Not My Grammies

NOTE: This is an essay I wrote a few years ago, after watching the Grammy show on TV and pondering the fact that I and my music have become, shall we say, irrelevant. Some of the events and names are dated, but I think you’ll get the idea. Substitute the dated stuff for your own favorite new stars and songs. As time goes on I expect to remain lost in the maze of modern music, so I’m reprinting this here, as some day I’ll probably withdraw my entire online musical persona into this site.

I’m a songwriter and musician, but my chances of ever getting near a Grammy award are zero. My time is past. I think and work in a musical style that is foreign to Grammy voters and modern music listeners. As I was settling into this condition, starting in the mid eighties, I guess, I was still working in the music biz, so I had to at least try to keep up, even if what I was hearing held little emotional appeal for me. I worried about being left behind, becoming irrelevant. I thought rap and hip hop would take their places as minor genres, followed only by fanatics who didn’t care about the mainstream. But instead what happened is it became the mainstream, which basically locked me out for good. I don’t feel it, and as a result I don’t care about it.

And so of course, now I am irrelevant.

I could — and I have — complained about the condition of modern pop music. I could say, as my mom did many years ago about what I was listening to then, that it’s not even music. I could make the case that you can create rap and hip hop and win awards without singing or learning anything about music theory or structure; without learning to play an instrument or even hiring somebody to play on your track. I could say there’s no playing on a hip hop record, or if there is it’s a piece of playing digitally sampled from somebody else’s record, probably recorded 20 or more years ago, when musicianship was still a thing.

To me, R&B is Motown, Barbara Lewis, Jackie Wilson, Ike and Tina, Otis Redding, The Marvelettes, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and others like them: soulful, powerful and musical. In the 1950s and 60s these great artists, along with Chuck Berry and his followers, overflowed the boundaries of “race radio” and poured into the world of rock’n’roll, pollinating it and becoming the spiritual parents of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Surely we would never have heard of Huey Lewis if we hadn’t first experienced Huey “Piano” Smith.

In fact, today’s rappers and hip hop performers are also the descendants of those R&B pioneers. I know it, but I don’t feel it. As with every new generation, there’s an element of pissing off old folks involved here. They know they’re on to something that I don’t get, and they’re rubbing my nose in it. I did the same thing myself, musically and in other ways when I was 20. Since I don’t get it, though, I won’t pretend it’s about me or my Boomer generation.

My songs are dated, as I am, but before many rappers and hip hoppers were born I had embraced digital technology and was producing my own recordings in my home. Ironically, it’s the same technology that allows today’s youth to make beats and rap over them in their bedrooms and record their epics in glorious high-quality digital formats, and it’s probably been a major impetus in the flowering of an art form that I can’t get into and just plain don’t understand.

Enjoy your honors, Bruno and Kendrick and Ed Sheeran, and all the best to you. But don’t look back, because somebody’s probably gaining on you.