How is it that we get sucked into this thing every year? Each time after the next there’s always a shared interpersonal struggle with the world about the Grammy Awards and its relevance to the industry. We often spend the rest of our 364 days toiling and complaining about this artist or that one, and try to understand the madness behind why some songs garner the most popularity while other options should instead hold their revered place.

Whine, whine, whine – it’s all we do and that’s all we hear. Heck you Grammys. Heck you and your perfectly placed time slot between important football games.

But if you really want to know how we feel, here’s this:

Jay Z and Beyoncé are both terrible for the overall industry. Please understand that. We certainly don’t want to discredit the work ethic or ability to entertain people from either of these front-runners; but what listeners have to understand is that there aren’t two people creating everything we see. There are hundreds, if not thousands of middle men and women in the background creating their iconic images to sell. As we saw in Jay’s “Made In America” documentary, he now simply walks in to a studio, listens to a snippet of a beat, and shells out money to use it. To us, that’s not holding artistic merit and takes away from other artists who spend years perfecting a tune only to be drenched by the oversaturation of half-assed content.

And if you think these high profile matches happen at random because of some arbitrary notion of fate and crossing stars, you need to tweak your gullibility meter a tad bit back to the rationality side. Public relations directors have and do make sure that certain celebrities are at the same functions often and heavily introduce a probable power-couple to increase the odds of a relationship. It makes for good publicity and we’re not going to say one way or another what we think about these two being hitched, but, come on, think about it a little. It definitely doesn’t hurt either of their images now being a powerful family unit.

We’d also like to say that the worst part of the night happened within the first three and a half minutes. Jay Z reciting the lyrics “I’m like Ike Turner, eat the cake Anna Mae” while lovingly walking towards his Boo- yoncé is an inexcusable doozy. The line of course is in reference to the time Ike Turner beat the shit out of Tina Turner, whose real name was Anna Mae. There’s something about the Grammys that always brings out the domestic violence in people.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis made statements on top of statements: The night’s wildest card in the mix was easily the hip hop duo of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Independent as a seagull in Vegas, the duo landed four awards from their seven nominations – all while still never signing to a major label. That alone is a small glimpse into the possibilities of the future industry, but the statements didn’t stop there.

Queen Latifah marrying over 30 mix’n’matched couples in the crowd during the performance of “Same Love” had to have been one of the Grammy’s finest moments. They could have done without Had-A-Little-Work-Done Madonna – who was overshadowed profusely by the outrageously stunning Mary Lambert – but it’s the Grammys and any chance to throw up age on stage is fair game. But, we’ll get to that later.

Katy Perry continued to burn away her likeability and witches: Our main girl KP caught some serious Twit Talking (that’s shit talking on Twitter) about her American Music Awards performance back in November when she dressed like a hybrid geisha. People were calling for her head because of the notion she was appropriating a culture and her using it seemed just as bad as blackface, if not worse.

We don’t know about all that; but it would have seemed that her performance last night would have made just as big of an outrage considering she dressed herself up like a witch and ended up burning herself at a stake. No? People aren’t mad about that? Because it happened in history, and innocent women lived a life of hell on earth because of imaginary rationale. Oh people of Twitter, you so clueless and cray cray!

Jamie Foxx has a head tattoo? Yup, he does – we proceeded to hit up the Google machine as soon as we saw his stoned ass give away the award for Best Rap / Sung Collaboration to Jay Z and JT. There’s really nothing to report from said Googler, other than some people think it was to celebrate his 40th birthday and others think that it’s to cover up a scar from a hair transplant. To us it looks like a crappy tribal that may or may not have been done by the same person who brought the world Mike Tyson’s embarrassing facial work. Even though some of us have tribal tattoos here in the office, we get away with saying ‘ewww’ because we feel his pain. Also, we got them in the 90s – and they were totally fine in the 90s. Everything was fine in the 90s.

The Kendrick Lamar / Imagine Dragons performance won the night: By far the best performance of the night was the formidable mashup between Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons. The intensity of Lamar’s stage presence glimmered in perfect compliment to Imagine Dragons anthemic arena rock. This collaboration was diamond status and watching everyone get pelted in the face with color dust made it all that much more fun to watch. Side note: color dust to the face good, white dust up the nose bad, mmmk?

Lang Lang (pronounced long long) is the world’s greatest heavy metal pianist. Your argument is invalid. That’s it.


Age does not the best performances make: As we said before, any and all opportunities are taken at the Grammys to get legendary alliances on stage for never before seen, one of a kind performances. That’s great, really, but does anyone else think that the head of these idea round tables need be shot? Alright, not shot that’s mean, but fired?

It was a terrible idea to put Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson on stage together. Let the legend of each of these men speak for itself in history – don’t try and squeeze something out of a dry sponge. The combined age of the three country stars is 233 years old. Was there no light somewhere that blinked saying, “hey, they may not be as good as they were in their prime, maybe this isn’t a great idea.” We were embarrassed for each of them and it seemed more like a self-fulfilling parade for the Grammys than it did a high point in any of their careers.

As far as the awards… Daft Punk dominated, Lorde will be BFFs with all other women in music because they’re afraid of her and Kanye was a no-show. Musical high rollers the likes of Rihanna, Adele, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga were also nowhere to be found. Except for Miley, she was found on Instagram playing Guitar Hero – naturally. We’re not sure if this is a statement to the award or if it’s just lack of sincere interest in some of the artists. Either way we kind of secretly agree with them– lots of hubbub for little output. But it was a football-less Sunday and our options were limited.

Until next year – we suppose?

Oh right, and we almost forgot to mention: Trent Reznor is a sad panda because the awards ran long and the network ended up cutting his final performance with Queens of The Stone Age, Dave Grohl and LIndsey Buckingham short. Oops.