Good-Pass Filter

By Lynz Floren | February 8, 2012

It’s GRAMMY Time! (if you care)

This Sunday, Feb 12, is the annual gathering of everyone in the music industry who is out of touch with the reality of most music fans. Sounds fun, huh? Think of it like the first 3 quarters of the super bowl, plus the boring parts of the halftime show, but with less-interesting commercials. Man, they should put me in charge of their PR.

Actually, I’ve gotta hand it to them. The Grammy’s have made a shift, over the past few years, towards unlikely performance pairings and more performances in general. I looked at the list of performers and it seems to outnumber the awards.

The host this year is LL Cool J, who has been largely irrelevant in recent years. By Grammy logic, he is the PERFECT candidate for hosting duties. In reality he would’ve been a better candidate for the Republican Party nomination, so that makes 2 organizations that don’t understand anything at all.

"I AM RIDIKOLUS"

SO. Why should you watch the Grammy’s instead of merely keeping tabs on your twitter feed then checking out all of the performances the next day like a Monday morning Youtube quarterback? I don’t have an answer for that. I really don’t. I suppose if you have the desire to be lectured by the president of NARAS about how you are an evil person for downloading music, burning CD’s, and using “new media” (seriously how new can it be? Mp3’s have been around since the 90’s), then you could tune in. My best suggestion is to DVR this beast and watch the whole thing in 25 min.

In fact, even if you watch the entire thing, there are some categories of REALLY GOOD music that don’t make it on the telecast because Bruno Mars really needs another 3 minutes of screen time. Here are two of the categories I really care about:

Best Folk Album

Barton Hollow — The Civil Wars
I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive — Steve Earle
Helplessness Blues — Fleet Foxes
Ukulele Songs — Eddie Vedder
The Harrow & The Harvest — Gillian Welch

That is a lot of good artists and all of these albums are good, but the winner is:

Fleet Foxes

Best Comedy Album

Alpocalypse — “Weird Al” Yankovic
Finest Hour — Patton Oswalt
Hilarious — Louis C.K.
Kathy Griffin: 50 & Not Pregnant — Kathy Griffin
Turtleneck & Chain — The Lonely Island

This is another one with some really stiff competition, but the winner is:

Because he can do no wrong

And now it is time to give my own awards:

Worst Misclassification:

Mumford & Sons “The Cave” for Best Rock Song

I love Mumford & Sons, but seriously this is not a rock song. They are not a rock group. Granted, “Best Jug-Band Song” isn’t a category anymore, but still. This one should be under Folk or Alternative. Oh wait, you mean they don’t give song awards for Folk or Alternative songs? These categories are crap. In reality most of the songs/albums/artists in the Rock categories aren’t really Rock. Radiohead should be in the Electronic category and Coldplay is a lot of genre’s all at once, but not always including Rock. This isn’t quite a “Jethro Tull – Best Hard Rock” level of failure, but still.

According to the 1989 Grammy's this is a Hard Rock instrument

Worst Presenter:

Everyone but ?uestlove.

Seriously, could you get a less interesting group of presenters for this thing? Jack Black MIGHT be ok, but who the eff cares about watching the plastic, death-defying Diana Ross read a tele-prompter. And Dierks Bentley? Why do you hate us, Grammy’s?

They should've made ?uestlove the HOST! That would be a Grammy show worth watching.

Best Performance:

The Civil Wars

While Adele would get the popular vote on this one, I’m banking on the fact that her throat is a bit messed up so it won’t be her best performance. Also The Beach Boys and Maroon 5 will be so bad that even Foster The People can’t make them good. Paul McCartney usually warms my heart, but he hasn’t performed impressively in quite a few years. Also, I just love to root for an underdog. The Civil Wars will give you chills…I guarantee it.

Well I would love to predict more things about the Grammy’s, but really what is the point? It might be worth my time if there were some Vegas bets on the line, but really, the biggest wager is how big of a ratings disappointment it will be.

I will sign off and add a video here for those of you who want to remember what showmanship is really like. Cee-Lo’s costume put Elton John to shame and I’m pretty sure eventually led to him getting a judge job on the Voice. That, my friends is how you make the Grammy’s a little bit more interesting.

Posted in Lynz Floren