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.

This is what makes no freakin’ sense to me today, and I’ve already alluded to this here — how could Amy win — and we don’t know how close the vote was of course — ROTY, SOTY and BNA, and “Best Pop Vocal Album”, “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” (for “Rehab” again), and help Mark Ronson win for “Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical”, and not win AOTY, which is an award for the performer and the producer???

(I don’t work for Grammy or anyone else that affords me access to secret vote totals and such, BTW.)

Since we won’t get the totals for the votes, we can only make educated guesses, but the “winner” obviously must receive >20% of the votes. Since it’s unlikely that every album gets close to 20% of the vote, I suspect that the winner typically receives somewhere between 30-35% of the vote.

Pause.

There are really 30% of the 18,000-esque NARAS members who voted to give that award to Herbie Hancock? Even though some of them (maybe) had already voted to give Amy all those other awards?

Seriously???

I just don’t get it.

I’ve read today the theory that the voters wanted to slap two artists who are highly polarizing, but that still makes no sense considering the fact that they already had voted to give 9 Grammys to the two artists (and 1 more for Ronson). And it still means that 25-30% minimum, of the voters had to vote for Hancock.

I call it the “Rock It” theory.

Re: Raitt–from the RIAA’s own website.

Artist
RAITT, BONNIE
Title
NICK OF TIME
Certification Date
07/26/1989
Label
CAPITOL
Award Description
GOLD

Certification Date
03/01/1990
Label
CAPITOL
Award Description
PLATINUM

For the record, Raitt won on the Grammys for 1989, taking place in February of 1990 (maybe early March; they held the ceremony a week or two later back then).

We don’t have Soundscan numbers for anything pre-1991. But even assuming the usual RIAA certification inflation (shipments, not records sold), going gold by July of ’89 — months before the Recording Academy had either announced nominees, much less given her the win — shows a record selling on its own, modestly but solidly. And the platinum cert. immediately after the ceremony shows that first gold shipment had clearly sold through (otherwise it would’ve reached platinum by, like, April; instead, the record was double-platinum by May).

Again, simply put: Raitt ’89 and Hancock ’07, not comparable. For Raitt, situation was not “dire,” to use your word. Good sales before the ceremony, stellar afterward. Hancock album: a speck on the windshield of culture before the ceremony, now the Crash of the Grammys.

More to the point: You are absolutely entitled to your opinion about the Hancock record, but you’ve said nothing to convince me this was a remotely pure win on the merits of a little-heard, near-irrelevant-to-the-culture record.

Any other theories?

The Bonnie Raitt story you tell is not completely accurate — Bonnie’s struggles with addiction and lackluster sales had not positioned her well. These issues had left her all but uncrecognized by the music industry by 1987. I agree with you: hers was an incredible and fulfilling moment in Grammy history. As for the sales, I think if you will go back and review your data, you will discover historical innacuracies in your numbers as to pre-Grammy sales and radio play.

The comparison I am drawing between these two wins stems from the lackluster sales of these two artists and their relative lack of prurient interest which, as I recall, was much more dire than the story you are telling. I take nothing away from Bonnie Raitt, and further take nothing away from Herbie Hancock or, for that matter, Joni Mitchell, whose songs inspired the album he created.

Is it my favorite album? No. Is it my favorite Herbie Hancock album? Far from it. Is it the palpy unlistenable porta-potty that you’re painting it to be? Far from it.

As for the indie rock snobbery, take it more as an ad hominem attack meant to paint you as someone whose comments here belie what is likely an intuitive and thoughtful history of music review.

“How old is Jerry Lee Lewis?” doesn’t show up on the top 100 searches, however.