The Grammys? Oh, yeah, they were on last night.

Supposedly the "biggest night in music," I've never been a big fan of this major award ceremony. Music to me is too idiosyncratic and personal to easily lend itself to some kind of universal recognition that a certain song or album or performance was "the" best of the year. Movies, that doesn't bother me so much for some reason. But my musical tastes have mellowed and grown more magnanimous over the years, so I tried to be nice and watch the festivities a bit last night. If U2 performed live, then I missed them. But I did see a bit of the Lynyrd Skynyrd "Sweet Home Alabama" tribute which didn't do all that much for me, and I saw a portion of the Melissa Etheridge/Joss Stone tribute to Janis Joplin which seemed more interesting, especially now that Etheridge is a bald-headed cancer survivor. She made a fashion statement of sorts by abandoning the pretense of a wig. And I saw the underwhelming performance of "Across The Universe" by the Bono/Stevie Wonder/Steven Tyler/Billy Joe/Velvet Revolver/Alicia Keys/Brian Wilson and whoever I left out All-Star Cameo Band. Sorry, but that song was never intended by Lennon to be a 21st-century "world anthem." It's too much of a hippy-dippy crash-pad comedown strum the guitar stream of consciousness meander to ever catch on as a big time singalong "Up With People" number. "Nothing's gonna change my world" chanted over and over again like it's supposed to be some kind of inspirational uplift? Heh, did anybody actually read the lyrics before they finalized this plan? And then they had to go and change it to "Something's gonna change our world?" And this is what they are using to raise money for the tsunami survivors?

Well it's a noble gesture, and perhaps a convenient tax write-off not to mention good P.R.

And then there was Usher and James Brown at the end. That was kind of funny, funky and cool.

We didn't watch much of the other stuff, the Ray Charles bits. I like Ray Charles and all but I think it was just wrong that his album beat out all of the contemporary competition. I would have given Album of the Year to Usher, 'cause the dude just ruled the pop music scene this year. But then I'm contradicting myself I suppose. It's their ceremony, I guess they know what they are listening for better than I do. Let 'em hand out their trophies to whoever. But all the awards for Ray Charles just reinforced my bias that the Grammys are kind of lame and continue to miss the mark when it comes to getting an accurate read on what's currently really happening at the pulse/heartbeat level of popular music, the stuff that moves us and gets us going. Ray Charles should have got his little trophies back in the 1960's when it would have meant more than just sentimentality.