The Grammy's See No Difference Between Hard Rock And Metal
In a press release on Wednesday, The Recording Academy, the painfully out of touch people responsible for doling out the culturally irrelevant Grammy awards, reduced the number of total awards to be given out in 2012 from 109 to 78. Though this matters little, I found one detail particularly telling of The Recording Academy’s continued and growing failure to connect to culturally important music: in 2012, the categories of Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Metal Performance will be combined to form the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. What an innovative title!
This coming at a time when metal continues to grow in popularity and in artistic complexity. With the popularity and excellence of American bands like Mastodon, High on Fire, and Agalloch (whose Marrow of the Spirit was even named to NPR’s best 50 albums of 2010), to name a tiny sampling, isn’t it time that metal deserved more recognition and distinction instead of being bound to such a general category of “Hard Rock”? I suppose not to the insensitive ears of the delusional and self-important Recording Academy, whose failures to grasp distinctions in genres and to reward excellence discourages innovation and cultural understanding. Though I hate to even give the Grammy awards that much credit, the broadcast does reach a large television audience that could be turned on to music outside the mainstream—if the show were to feature it.
50 bucks says Metallica or Nickleback win it next year.
