The Relevance of the Grammy's

I watched the 58th Annual Grammy Awards last night (and tweeted quite a bit of it) but I couldn't help but feel struck by a feeling of irrelevance as I watched it. My knee jerk reaction was to think 'this could not matter less' and - in the grand scheme - it clearly doesn't matter. But was it a bad awards show? It did it's best to appeal to a wide range of audiences by having performances by Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, The Eagles, Lady Gaga doing a Bowie tribute, Beiber, Alabama Shakes, Hollywood Vampires and even Pitbull. That's a wide swath of interests!

So why did it feel so out of touch? Possibly for the exact same reasons - it appealed to such a wide swath. It's always felt ridiculous to pick "Album of the Year" when there are thousands of records getting zero nods. It's an echo chamber for a handful of artists and in a world where there's so much music available for so many tastes, it feels too insular. At least that's how it feels as someone who Internets all day.

In the end, we do get this explosive Kendrick Lamar performance and that makes up for the three and a half hours of slog that surrounded it. It's clear that Lamar was the only artist that really had a message or anything to actually say at all, an attribute that every other performance was lacking.