Respect the Grammys

Ken Ehrlich, the bearded, menschy executive producer of the Grammys, has been involved in putting on the production for thirty-four years, and in charge of the show for the past nine. When he started, in 1980, it was two hours. CBS decided to expand to three hours for the Grammys’ twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1983 (Toto won big that year), and never went back. Now the broadcast runs three and a half hours. As the running time has increased, the number of awards presented on air has shrunk, from fifteen to ten, while the performances have grown, from twelve to twenty. The audience has become steadily younger, helping bring down CBS’s silver-haired demographic, which is the oldest of the four networks’. Ratings have fluctuated, but the past several years have seen an uptick, with the 2012 Grammys, one day after Whitney Houston’s death, hitting a high of thirty-nine million domestic viewers, almost as many people as watched last year’s Seth MacFarlane-hosted Oscars (40.3 million). (The stale media biscuit that the Oscars is watched by a “billion” people around the world has been repeatedly debunked.)

Still, for all the attractions that the Grammys offer—where else can you see Eminem performing with Elton?—it remains the Cinderella of the winter awards shows, forever sweeping the cinders of pop culture around the electronic hearth, while its brassy stepsisters, the Golden Globes and the Oscars, drink vodka martinis on comfy leather banquettes and flit around Graydon Carter’s post-Oscars party.

“For whatever reason, we all feel we don’t get the respect we deserve for this show,” Ehrlich was saying the other day on the phone, as he took a break from rehearsals. “Movie stars just seem to be inherently more interesting to people than rock stars. I think music is simply deemed less important in terms of pop culture, even though I think more people sit around and talk about music than sit around and talk about movies.”

Is music less important? These days, musicians routinely grace the covers of glossy magazines that used to feature only the stars of the screen. Music was the first of the media to go fully digital, and while that has had a devastating effect on the business of music, it has also brought singers and players into intimate contact with digital natives through their handheld devices, while movie stars seem to dwell far away, somewhere beyond the proverbial fourth wall of the theater. Actors play a role that a screenwriter wrote for them, whereas musicians are perceived as expressing what’s in their souls (even if that expression was also crafted by someone else). The teen-agers I know have only a passing interest in watching the Oscars, but will remain glued to the Grammys long past their bedtime (so long as they have a small screen in front of them for Facebooking and Snapchatting at the same time). Maybe they’ll mature into Oscar watchers, but what if they don’t?

Both the Oscars and the Golden Globes seem clubby, whereas the Grammys feel inclusive. The Oscars are more like a privileged California country club, where an older, overwhelmingly white crowd sits in the same places year after year, with the occasional newcomer, such as J. Law, brought in to add fresh blood. The Golden Globes are a different kind of club, something of a cross between London’s Groucho Club and the Waverly Inn. The Grammys, on the other hand, with the mix of the performers’ ages and ethnicities, feel like a much truer portrait of the society we live in. And it’s never a surprise when an artist you’d never even heard of the year before, such as fun., Gotye, or, this year, Lorde, walks off with the night’s biggest awards.

Ehrlich’s challenge, in staging the Grammys, lies less in music’s supposedly limited pop-cultural appeal than in the sheer range of styles the evening must embrace. “I envy a show like the Country Music Awards,” he went on, “where the whole country community is gathered in one place and, whether it’s true or not, you get the feeling they are all rooting for each other, because they are all part of the same thing. I think the same thing happens with the BET Awards and with the ESPYs.” He added, “For thirty-five years, what I’ve tried to promote in the show is this heady idea of the ‘family of music,’ through the collaborations and combinations I do.” He mentioned a memorable number from last year’s Grammys, which was conceived as a tribute to Bob Marley, in which Bruno Mars performed his hit “Locked Out of Heaven” with Sting, Rihanna, and Ziggy and Damian Marley. “You had three generations of artists, who come from four different cultures—Bruno’s from Hawaii, Sting’s from England, Rihanna’s from Barbados, and we know where the Marleys are from—together on one stage singing one of the biggest songs of the year.”

In spite of this diversity of cultures, the musical content of every performance—the basic structure of a song—is unvarying. “At the end of the day, it’s still four bars of guitar going into sixteen bars of vocal, going into verse/chorus/bridge. Whether it’s a symphony or a pop tune, you’re still listening to a formula,” Ehrlich said, and that presents its own set of challenges. Still, “it’s all great fun,” he concluded, and then he had to go, because there was a mashup of Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons to rehearse, “which is going to be very hot,” not to mention a Robin Thicke/Chicago pairing “that I would be willing to bet will get a standing ovation….gulp!”

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty.