In what should be the equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday for music aficionados, most of the people I would consider anything beyond casual fans of popular music are unaware that the Grammys are holding their 50th annual ceremony. This is not surprising considering the poor reputation the awards show has developed among anyone who doesn’t buy all their music from Starbucks.

Who is this so-called Academy comprised of? The majority of the artists and records nominated are certainly not the records that make anyone’s, much less even critics’, top ten lists. I refuse to believe that true music fans are behind this enterprise mysteriously known as the Academy. The nominations read more like the guest list for a party that the networks cooked up in a desperate attempt to create spectacle, a shameless ploy to attract ratings from the lowest common denominator instead of the legions of music enthusiasts that exist out there. One trait of the music-obsessed is, for better or for worse, an appreciation for “the underdog” (yes, the infectious Spoon anthem as well as the figurative black horse candidate). We are notorious obscurists who enjoy claiming lesser known music as our own, then griping about their overexposure once our collective word-of-mouth leads to their music being featured on our teenage sisters’ MySpace pages and in Nordstrom bathrooms.

Another huge problem I have with the Grammys is its insistence on giving the overexposed even more exposure, making the famous more famous, instead of recognizing the deserving and raising awareness for their achievements. I truly doubt that Feist would have been nominated at all if “1234” had not appeared on that iPod commercial, propelling it to banal ubiquity within days. If The Reminder had remained the quiet little singer-songwriter album, there would be no way she would be sitting there amongst such luminaries as Daughtry and Miley Cyrus. Whereas its cinematic counterpart at the very least nominates lesser known films in hopes of giving them the audience they deserve, the Grammys blatantly aims to score as many viewers as possible by stuffing as many big names into the expansive Staples Center as possible. Though I’m sure the Oscars have just as devious motives behind them as the Grammys, the music awards have strayed from what I assume was the initial purpose of the ceremony: acknowledging the greatest achievements in music of the given year.

-Amorn