Notes

Little substance in the Grammy Awards this year (and many others). I don't see much interest in who's receiving awards. Let's see....Lorde, Taylor Swift, Imagine Dragons, Robin Thicke, Katy Perry, Lana Del Ray, Jay-Z and so on.

While electronic dance music/rap/EDM/dubstep/alternative etc has taken over the charts this year, what the Grammy Awards fail to realise with people who actually love music - aka listen to full records, love the old and some new music, see the album as an album and not just a 'dip' of mindless generic noise - have been listening to this kind of stuff for ages, because we seek it out, we don't wait for the hype or the 'oh my god it's the greatest music ever!!!. Because we, the ones who listen to music and understand it, not for the profit/chart positions/hype it procures (I'll get to that in a moment) have been listening to alternative music for ages. These people, the ones who choose the awards, the ones who sit in the audience pretending to 'rock out' to electronic music, the ones who only know one song from would-be decent artists (very few) on the payola roll - don't get music and they never will.

Who remembers Robert Miles? Early Paul Oakenfield? Brainbug? Enigma? Four artists (in the very sense of the word). Look those up and tell me today's 'mainstream EDM/electronica' compares. It doesn't. And it never will. Why? Because innovation no longer counts in a world of coal and prostitution.

John Kalodner, the A&R representative since retired was talking about how online services will ruin music. He was half-right. It's been dumbed down to the nth degree, but it's given listeners and lovers of true music more choice. So when a record executive - or the scum that is the RIAA - says online music and file sharing (P2P, torrents...etc) is ruining music, they haven't taken a look at themselves. And then they have the nerve to say the Grammy Awards is 'music's night of nights'. Sure it is, if you're an idiot that doesn't get music or a record executive that lives off the almighty dollar and don't care about actual talent.

Let's see. Remember Sinead O'Connor? Her performance on Saturday Night Live in, was it 1991 or 1992? If you don't, look it up on YouTube. She was slammed to hell and back for that. 'Oh her career is over'. 'She's nothing but dirty scum'. Exposing the REAL issues while Miley Cyrus exposes her breasts on TV and shows basically soft-porn. Amazing how she'll get away with that and people lap it up. Yet a woman, who was serious and knew the issues (until Madonna jumped on board and said 'how dare she do this', not forgetting her own performances against the Vatican in later tours - nobody takes Madonna for what she did) was derided for this. See how hypocritical the media and the music 'business' (it's a business, not a grounds for anything else but that) can be. Sad.

As for this Lorde character, sure the song (Royals) might resonate but for me, I don't see resonance in it. I see it, in a year, as forgotten. She's been called 'alternative', 'edgy', 'mind-blowing' and yet when Kate Bush did this; whether she won an award or not, I don't know - was called 'a freak'. How tastes have changed. Think of all the great artists that have been called nasty words over the years and yet this Lorde, who is an obvious one-hit wonder (even though her new song may be at 11 million hits from YouTube) - is hailed as some sensation. Get off the damn pot.

And that brings me to payola. All those artists who won awards - they're not awards, they are masturbatory piles of dirty profit bought about by dirty hands past their time - have been played on various pop radio stations and promoted online (Amazon, Spotify, iTunes etc etc, you name it) - have been played so very much you wonder how much of a payola there is - even though I've read (obviously false) statements by 'various sources' that it doesn't exist - you can't tell me, with the saturation of these 'songs' (like reality TV shows) that there isn't a payoff. It's the same question of wondering how does Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton continue to exist in such a spotlight. Easy - dirty payola and mass media consumption has done this, and the masses are fed it like pigs. In the land of the pig, the butcher is king.

Speaking of music, where was the rock this year? Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Grohl, Sabbath (well, 3/4 of Sabbath), Steven Tyler, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr - was that all there was? In other years you'd get more than that. Shows how far music has fallen when standard looped beats and cheesy synthesiser loops are the order of the day. The mainstream was pretty bad before but now it's just....dead in the water. As Trent Reznor said back in 2000, rock is 'having a case of the blands' - and hardly anyone who was in the mass media (look up an interview from 2000 with him called 'Fragility' and watch the interviewer - who clearly doesn't get it) understood the angst, the true depression, the fear, the ache, the dark, the deep, the brooding and the frightened on 1999's The Fragile (which by the way is a masterpiece) - 'oh it's not The Downward Spiral, it's not as innovative'. Yet people have the nerve to call bands such as Imagine Dragons and Mumford And Sons (who will be missed by everyone said no-one) innovative rock music, and that's all you can give rock music credit for. 'The Fragile', dismissed. Imagine Dragons, revered.

There's no fear, no angst, no anger, no ache in those 'songs'. They're mass crap for mass idiocy consumption.

I've nothing against quality pop music. But when it's the same old being recognised for being 'ground breaking', you have to wonder, who's deciding this and giving it this recognition of something that it doesn't deserve, let alone even sound, to be.

Shame on the Grammy Awards for recognising noise that isn't music.