All I care about is love*

Some random musings on the Grammys:

Well, the 2013 Grammy nominations are out. Yawn.

Kelly Clarkson seems to have done well; Taylor Swift, not as much.

Bruce Springsteen is still getting nominations in the Rock category? Impressive.

It's telling about our society when two of the "best" rap song nominees have to be referred to by more asterisks than letters.  Hmm. The industry won't print the titles but they have no problem producing the albums and making money off of it.

Why don't they just change the name "best spoken word album" to "best drooling liberal blather" and be done with it? It'd certainly be more honest. In case you think I've slipped off the rails on this one: Recent winners include Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.  This year's nominees? Michele Obama, Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres, and Janis Ian** (?).  Political nonsensibilities aside, they really need to get rid of this most self-indulgent of categories.  I checked out the entire list of winners in this category.  In the early days we saw luminaries like Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Orson Welles, and William Warfield, not reciting their own writing but that of others (Performances of Copland's A Lincoln Portrait won twice, and even Leonard Bernstein won for an album entitled Humor in Music.) Great literature has been replaced by self-important political screeds in this category.  I'd probably feel the same way if they were conservative.  No, really.  Dump the category already, or at least present a nominees list that doesn't slant farther left than the post-iceberg Titanic.

I don't know why, but you have to go past "best album notes", producer of the year, and best long form music video (don't they call those MOVIES?) to get to what's left of the classical categories.  I have to say it's nice to see new nominees in those categories, though.  Now if they'd only include these performances on the broadcast.  Honest to God, the last classical performance I remember at the Grammys was Evgeny Kissgin (sp?), who played the snot out of a Chopin piece, followed by Whoopi Goldberg intoning "that was exquisite" with all the spirit of placing an order at the dry cleaners.

I had a couple of interruptions to completing my management final tonight--I had to go get a shirt for Daniel Jr. for his performance tomorrow, and I am about to return to hand-copying some music for a rehearsal tomorrow.  Orchestral management is going to get a separate post, post-concert and final exams.  It won't be pretty. 

Cheers.

*--John Kander and Fred Ebb, from the musical Chicago, 1975.
**no nasty letters please, I LOVE Ms. Ian's music as do you if you're considering hate mail.