What's Wrong with the Grammys

By Jay Cocks.

Bad timing. And with the big show ready to air this week too.

Here is the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, diligently trying to add greater luster and further lucre to the music biz by modernizing the Grammy Awards and trying to slip them into some semblance of synch with contemporary taste. It took NARAS until 1979 to give rock its own category, but lately it has cooked up a slot for everything from rap to New Age.

Now maybe hipsters will stop calling the show the "Granny Awards." But still present -- they won't go away -- are the unsavory reverberations of Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, the two Audio-Animatrons who were supposed to be Milli Vanilli but weren't, and had to surrender their 1989 Best New Artist Grammy. Very embarrassing.

But maybe not as embarrassing as Sinead O'Connor, nominated for four gold statuettes, boycotting the Grammy ceremony. She doesn't want to be part of the show, which will be aired live at 8 p.m. EST this Wednesday on CBS, and she won't accept her Grammys if she wins them. Such awards, she informed NARAS president Michael Greene, "respect mostly material gain, since that is the main reason for their existence."

O'Connor, 24, is one of the most gifted young rockers around, and it is awkward to have someone of her talent and exuberance tell the music business to stuff its highest award. "I don't agree with her rationale," says Joe Smith, president of Capitol-EMI Music, which is affiliated with O'Connor's record label, Chrysalis. "If Sinead doesn't like these shows, then that's her opinion. They get good ratings. This is not the International Red Cross."

Nor is it the Oscars, Emmys or Tonys. Among the Big Four show-biz awards, the Grammys have the most unfortunate reputation for often making saccharine choices that toady shamelessly to the marketplace. The past winners have included such unremarkable talents as Debby Boone and Toto. With the latest snafus, NARAS president Greene has been busy defending and explaining how members cast their lot for a total of 77 awards in 27 different fields. "It's a very complicated process," Greene admits. "It's too damn complicated. I don't know if God intended music to be classified."

The voting is egalitarian, but that may be one of its problems. Last summer NARAS sent a form to each of its 8,000 members and to executives at the major record companies soliciting nominations for recordings released during the 12 | months ending last Sept. 30. Each member -- including singers, songwriters, album-cover designers, engineers and producers -- is allowed to recommend up to five candidates in each award category. That list becomes the ballot that is mailed out to the 6,000 members eligible to vote.

Members can vote in as many as nine of the 27 fields, and everyone can vote on the four key Grammys (Record, Song and Album of the Year, and Best New Artist). Members are, however, encouraged to vote only in areas where they feel qualified. "I'll vote in pop and rock categories," says songwriter Diane Warren (who wrote Milli Vanilli's Blame It on the Rain). "But when it comes to the Best Polka Song category, I don't vote in that one."

Not everyone shares that compunction, and there is no system of checks to make sure, for example, that Itzhak Perlman isn't putting his mark beside Motley Crue's Kickstart My Heart. "I don't like the idea of having the freedom to vote in areas outside your expertise," says Ken Barnes of the trade publication Radio & Records. The system seems to give the advantage to more widely publicized, commercially accepted acts. "If you don't sell, you don't have a chance at winning," says rock critic Dave Marsh. "But if you do sell, it doesn't guarantee winning."

Not even greatness guarantees that, especially for artists ahead of their time. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Little Richard, Sonny Rollins, the Talking Heads, the Supremes and the Who never got a single piece of Grammy gold. Some of Grammy's greatest hitters are heavy-duty worthies (Aretha Franklin has copped 15, Stevie Wonder 17), but it's also true, as Marsh points out, that "no one thinks that the Grammys honor artistry. People like Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen and Phil Spector have all been disrespected by the Grammys, and so people don't take the awards seriously."

Then what does that Grammy, a little gold-plated Gramophone on a pedestal, represent? A souvenir of a TV extravaganza. A talisman of mainstream commercial success. A bit of show-biz immortality that, since this is show biz, after all, is more tenuous and suspect than other varieties of eternal fame (anyone remember 1980's five-Grammy grand slammer Christopher Cross?). Sinead O'Connor is right: the Grammys probably do "respect mostly material gain." But in the words of a very prominent Grammy wanna-grab, we're living in a material world.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and Janice C. Simpson/New York