Why I Can’t Quit the Grammys

For music journalists, the Grammys often feel like a chore, and it can be tempting to ignore the annual celebration of music’s one percent altogether. The award show is generally a shameless pageantry of excess, with a notorious track record marked by racism and out-of-touch-ness. But as one of the last monocultural music events we’ve got, the Grammys endure. And, try as I might, I can’t stop watching.

All awards shows—with their shiny trophies, glitter, and stilted presentation speeches—are essentially childish endeavors, and, as a kid, I grew up intently devouring them. I anticipated these purportedly big nights because the Red Carpet Industrial Complex told me to anticipate them. In the months leading up to awards season, I followed the horse races with my highlighted copies of Entertainment Weekly. I was drawn into these galas’ historic sweep and air of authority. Early on in my career as a music journalist, in the 2000s, I started to get paid to tune into the Grammys and offer some thoughts. By that time, I wasn’t so reverent, and generally goofed on the proceedings in live blogs and day-after roundups. In one such piece covering the 2010 Grammys, I was quick to dole out snark like: “Btw Grammys are pretty relevant now—‘grammys’ was one notch ahead of ‘#picofmycock’ on trending topics earlier today.”

That was the tenor of Pitchfork’s coverage when I was hired there in 2009: Why would an independent music website take the Grammys seriously? By the end of my Pitchfork tenure a couple of years ago, the publication was no longer independent, and the staff covered the Grammys with an SEO-driven intensity that rivaled industry rags like Billboard and Variety. Pitchfork needed hits to make money from advertisers, and the Grammys granted that traffic. As a features editor, I tried to encourage a skeptical attitude, sometimes staying up until 3 a.m. after the broadcast to edit and publish an ostensibly fun piece breaking down the night’s highlights and lowlights. The news team, led by Matt Strauss and Evan Minsker, bore the brunt of the thankless work, setting up templates for “Adele Wins Album of the Year”-type stories and then instantly publishing them, one after the other, during the broadcast. Overall, there was something of a Robin Hood mindset at play: If we could squeeze as many hits as possible out of this silly spectacle, it would free us up to cover weirder shit throughout the rest of the year, and help us keep our jobs and our healthcare. The strategy worked until it didn’t, and Pitchfork’s owners, Conde Nast, eventually laid off half the staff, including me.

At Hearing Things, we don’t have to cover the Grammys or anything else that we don’t want to write about. It’s freeing. A reasonable longtime music writer might take that as an invitation to stop watching the Grammys. I’ve definitely considered it. But, perhaps due to a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or because the Grammys have made an effort to diversify their voters (and, by association, their nominations and winners), or because the show has become less stuffy in an attempt to appeal to younger generations, I actually sorta kinda wanted to write about it this year.