The Grammys have always been the lamest of all awards ceremonies. And in a crowded field including the Oscars, Booker and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, that’s saying something.
The Grammys are so lame, Jesus himself couldn’t heal them, even in full miraculous-powers mode. This is a shindig whose most rebellious moment was when Bono used the f-word a decade ago.
Wow, how cool. I mean if wanted to hear a middle-aged man swearing, I’d just eavesdrop on the average Under-12 soccer team coach berating a group of teary youngsters for not “giving it 110 per cent”.
So lame are the Grammys that the only thing of note that ever happens are the outlandish costumes worn by single-brain-celled attention-seekers like Rihanna, J-Lo and suchlike. You want a washed-up singer doing acrobatics while wearing a flesh-coloured cat-suit in a desperate bid to make the world remember her again? No problem, madam, Pink will be along with that in just a moment.
You’d wonder, then, why the award organisers issued the notorious dictate this year, warning attendees that they’d better cover up, or else… Well, I’m not really sure what. Maybe they’d have parking valet privileges removed, or have to sit in a seat near the door for the loos.
Any road, a leaked memo decreed that “buttocks and female breasts (be) adequately covered”, while “thong type costumes,” we were solemnly told, were “problematic.” Yes, I’d imagine they could be.
They really got into icky detail with the next paragraph, imploring attendees to “avoid exposing bare flesh under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack…be sure the genital region is adequately covered…” And so on.
Naturally, the reaction from press, public and those skeezy celeb gossip websites like Prez Hilton was one of mockery first – as in the early part of this here piece – and then a weird sort of po-faced disapproval.
The Grammys, some folks hilariously claimed, had gone too far, were acting like the PC police, and had lost their sense of humour/fun/marbles/whatever. They should let these wimminz put on whatever they liked – or more to the point, not put on whatever they liked.
Now here’s the weird part: I think I agree with the Grammys on this one. Yes, you read that right. Me, Darragh James, the coolest sumbitch this side of Frosty the Snowman eating a Mr Freeze in a walk-in refrigerator…in Antarctica. And I’m agreeing with something done by the Lamest of the Lame.
Now, maybe I approve of a ban of this sort for different reasons to theirs. The Grammys are probably looking at keeping advertisers happy and not upsetting their corporate sponsors and all that. But I agree with the move nonetheless.
I agree because the world is almost literally saturated with sexuality, and to be honest, I’ve kind of had enough. I’m no prude – in fact I’m a total pervert once I get behind the heavy oak doors of my sadomasochism Saturday night club in darkest Soho of old London Town. As Madame Sadistica will enthusiastically attest.
But still, everything in its right place. And for quite a while now, sex and sleaze have not been in their right place.
It’s one thing a woman, man, woman-man, man-woman or somewhere in between parading around half-naked in a strip-club or burlesque house or brothel or whatever. You may not approve of it, or on the other hand you may think it’s the best thing since sliced bread – the point is, it’s being kept in its right place.
Mainstream TV, by contrast, is definitely not the right place for all this. The pages of daily newspapers, that’s not the right place either. Entertainment websites – you’re way ahead of me – not the right place.
There used to be something disreputable, dodgy and even a little dangerous about aggressively sexual costumes and behaviour; you tended to find these things in blue movies, scuzzy magazines, obscure TV channels or, yes I admit it, Madame Sadistica’s Pleasure Palace of Pain. Nowadays it’s been sanitised, packaged and sold to everyone from grannies to – yeeuch – little kiddies.
And that, my friends, is FUBAR. (Look it up on acronyms-explained.com.) I couldn’t really care less if some loser is trawling the sex shops of Amsterdam, buying rubber underwear for himself and an electrified truncheon for the gimp he keeps locked up in the basement, for that special romantic evening they have planned.
But the thought of a little kid seeing some yoke like Rihanna strutting about like a five-buck hooker, and worse, looking up to her, and worse again, wanting to be like her: that makes me feel ill. Even more than the Grammys usually do.
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 