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How Are People Like Halsey and The Weeknd Still So Pressed About The Grammys

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel were both nominated for a Grammy award for Best Male Vocal Performance. The fact that Billy Joel won should have told everyone forever that the Grammys were a joke but still, people think there must be some conspiracy as to why the Grammys get everything so wrong.

The Weeknd called the Grammys “corrupt” in response to his snub.

Halsey made a post claiming the Grammys were given out based on bribes and nepotism and giving networks exclusive performances which sounds a lot like The Golden Globes.

And Blind Gossip suggests BTS thinks racism is behind their snub, what with them being the biggest band in the world and not getting a single nomination in a major category.

But the truth has been in front of us all along and that truth is that the people who vote for the Grammys are old people who cannot grasp the cultural relevance of music until years after the fact.

Let’s look at the Grammy history of Nirvana, the greatest, most influential rock band of all time. Surely Nirvana won Album of the Year for Nevermind, widely considered to be the greatest rock album of all time, right? Nope. In 1992, the year Nevermind was eligible for a Grammy, Album of the Year went to Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable… With Love, the album of Nat King Cole covers your spinster aunt wanted for Christmas that year.

Okay, but it had to have won Best Alternative Music Album, right? Alternative rock as a genre was basically defined as “stuff that sounds like Nirvana,” so they had to win that, right? Nope, they were nominated but lost to R.E.M.’s Out of Time, which is a good album but not better than Nevermind.

Nirvana didn’t win a Grammy until 1996, 22 months after Kurt Cobain’s “suicide,” when they got Best Alternative Music Performance for Unplugged in New York, which wasn’t even nominated for Album of the Year, which went to Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill. Anyone who was a teenager in 1996 that can remember what they thought about those two albums and what their mom thought about them at the time will know exactly why the Grammys go the way they go.

But let’s look at one more band that created an entire genre of music, Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was nominated for six Grammy Awards while they were active: Best New Artist in 1970 and then five nominations for Best Recording Package. They won none of these awards. One of the most influential bands in history never had a single song or album nominated for a Grammy.

But Led Zeppelin has won a Grammy. They got several Grammy Hall of Fame awards, but they won an honest-to-God Grammy for Best Rock Performance in 2014, only 34 years after they had permanently disbanded following John Bohnam’s death. The Grammy was for Celebration Day, a recording of a reunion concert the remaining band members had performed seven years earlier in memory of Ahmet Ertegun.

See, when Led Zeppelin was the biggest band on the planet, the old people who vote for the Grammys gave the awards to Carole King and Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon. Only once the old people who vote for Grammys were replaced by old people who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin did they actually win.

See, there’s no conspiracy, there’s no corruption… it’s just that awards show voters are the most out of touch people in the world, and that’s especially true when it comes to music.

Whatever album does win Album of the Year this year, I’ll bet your mom loves it.

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