The Grammys need to be a compelling advertisement for recorded music.

How musicians can win in the modern attention economy.

To follow up my last post and the questions readers have sent me since: Yes, I watched the Grammys and I had a few thoughts.

Worry, be sad

Tracy Chapman’s performance of “Fast Car” with Luke Combs was the highlight of the 2024 Grammy Awards, and she seemed genuinely moved by the overwhelming crowd (and social media) response inspired by her return to the stage. For a show that’s desperately tried to manufacture “Grammy moments” over the years, Luke Combs delivered something that worked because it was so heartfelt.

Unfortunately for me, I have a long memory and, while I enjoyed the performance, I was mostly thinking about the 1989 Grammys, a ceremony where “Fast Car” was nominated for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

It lost to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Sure that novelty record went to #1 for two weeks, but it barely made it into the Top 40 chart on the year-end Billboard ranking of singles released in 1988. McFerrin has made a lot of good records, but “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is not one of them.

Maybe the Grammy voters were dazzled by the technical prowess of McFerrin’s vocal performance and wowed that he took an a cappella song to #1, but Tracy Chapman’s world-changing masterwork was staring them right in the face as they marked their paper ballots.

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is a terrible, terrible record. Like “Macarena” bad, an earworm that gets exponentially more annoying the more times you hear it. “Fast Car” was everything the Grammys are supposed to celebrate, an accomplished song by an emerging artist that also happened to be a massive hit.

Bobby McFerrin would be more celebrated today if “Don’t Worry” was a footnote, the freak #1 single in an otherwise impressive body of work. Instead, it’s an albatross that tars his legacy.

And Grammy voters said “Fast Car” wasn’t as deserving.

Low YoYo Stuff Records in Athens, GA has an excellent selection of Grammy-nominated albums on vinyl.

Musicians to the front

Trevor Noah was smart, funny, and consistently entertaining as host of The Daily Show. His book Born a Crime is a classic memoir that’s both hilarious and moving. So why is he such a terrible Grammy host? He comes off like a cut-rate hype man, desperately trying to convince us carnival goers that it’s okay to spend our quarters on whatever’s behind the Recording Academy tent.

I have to believe that he’s not in charge of his own script. Is it interference from CBS suits who don’t really think music and musicians have enough star power on their own to attract an audience? Or it the Recording Academy so nervous that they think repeating the idea that this is “music’s biggest night” over and over will make that wish come true?

Public Service Announcement: Music’s biggest night is always tonight, because music is the lifeblood of the party and everyday life and those private nights of reflection. The next record you play is always going to be the best one. Music has an emotional power that neither sports nor movies can match. Music is magic. There’s a reason that actors are so desperate to be rock stars and so few rock stars care about becoming actors.

I’d much rather see a ceremony hosted by musicians who were allowed to speak in their own voices and share their unfiltered magic. Here are a dozen host ideas I came up with off the top of my head: Dave Grohl, Questlove, Brandi Carlile, Michael Bublé, Josh Groban, Dwight Yoakam, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott, Lisa Loeb, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, and Jay-Z.

All of them have charisma and they’re all Grammy winners. Mix and match if you want them to work in pairs. That list was free. If anyone at the network wants to pay my consulting fee, I’d be happy to come up with a few more suggestions.

Show some regret

I lost count of how many times that Trevor Noah and the CBS announcer hyped the FIRST-EVER live performance by Joni Mitchell at a Grammy ceremony.

Is that really something they want to point out? You had never invited one of the most important songwriters of her era to perform at the Grammy Award ceremony. Also, there were zero nominations for Blue, the 1971 album that a lot of people I know consider the best ever made. These are facts that should inspire a bit of shame and self-reflection. Yelling that you finally got things right after nearly 50 years of disrespect is not a winning strategy.

We should all celebrate that fact that Joni Mitchell has been able to return to performing after some devastating health issues, and she deserves the recognition. I’m just sorry that millions of viewers who’ve never heard of her before were denied a chance to see her in her prime.

Chemistry class

People love U2. They made some of the most important records of the ’80s and ’90s and that goodwill hasn’t gone away despite some ill-advised career choices in the 21st century (see: that forced iTunes release and a new album released less than a year ago that most of you can’t name).

Since last fall, U2 has been the house band at the Sphere, a new $2.3 billion video dome in Las Vegas. They even released a new single in September to hype the shows. They called it “Atomic City,” because there’s nothing more exciting than hitting a nail directly on the head. Subtlety is a young man’s game.

Did you know that U2 released a new single in September? The suits at CBS are pretty sure you didn’t, because the Grammy Awards kept hyping the fact that the band was set to perform their new single live from the Sphere in what promised to be a revolutionary performance.

