To quote the band that has just become the subject of this rant: We are the vanquished foes of the metal / We tried to win for why we do not know…
If you think about it, it’s not that hard to pick which is the worst award-giving institution regarding music, between the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and the Grammys. The answer would easily be the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame for one simple reason: the committee of the Recording Company people, responsible for voting for the Grammys is in general (not exclusively) a bunch of chart-loving ignorants, who little do they know, each year vote for those who dominated the charts the longest, and since those charts are controlled by record companies in the first place and comprised with entries they’re brainwashing you with all year long, in times when pop stars are made by fake numbers of bought up Twitter followers, we’re locked in a vicious circle. All that’s to argue in favour of the Grammys, for just being dummies, those poor guys and not as bad as the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is, that embodiment of evil, that pact of old, slimy record company executives who nominate whoever they want, induct whoever they like best and provokingly and deliberately ignore entries that should have gone in on the first ballot the first year they were eligible. So, the ignorance of the Grammys could be considered harmless compared to the maliciousness of the R&RHoF, still it’s not that easy to swallow.
Let’s pretend we haven’t noticed that this year’s biggest winner was recently forced to pay royalties to a couple of legendary songwriters for ripping off one of their classic songs and credit them as co-writers. Let’s pretend that all the nominees in every category deserved the nomination and every winner deserved the win and let’s focus our attention for a moment on one certain category: Best Metal Performance.
I love Tenacious D for their TV series, their first album and the Pick Of Destiny movie, including its soundtrack. I didn’t go crazy about their latest record, Rise Of The Fenix, but that’s okay, what can you do? Everybody’s got their ups and downs. For that last one, they got nominated for a Grammy in 2013 for Best Comedy Album and fairly lost to Jimmy Fallon, but anyway, I wouldn’t have ranted about it if they had won.
Tenacious D have just won their first ever Grammy in the Best Metal Performance category for their cover of the Dio song, Last In Line, from the tribute album to the metal god, This Is Your Life.
Yeah, that’s the Grammys alright, the institution thriving on pop music, country-pop music and rap (that is popular) music and loves the big ceremonies with all kinds of celebrities marching on the red carpets, but they got to have a “metal” category, don’t they? Otherwise how would they be ubiquitous and justify their ever-presence? After all they know it all and they’re experts on all kinds of music, aren’t they?
So, the Grammy people sat down when the time came and eventually listened with care and attention to all the worthwhile metal releases of the year and came up with the nominations after some pretty hard thinking: two veteran bands (Anthrax and Motörhead) because they don’t hide behind their fingers and express their tendencies for the oldies, two modern, contemporary bands (Slipknot and Mastodon) because they keep a close eye on the new blood as well (never mind that those two bands emerged for the first time 20 and 15 years ago respectively) and a comedy act (Tenacious D) that appeals to metalheads, provides eccentricity for the category and would make a nice surprise win. So much effort they put in their selection, that two of the five songs nominated come from the same album, a tribute to a late veteran artist that was never awarded a Grammy himself.
Let’s not fool ourselves, the Grammys are all about pop music and/or what’s popular in music. It would have been far more honest from their side if they dropped the categories they’re clueless about. For them putting together a general “metal performance” category seems as hard as if it had been “best drone album of the year” or the “best alien spacecraft in space”, it is something they don’t understand, they don’t care about; they’ll pick whatever they find on the surface and move on to crown the next teen sensation to infiltrate every household in the universe.
ZR