards last night in an egg.

Yes, an egg.

What this has to do with the music is beyond me.

She owes a lot to Madonna (another act that I really can't stand), to David Bowie, to Alice Cooper and to others who blended music with performance.

You can trace this back to probably Screaming Jay Hawkins when he performed his hit, "I Put a Spell On You." He would come out looking like a voodoo medicine man, with his coffin following him from behind.

It was great theater.

Later, when the Monkees did their concerts, they burst out on the stage from large, fake speakers. That was so different from the norm of that time, when acts just basically came on stage and did their thing.

Bowie stretched the boundaries even further, and so did Alice Cooper.

But with those acts, the music still came first.

With an act like Lady GaGa, and Madonna for that matter, the performance is much more important that the music. The music is secondary, and I didn't think the Grammy Awards were about that.

Yet, so many people think she is so creative.

Bah!

And then you have rap, which is pure garbage that some people think is an art form.

Sorry, but it's so easy to say every curse in the book; it's harder to work around it.

These "artists" don't work around it.

Their music is repetitive, often racist and anti-human being, and it is garbage.

Please, critics, don't pass this off as art. Sorry Eminem, I don't care how many records you sell, you are not an artist by any stretch of the imagination.

Last night, some oldies were there, including Barbra Streisand (an eternal ugh!); Mick Jagger (who is nothing without Keith Richards), and Bob Dylan (another ugh!), and there was a tribute to Aretha Franklin by some much lesser talents than her. Funny, I didn't think the Queen of Soul was dead yet.

Anyway, I guess by not liking the Grammy Awards, I don't like the current popular music.

You can assume that, and if you do, well, it's true.

I would rather get out my dusty Archies records and listen to them.

There is more credibility in that music than there ever will be in the current crap, er, crop, of music.

And that is a shame, because I am sure there is talent out there.

Somewhere ...