What if it’s not even the voting members themselves filling out these ballots? If working voting members are too busy to return phone calls or answer emails (for example), maybe they’re too busy to fill out these ballots. If so, what’s to stop an intern at their management company, their mom, their assistant, or anyone else from checking those boxes?

I have good reason to believe that some percentage of the membership doesn’t fill it out themselves due to obligations and time constraints. And, as you said, if they do, they probably do it “by rote”.

In all seriousness, why the fuck didn’t Kanye either win or kill someone after losing?

But in any case, what good with that do? I’m not offering conspiracy theories here (DHMBIB is, kinda, and good for him), I’m offering judgment.

I truly don’t doubt that Hancock won a plurality of votes; I only doubt that a bunch of lazy Grammy voters listened to his album and judged it fairly on the merits vs. his competition. I think a box was checked by people too entrenched in bad habits to fairly consider the merits of Kanye, or Amy, or…hell, Vince Gill (if that had won last night, then you’d be talking about an album I don’t love or care about that I’d respect, thanks to the obvious passion it inspired).

The Grammys are always sentimental, which accounts for a lot of the cynical reaction you see from people the morning after, every year. I am angrier than usual this year, because last night’s win by Hancock is egregiously sentimental even by the Recording Academy’s standards. It’s made some pretty big, often well-intentioned mistakes in its 50-year existence; this one, given the field of competitors, is worse than usual and should be regarded as an embarrassment — not a blow for the “little guy.”

I don’t ask the Grammys to match my taste (good lord! how much would have to change for that to happen!) — I ask it, in its blinkered field of influence, to make some goddamn sense: reward something I might not like that clearly moved the Zeitgeist or affected the culture. Give it to bloody Celine Dion, fer cryin’ out loud, if that record moved people (Falling Into You, AOTY, 1996). But don’t give it to a record that’s a latte souvenir just because the guy on the cover is a legend and a swell guy.

Are you going to demand a recount? As incensed as you are, right now it merely looks (to the untrained eye) as if you and I uselessly quibbling about the minutiae of people’s relevance to music in the comments section of Idolator, meaning nothing productive will ever come from it. We can disagree about what is or is not good music — that’s healthy.

However, I think you should petition the Recording Academy to recount the ballots if it upsets you this much.

You just might be right — maybe he didn’t actually win. Every argument you’ve presented here leads me to believe that you’re convinced of the sheer conspiratorial impossibility of Herbie Hancock having won the award, so you should really do something about it.

I can’t take the Grammy back from him, maybe you can.

Close: the one album that should not, by any objective measure, have won, did win, and I am upset.

And if you think the sole mission of the Grammys is to do something as retrograde as “preserve the heritage of music,” then there’s no argument I can make to you that will convince you. I mean, on that score, you win: “heritage” = Herbie Hancock FTW. Let’s just seal the whole thing up in a coffin, while we’re at it.

It doesn’t seem that Herbie Hancock is really the subject anymore, it’s that someone you wanted to win did not and you’re upset.

If your real contention with this award is that the Grammies should be awards for trends in popular culture, that’s a different argument than Mr. Hancock’s relevance to music in 2008. There’s obviously plenty more people, including voting members of the Recording Academy, who disagree with you.

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Recording Academy’s purpose is not simply to encourage and reward up-and-coming artists, it is to preserve the heritage of music, a heritage to which Herbie Hancock definitely belongs.

I’m not going to ask you to like him, his album, or even to respect the work he’s done. It’s clear that you won’t. He still won this award.