I’ve talked to people who’ve attended shows at the Sphere, and they’ve been uniformly impressed by the immersive experience that concert hall creates. Unfortunately, that experience doesn’t translate in a 2D movie version. Kids who have never heard of U2 were treated to a swirling and confusing bit of non-Grammy theater.

Aside from an inferior U2 song and an incomprehensible performance, there was an even more uncomfortable truth. Like many bands who grew up together and learned to play their instruments as a combo, swapping out a member destroyed the U2 ecosystem.

The official line is that Larry Mullen, Jr. is not performing on the Vegas dates because he’s recovering from a medical procedure, but there’s constant talk in my circles that he’s decided to quit the band and U2 just hasn’t admitted it yet.

Based on the one song we saw on TV, Bram van den Berg is an accomplished drummer. But he’s not Larry, and the alchemy that happens when Adam, Edge, and Larry play together can’t be recreated with a ringer.

Not every group is so dependent on a particular combination of musicians, but some of the most revered rock bands in history are all about what happens when a specific combination of players perform together.

I’m sure the Sphere co-promotion looked great on paper during the advance meetings, but a better production team would have stepped in and pointed out these issues before they went ahead with the U2 mistake.

Quality control division

There’s a delicate balance between respecting the artists in your organization, adding marquee names to the performer list, and putting on a show that’s going to win over those once-a-year viewers.

I understand why Billy Joel fans are excited that he released his first single in over 30 years on the Friday before the Grammys, and the record itself isn’t bad if not exactly up to the artist’s notoriously strict standards for his work.

However, a quick glance at the lyrics to “Turn the Lights Back On” could have offered a clue about how Joel’s performance would go. It’s a song about an artist who’s unsure if he’s got anything left in the tank. When your chorus resolves on “Did I wait too long to turn the lights back on?,” you’re making your attitude pretty fucking clear.

Joel seemed exhausted onstage. When he plays an arena show for his devoted fans, I’m sure they bring enough energy to buoy him through a performance and send everyone home happy. A television broadcast will millions of viewers who weren’t even born the last time you released an album is a much more difficult crowd to conquer.

Again, this is a scenario the folks in charge of the show should have seen coming.

Co-sign

In my “How I got booted as a Grammy voter” post, I used nearly 3,000 words to point out that Beyoncé had repeatedly been robbed in the Album of the Year category.

Jay-Z, who received the Dr. Dre Global Impact lifetime achievement award at the ceremony, made the same point far more directly in less than 75 words in his acceptance speech:

"We love y'all. We want y'all to get it right. I don't want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than anyone and never won album of the year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn't work. Think about that. Most Grammys, never won album of the year. Some of you may get robbed. Some of you don't belong in the category. When I get nervous, I tell the truth."

That was aimed at the voters in the room, the voters watching at home, and even at the ex-voters like me.

Better than you can

I’ll confess that I’d never paid attention to Miley Cyrus’ wine bar divorce anthem “Flowers” until she performed it during the ceremony, but I knew right away that it was going to win Record of the Year.

The original plan was that I was going to spend a couple of hundred words explaining why I think this song won’t have the lasting impact that some of the other nominees will have, but I had a couple of conversations with people yesterday that convinced me that, while this one might not be as much of an all-timer as “Wrecking Ball,” people love “Flowers.”

If the Recording Academy wants to play by its own rules and champion a particular vision of what constitutes awards-worthy music, then a live broadcast on CBS isn’t the place to do that. The Grammy organization depends on that annual network check for its survival, so moving the Grammy Awards to YouTube or a streaming service won’t be a viable option.

Management has to appease a large group of voters who don’t want to embrace a mainstream platform, so the organization wastes this once-a-year opportunity to highlight the recording industry for an apathetic audience.

Focus on hits and ditch the world premiere songs because too many of them turn out to be stiffs. Make an effort to feature artists who are still at the height of cultural relevance. Stop nominating (and giving major awards!) to performers that no one besides Grammy voters cared about the day before the ceremony and will promptly forget the day after. There are plenty of high-profile artists creating work that’s worthy of Grammy attention.

There’s a lot of competition in the modern attention economy, and the Grammys need to be a show that offers a series of undeniable performances to win over the casual viewer. That would require putting the broadcast in the hands of a seasoned producer who would keep the focus and have the insight to put a stop to bad ideas before they ended up on air.

Some of you are going to think the Grammy awards are a lame exercise no matter what they do to improve, and that’s mostly because you’re inside a music fandom that doesn’t align with the mainstream tastes the Grammys should aim to satisfy.

We’ll all benefit from a world where music is more popular than it is now. Reel in a few million doubters, and there will be a subset of new listeners who keep digging and eventually support more adventurous and less mainstream artists.

I could have written something like this at almost any point over the past six decades, but there’s always hope. The Grammys are much better than they were in 1984, so you can’t say things will never get better. Fingers crossed for the future.

8-track of the day

Only one of these Superstars has been nominated for any Grammy awards.