Grammys: Is there anything left to care about?

If the Grammy's were worth it, The Black Keys
would be up for best rock record.

This weekend, CBS will air that great big musical farce we call The 53rd annual Grammy Awards. It is a glitzy, silly show that seems to get more and more cosmically distant from actual music making with every passing year.

So out of touch are the Grammys when it comes to rock that it's getting difficult to distinguish Grammy nominees from their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counterparts. Consider the nominees for "Best Solo Rock Performance": Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Neal Young and John Mayer. If not for Mayer, you'd swear you were looking at a list from 1973.

With all the mewling and caterwauling about the death of the music industry and the culpability of file sharing in its demise, The industry fails to see its own role in all the destruction. It seems oblivious to the fact that it has been completely ineffective at promoting new and interesting music for more than 20 years now (a generous estimate) and nowhere is the evidence of the growing gap between the music industry and the music listening public more evident than at the Grammys.