“Hey, it’s the Grammys, y’all!”
Who is excited for the Grammys?! Wait–no one? Really? Well that’s too bad, because they are happening anyway, and I am here to give you a sneak-peak/scathing critique of this year’s crop of noise-polluting cultural termites who have singlehandedly kept the FM radio and Rolling Stone on financial life support over the past year.
The Grammys are the way the Music Industry honors their “artists” who excel at making profits or being Irrelevant, or both. I will be highlighting a few categories over the next week in a lead-up to the big night, or until The Impersonals asks me to kindly shut up.
CATEGORY: Record Of The Year
Lonely Boy – The Black Keys
Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) – Kelly Clarkson
We Are Young – Fun. featuring Janelle Monáe
Somebody That I Used to Know – Gotye Featuring Kimbra
Thinkin Bout You – Frank Ocean
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together – Taylor Swift
VS.
CATEGORY: Song of the Year
The A Team – Ed Sheeran
Adorn – Miguel
Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen
Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) – Kelly Clarkson
We Are Young – Fun. featuring Janelle Monáe
Record of the year? Or song of the year? What is the difference? Why are all of the Grammy award category names so purposely vague? Shouldn’t the category be “Most download-able track and/or jam?” (I really don’t think we should be calling some of these things songs.) I am just gonna make an intuitive leap here on behalf of the Academy, and assume that we only need to have one category celebrating the one great song that utterly mesmerized tweens, depressed housewives on Xanax, closeted businessmen and other such target demographics.
We are here to save white people from irrelevancy.
The only people who listen to The Black Keys with any regularity are typically frequent heavy drug users who have damaged their synapses, so that explains how they got included on this list. The Black Keys circa 2013 are the Arcade Fire circa 2011, i.e. formerly “alternative” scene-makers who were deemed by the Industry establishment to be “potentially marketable,” so an effort was made to create the illusion that these are “seminal artists,” because they make these ancient Industry dinosaur labels seem “cool” and “relevant” once more.
Insert your cornhole joke here.
Frank Ocean is riding the gravy train on the same token as The Black Keys, with some added benefits because he has announced he is gay and has proven to be good at generating attention/publicity for himself amongst people who have never heard his songs and have no interest in doing so (such as myself).
Hey, girl.
I will admit I didn’t know who this “Miguel” character is, but based on a quick image search, I am inclined to state the Frank Ocean isn’t the only gay r&b singer nominated in these categories this year. And his Wikipedia fan page doesn’t even have a “Personal Life” section, which is hella suspect. However, I will defer to the black gossip websites on this subject and believe whatever it is they have to say. But I’m gonna go ahead and speculate that gay r&b is a new thing. Maybe this means that John Legend will be able to make himself relevant again!
“It hurts when I pee!” 
Ed Sheeran is another “up and coming” nominee, and he is one these introspective, sensitive male singer-songwriter types. That’s cool if that’s your thing, but I am warning you now that those guys are pretty much always womanizing jerks whose brains are slowly rotting due to untreated venereal disease (see also: John Meyer). By just looking at the photo of Sheeran’s young, tortured face on his album cover, you can totally tell that it burns when he pees. I was quite disappointed to learn that his song “The A-Team” contains zero references to Mr T., not even if you play the song backwards. This will certainly not please voting members of the Academy, many of whom have fallen victim to dementia and truly believe it is still the 1980s.
This all leaves a showdown between the songs that pretty much anyone with a pulse has actually heard. “Call Me Maybe,” by the positively ancient Carley Rae Jepsen, should only win if the Academy is made up entirely of devil-worshipping nine year olds with Radio Disney tattoos. The fact that it is even nominated is embarrassing for everyone.
Insert your fav famous gotye meme here.
“Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye feat. Kimbra is a great message to everyone that even if you are people in a painting, you can still have feelings and write catchy songs about breakups. Same goes for Taylor Swift, except substitute “blow-up doll” for “people in a painting.”
“I think I’m gonna be in this song too, okay?” –Janelle Monae
“We Are Young,” by the annoyingly-named Fun., is a cute advertisement for the reckless abandon of Generation YOLO by a group lead by a man who is anything but young. And I want to caution everyone who thinks it’s okay to “Set the night on fire” to remember what happened recently at that nightclub in Brazil. But both Carley Rae and Nate Reuss are examples of people born in the early 80s who became youth cultural breakout sensations, so I’m gonna have to support that concept, since none of us is getting any younger. Meanwhile, I’m not sure how Janelle Monae figured out a way to convince anyone it made sense for her to be featured on this track, but I guess if you wear a suit 24/7 people will just assume you know what you’re talking about when it comes to business.
Your chick she so thirsty.
And I really respect Kelly Clarkson (the girl can hold her bourbon!) but “Stronger” is sooo boring, I feel like she just got loaded one night and opened a dictionary of clichés with her eyes shut and just wrote a hit single about the first one her finger landed on. But a lot of tweens are “going through some shit,” and the song really resonates with them and their parents’ money, so it does have that going for it.
So, who will win? Who should win? Who even cares? I guess if somebody held a gun to my head and forced me to care about who wins Grammys for a second, I would wish that Taylor Swift gets the award—only so she could do another one of her fake-surprise faces. Everyone is getting bored of all of the old gif’s.
“This is even more shocking than my recent breakup!”
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