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"I&amp;#x27;ve been watching the Grammys ever since I can remember, so it pains me to admit that when this year&amp;#x27;s show was announced, I reacted the way you might when a woman you took one college class with asks you to be a bridesmaid in her wedding and you&amp;#x27;re about to turn her down, but you remember that weddings have open bars, so you say, &amp;quot;Yes, but on my terms,&amp;quot; and show up to the dress fitting like this: Meaning that I&amp;#x27;ll watch the Grammys, BUT I&amp;#x27;m going to be doing other stuff like checking out reruns of The Nanny on Nick at Nite every few minutes and rehearsing for the day when I&amp;#x27;m called in to audition for role of &amp;quot;enthusiastic black woman who loves fried food.&amp;quot; Let&amp;#x27;s be real, we both know it&amp;#x27;s inevitable and that I would nail it. You don&amp;#x27;t live this long as a black person and not know how to do the Holy Ghost two-step over a plate of popcorn shrimp. Anyway, the point is that my enthusiasm for the award show has waned during the past few years, which is a bummer considering that I&amp;#x27;m their ideal demographic. I love smoke machines, performers lip-synching while dancing their hearts out, and pop stars making stank faces when they lose. Unfortunately, those highlights are too far between lately and it&amp;#x27;s becoming clear that I only tune in out of a sense of tradition and not excitement. But all is not lost! There are some things that will make me be #TeamGrammys again. Let&amp;#x27;s take a look. 1) Stop nominating people who elicit from me the New Orleans Saints football chant &amp;quot;Who dat?&amp;quot;: Hunter Hayes. Huh? Kaskade. Is that a thing? Dailey &amp;amp; Vincent of &amp;quot;Dailey &amp;amp; Vincent whose record label is Cracker Barrel Records???&amp;quot; And considering there are now 81 (!) categories, the list of nominated artists who most people couldn&amp;#x27;t identify in a police lineup goes on and on the way a friend of mine, who shows up late for lunch, does by proceeding to talk about her terrible week at work without pausing for a moment to say to me, &amp;quot;Happy birthday.&amp;quot; So I&amp;#x27;m annoyed and rummaging through the bread basket like this... ...and thinking, &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re still talking?&amp;quot; Look, I&amp;#x27;m not saying that I only want the uber-famous artists to get nominated; the less popular, yet equally talented acts deserve to shine. But reading the litany of &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sure their auntie and cousin thrice-removed are happy for them, but who the heck are these folks&amp;quot; nominees makes my eyes glaze over and now it feels like a chore to watch a bunch of people I don&amp;#x27;t know win awards. 2) Remember that when musicians from the AARP community sing at the Grammys, they might look heartbroken like someone stole their last bowl of applesauce for 85 percent of their performance and that&amp;#x27;s sad for everybody. Yes, I&amp;#x27;m talking about the Beach Boys&amp;#x27; barely lucid rendition of their greatest hits from last year&amp;#x27;s show. Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong; I love reunions as much as anyone, but there has to be a cut off point. Destiny&amp;#x27;s Child reuniting at the Super Bowl made me feel so exuberant and youthful that I wanted to put on a push bra, drive well over the speed limit, and see if I could&amp;#x27;ve talked my way out of getting a speeding ticket. The Beach Boys performing in celebration of the band&amp;#x27;s 50th anniversary bummed me out and made me want to help them like I do a stranger who gets sick in a public restroom: 3) Like a former Disney child star who wears a bare midriff on her 18th birthday in order to show the world that she&amp;#x27;s doing the mattress mambo AKA having sex, you&amp;#x27;re too predictable. Rihanna and Sting are scheduled to sing. Great, they perform at the show all the time. Bruce Springsteen is nominated again for another song about the working class man. C&amp;#x27;mon! This dude has been rich and famous for 30 years, and you keep rewarding him for writing songs about pick-up trucks and American cheese slices on blue collar dudes&amp;#x27; lunch sammiches. Bruce probably doesn&amp;#x27;t eat American cheese anymore, so what does he know about the struggle? But that&amp;#x27;s not the point. The point is that I get it, Grammys. You like to stick with the tried and true because you don&amp;#x27;t want to fail, but unfortunately that makes me treat you like a family member who announces they did all their Christmas shopping two months before Black Friday: 4) Don&amp;#x27;t allow artists to graduate summa cum laude from Ridiculous University by letting them do these elaborate, but ultimately terrible performances. This isn&amp;#x27;t some home video of your 7-year-old child with washcloths tied around her wrists pretending to be Wonder Woman that you&amp;#x27;re just going to show to a couple of friends. This is the Grammys! Feel free not indulge in every whim from over-the-top people like Nicki Minaj. When she came to you last year with the premise to do a confusing mock exorcism on stage, you should&amp;#x27;ve reacted the way I do when I overhear a woman giving her friend bad relationship advice: 5) Stop trying to impress who you think are the cool kids at the lunch table. We all know that popularity is not synonymous with quality, yet you continually nominate and award acts in hopes of appealing to tweens and hipsters. For instance, as much as I enjoy Carly Rae Jepsen&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Call Me Maybe,&amp;quot; there&amp;#x27;s no way that it&amp;#x27;s one of the five best songs of the year. I can think of hundreds of others that are more of recognition: M.I.A.&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Bad Girls,&amp;quot; Jake White&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Sixteen Saltines,&amp;quot; Kendrick Lamar&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Swimming Pools (Drank),&amp;quot; and Calvin Harris &amp;amp; Florence Welch&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Sweet Nothing.&amp;quot; Songs like these shouldn&amp;#x27;t be ignored because they weren&amp;#x27;t #1 on Top 40 radio for a couple of months. So, I&amp;#x27;m asking you Grammys, please stop chasing cool because you&amp;#x27;ll only end up looking foolish as evidenced by the 80&amp;#x27;s trend of injecting faux hip-hop into teen movies like Teen Witch: What do you think are some ways the Grammys can regain their relevance?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2013/02/how-the-grammys-can-make-me-ca>