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"Why I Hate the Grammys" by Slate's Bill Wyman
February 13, 2011 6:39 PM

Here's something interesting about tonight's Grammys Awards you may not know:

The biggest scandal about the Grammys is the ruling cadre's secret manipulation of its membership's nominations. This is almost never noted in reporting on the awards. The recording academy, like the motion picture academy, has a putative raison d'etre that's secondary to the needs of presenting a worldwide TV broadcast. The awards show is an ATM of bovine proportions, funding the group's activities for the rest of the year.

We all love the Grammys, right? But who knew about these "secret selection committees?" Wyman writes:

This process is toxic on many levels. No. 1, it shouldn't be forgotten that it's fundamentally dishonest. The manipulation is not discussed on the organization's Web site. NARAS president Neil Portnow will blather on about music piracy on TV Sunday night, but he won't mention that he and some unnamed pals fiddled with the membership's nominations.

While Grammy officials have talked with me about this in the past, it's not clear that the organization is always candid when asked directly about the procedure. I called one of the NARAS publicists for comment this week. She responded to my fairly simple questions about the process with enough vagueness and obfuscation that I couldn't tell if it was deliberate on her part.

His reporting continues:

"The nominations are the nominations," she said repeatedly, seemingly denying there was an interim step between the nominations and the voting. I asked her to confirm the answer with Grammy officials. She responded the next day with this e-mail:
The following Fields go through this process: General (top 4), Country, R&B, Latin, Gospel, Jazz, Classical, Music Video.

All appear on first ballot to general voting membership. Deloitte [the accounting firm] then informs The Recording Academy of the top 15-30 (depending on category) selections from the first ballot. We present these selections (in alphabetical order) to the Nominations Review Committees, who meet in person for 1-3 days to listen to all of the selections. The committee members then vote at the end of the meeting via secret ballot. The ballots are collected by Deloitte in the room.

Contrast that answer -- which confirms that the membership's nominations are changed behind the scenes -- with the Grammy Web site's account: "In craft and other specialized categories, final nominations are determined by national nomination review committees comprised of voting members from all of The Academy's Chapter cities." The official account doesn't reveal the thing most readers would be interested in: The fact that the four top categories are "reviewed."

This process was started back in the mid-90's, and was called Plan B:

Plan B established a committee whose members' names are not made public, supposedly to protect them from record-industry pressure. The group is allowed to overrule the membership's nominations for its four biggest awards: album of the year, record of the year, song of the year, and best new artist. They take out nominations that might embarrass the academy -- one official has hinted that "Macarena" might otherwise have been nominated one year -- and replace them with artists they think are more deserving or, more importantly, who will bring in more viewers to the TV show.

The implementation of Plan B came in the mid-1990s, but didn't get much attention. Four years later, the Los Angeles Times's formidable Robert Hilburn got one of the secret committee members to talk about the group's duties off the record. But in the years since, this is almost never mentioned in coverage of the Grammys. This year, for example, I found one passing reference to the process in an L.A. Times blog. If the Oscars tried to pull off something like this, Hollywood would be up in arms.

Perhaps Hollywood does have secret committees like this. Hello, Oscars?

Well, in any event, if you're able, enjoy the music tonight!

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