February 5, 2024: People mock the Grammies. People grumble about the Grammies. People ignore the Grammies. I don’t blame them for any of that. This morning, though I am thinking about what the Grammies could be.

 

This is what happens the day after one’s daughter has the program on the television because a certain you-know-who was in the running for album of the year (she got it…swiftly). Yesterday evening, we were neither the jet set nor the Chevro-let set, being stuck in front of that ol’ television set.

 

There is Hannah Montana, quite taken with herself for having won a Grammy, gathering her flowers before – like the child of the river god – metamorphosizing into one.

 

There is Tracy Chapman, driving a fast rhythm on her guitar. There is Joni Mitchell singing regally from the other side. The members of U2 are beamed in. Billy Joel is back in the light.

 

I have a friend who has been nominated for a Grammy twice, but it is for the choral performance category, which never makes it to the televised broadcast. For one who enjoys listening to music, what is such a person to make of the conglomeration and ceremony that is televised?

 

I think the format undermines the music itself by training us to think about music in ways that resonate neither with how we listen nor – importantly for the musicians – how music is made.

 

Let me explain.

 

The first Grammy Awards were held in Beverly Hills in May of 1959 and in addition to the “Record of the Year,” “Song of the Year,” “Album of the Year,” “Best Engineered Record” (Classical and non-Classical), and “Best Album Cover Photography” awards that cut across genres, it featured individual genre awards in nine categories: Best Recording for Children, Comedy, Composing and Arranging, Country, Jazz, Musical Show, Pop, R&B, and Spoken.

 

The 2024 Grammy Award ceremony – held about ten miles away from the first ceremony’s location, in an arena cryptically named – by contrast featured approximately forty-three different genre categories, at least by my count. One has to think – again, if one is thinking about the Grammy Awards at all – that so many categories minimize the accomplishment of winning an award.

 

The Academy Awards provide an alternative model for how commercial art can be recognized. Those Awards feature Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director awards for all films, irrespective of whether the film is drama, comedy, action, or horror. Divisions exist between original screenplay and adapted screenplay, for international films, between live-action and animated films, between documentaries and non-documentaries, and between short films and feature-length films; all other genres are subject to the general categories for Best Picture, Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, and so forth. The awards are voted on by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which are largely composed of the filmmakers’ peers in the industry.

 

The minimal genre distinctions among Academy Awards means that when genre-films like Dances with Wolves (1990) or Unforgiven (1992) (the western), Return of the King (2003) or The Shape of Water (2017) (fantasy), or Silence of the Lambs (1991) (horror) win Best Picture, the individual film’s plaudit serves as recognition for the entire genre…an opportunity for all filmmakers working in that genre to celebrate and gauge how far a genre may have progressed with both the public and also with their filmmaking peers. Also, it allows genres to evolve as the fluid divisions they are – categories that reflect tastes of the moment.

 

Contrast this with the recognition of the forty-three Grammy genre divisions…most of which did not exist fifty years ago and most of which will be eclipsed in fifty years by new and as-yet-unforeseen genres. Such divisions and distinctions not only introduce confusion by continually interjecting the “what makes that that?” question, perennial to fans of any medium or genre, but it undermines the value of winning the award itself. How valuable is it to win Best Progressive R&B Album when it is mind boggling to decide what candidates even fit into that category instead of fitting into the categories of “R&B,” “Traditional R&B,” “Rap,” “Melodic Rap,” or “Contemporary Blues”? Today there are categories for “country,” “American roots,” “Americana,” and “folk,” but “bluegrass” or “traditional blues” recordings fall into their own categories. In the past were winners for “contemporary folk” and “traditional folk” albums. As others have written, the musicians have wholeheartedly imported commercial categories contrived to sell music into the way that they think about both the music and musicians that they want to recognize. This, of course, suggests that such commercially-convenient thinking is the way in which the creators think about the music itself.

 

I understand that people like to break things down into categories. It is, though, one of the lowest purposes to which cognition can be employed. Nevertheless, erecting boxes and then dropping widgets into those boxes provides – to most – some sort of pleasure.

