The Grammys is or are an annual ceremony held in America that allegedly recognises and rewards the best musicians of that year. Stars from various genres, pop mostly, but also jazz, classical, “world music” (which is basically music that isn’t made in the American format) spend a month vying for the attention, affection and approval of a mysterious cabal of oracles known as the “Recording Academy”, and this culminates in a three-hour ceremony in a very expensive room where the academy members reveal their votes and who they think is the best, the coolest, the cleverest, et cetera — at this ceremony, the Annual Grammy Awards. On paper it says they have found the best music of the year and made a definitive list. Off paper, in reality, here where we all live, they pretty much just farted on the back of a garbage truck. When you work on garbage truck, the place already smells bad. There is rotting food, decomposing trash, hidden body parts and other rubbish all over the place. I was a senior offload engineer at Africa United Sanitation Services when one of my supervisors, name withheld, once let out a long and loud fart. We all heard it. But none of us smelled it. Even the flies could not be bothered by it. We were, however, offended by the disrespect of the act. One should not fart in the workplace: it is bad manners. Farting among your staff is an act with moral significance, even though it has little actual impact in the greater context. Thus it is with the Grammys. Yes, like Josiah farting, they expressed what they felt inside, yes, they uttered forth a message, and their peers and colleagues in the industry made a huge deal about it, but really, ultimately, it makes no difference. One of the reasons is that there is no such thing as the best music in the world, man. You cannot measure music. There is no funkometer, there is no dope-o-scope by which we can objectively determine that Billie Eilish’s We All Fall Asleep was “more musicy” than Ariana Grande’s Thank You, Next. We don’t have any scales or measuring machines or Hadron Colliders. All we have is ears. Ultimately this is the only way we can gauge musical quality. You put it in your ears and wait. If the bum starts moving, then that indicates a good song. If the head starts jerking, that indicates a good hip hop song. If the fingers start snapping, a good jazz song. If the eyes start watering and the hand reaches for the smartphone and sends messages to the ex-lover to apologise for the way you acted when they cheated on you, that means a very, very, very good soul song. Mary J and Aretha and Alicia Keys and Solange? They throw you into emotions you don’t understand. Handle their music with care. But here is the trick: not all ears-bums configurations will produce the same result. For example, my team and I listened to Billie Eilish for two hours as research for this article and, while I will never ever begrudge or attempt to deny anyone their free right to love and enjoy Eilish music, to me, as myself, being Bazanye, no and nothing. I was impacted more by the fart on the garbage truck. The problem is that I am middle-aged and have experience working in the music industry, so if it wasn’t for travel bans and, not even wanting to go to his stupid America anyway, Africa Forever, etc., I would probably have a better chance than my Billie Eilish-loving staff of joining the Recording Academy and voting on whether she made good music or not. And I would obviously vote not. These kids were going crazy: JJ was screaming along to the chorus, Prunella was twerking, Rodney found a way to mix dabbing with the electric slide, and they were in ecstasy. But me? I couldn’t feel less moved by a sound if it was a podcast about breeding habits of snails. This is how we end up with a tradition as infamous as the Grammys are famous: the Grammy snub. Every year, after the Grammys announce their list of what they think is the best, other lists come out, enumerating who was missed. What about so and so, what about this and that, where is ‘nani’? Is it because the voters got Taylor and Tyler confused that they just decided not to vote for either? Each year the Grammys purport to definitively list the best music and each year they fail to do so. Or to put it simply, that is why the Grammys are a fart on a garbage truck.