 

I will not now channel this editorial into the obvious direction that notes America’s propensity to similarly divide its citizens into races and subraces and mixed races. For me, Martin Luther King Jr.’s plea was for the country to live up to its ideals, where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” not a world where we ceaselessly define ourselves by the superficiality of skin color any more than we would by eye or hair color.

 

No, I will continue to skim the surface today with me thinking about the Grammies and their forty-three little boxes, each one with a tiny gramophone statue within it, waiting to be lifted by the next winner.

 


I have a talented composer friend up in Seattle, Rick Bidlack, who once told me that there are only two genuine categories for music: scored music and extemporaneous music. In short, he asks, does a musician perform music by reading it off the page or is the music improvised from a basic structure in the moment? Music can then be categorized according to how that question is answered.

 

To this, I add a third category of music: music that is assembled during the recording process. Overdubbing is so typical of today’s studio recording process that it is assumed to be the default procedure, but the process was innovative when first introduced in recordings by Enrico Caruso, Sidney Bechet, Les Paul, and Patti Page. By the time the Beatles assembled “Tomorrow Never Knows” for Revolver (1966), the musical category of the assemblage was well on its way to dominating both the techniques of musicians and the expectations of listeners. Sometimes assembled recordings that could not have been performed live in the studio take on new life as scored or extemporaneous recordings on the stage. Brian Wilson labored for nearly a year assembling the unreleased Smile album – which he intended as his own answer to Revolver and follow up to Pet Sounds (1966) – before abandoning it in 1967. After taking the song sequence onto the concert stage in 2004, he reconceived the project as a series of scored compositions, which led to its recording and release later that year as Brian Wilson Presents Smile (2004).

 

Many a hip hop track that was assembled in the studio has later been recreated as an extemporaneous performance with pre-recorded tracks "played" like instruments on stage. Scored, extemporaneous, and assembled music can fluidly move between categories, but at least these categories reference method and technique. They make sense to musicians.

 

Last fall André 3000 (née Benjamin) released New Blue Sun (2023), a so-called ambient album by a musician typically categorized as hip hop; neither of those titles do justice to the album, nor would “jazz,” “new age,” or “avant-garde.” Rather, New Blue Sun is a brilliant extemporaneous work, featuring Benjamin on various flutes responding improvisationally to the work of other musicians live. The album is a true “record” of a moment.

 

American musical forms are born of the kind of cross-fertilization that takes place across regions: The Mississippi Delta, the Appalachian hills, Chicago’s streets, in bluegrass festivals, in churches, within revival tents, and inside pubs, juke joints, and honky-tonks throughout the Midwest and South. It is why Ray Charles remarked, “I don't categorize myself as a musician. Musicians are just tools used to transfer emotion and thought.” To a brilliant innovator like Thelonious Monk, all music was grist for the mill. In Straight, No Chaser (1988), Monk’s manager recalls how a reporter queried Monk about the kinds of music he liked. "Well," replied Monk, "I like all kinds of music." The journalist, not satisfied, pressed on: "Well, do you like country music?" When he did not receive an answer, he asked again, "Do you like country music?" Ignoring the reporter, Monk turned to his manager and remarked, "I think the fellow's hard of hearing."

 

Insisting on categorizing music can, in fact, make all of us deaf to that unique loom of harmony, melody, and rhythm from which all music is spun. Further, when genre categorization becomes constituent to the algorithms employed by Spotify, Amazon Music, and Pandora that help select music for us, our listening devices feed us suggestions that are themselves pre-selected based on commercial categories. The circle is vicious and can lead us to missing out on terrific music. And this can contribute to a loss of empathy: when we listen to and enjoy other people’s music, we tend to find it easier to empathize with them, to understand them, and to, well, get along.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, the 2025 Grammy for the Most Useful Editorial on Grammy Music Categories goes to…Daniel Mackay of Eugene, Oregon.”

 

“Wow, I can’t believe this! I’d like to first thank the Academy. If I had really thought I would win, I would have assembled something for you in advance, or at least written something I could read to you. Instead, I’ll present something extempore, like my favorite musicians.”