What Might Have Been

Eminem’s appearance on tonight’s Grammy Awards telecast wouldn’t be such a cause celebre in pop culture if Grammy voters hadn’t spent half a century sidestepping just such confrontations.

Using the ideological divisions of liberal, moderate and conservative, the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences have mostly voted the conservative line in awarding Grammys--at times an ultraconservative line.

These voters--chiefly veteran musicians, songwriters and producers--prefer to honor music that speaks about the world as we would like it to be. They aren’t comfortable with artists who challenge us to examine the world as it is, darkness and all.

These voters also tend to evaluate music in its narrowest context, rewarding in the top categories those artists who work in the broad, mainstream pop tradition. They ignore the sociology of pop music--the way defiant, cutting-edge artists encourage us to think about music, ourselves and our times in sometimes radical and revolutionary ways.

The great irony of the Grammys is that the academy has given lifetime achievement awards to many of the very artists that it shunned during their periods of peak influence, including Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

If the Grammy voters had been more visionary, they would have honored those artists in their prime, thus establishing a tradition of boldness that wouldn’t make the Eminem best album nomination unprecedented. The debate over Eminem is whether his X-rated tales of insult and rage--many of them often funny--are cutting-edge art or socially irresponsible expressions of hate.

Here are just some of the Grammy causes celebres that might have been--and the uproar they might have caused.

Elvis Presley: 1958

Presley is such a cornerstone of American pop culture that it’s hard to picture today the controversy that raged around him in the mid-’50s when he was the leading voice of rock ‘n’ roll.

Many saw his music as an assault on sexual and religious standards. When Presley performed on Ed Sullivan’s hugely popular TV variety program in 1956, he was shown only from the waist up because his hip-shaking antics were considered too suggestive for family audiences.

If Grammy voters had been daring enough to give a best record nomination to Presley’s raw, compelling recording of “One Night,” a Top 10 hit in 1958, you can imagine the uproar among the academy membership and the nation’s parents. Even though Presley’s image had been softened by his entry into the Army, there surely would have been protests outside the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the first Grammys were staged.

“One Night,” originally an R&B; hit for Smiley Lewis under the name “One Night (Of Sin),” was one of Presley’s most exciting recordings--a song of almost desperate sexual longing.

It was passed in the voting by the likes of David Seville’s cartoonish novelty “The Chipmunk Song” and Domenico Modugno’s soaring ballad “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu (Volare).” Modugno went home that night with the best record Grammy, and no one has heard from him since.

Bob Dylan: 1963

“The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album arrived in the summer of 1963, and it signaled a new era in pop music. By the end of the decade, Dylan would be the most influential songwriter of the modern pop era. Drawing on the commentary of country and folk as well as the urgency of blues and rock, Dylan brought intelligence to the energy of rock ‘n’ roll, giving rock a purpose and direction beyond the simple teen self-affirmation of the ‘50s. He also made personal viewpoint a goal of the best young writers for generations to come. “Freewheelin’,” his second album, contained such signature Dylan tunes as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Girl From the North Country.” But it wasn’t nominated for best album in a year when voters were more moved by the freak success of the Singing Nun’s “Soeur Sourire.”

If Dylan had been nominated, the Grammy brain trust would have had to brace itself for a storm of protest--especially from those who saw the antiwar “Masters of War” as treasonous during a time of Cold War tensions.

Like Presley, Dylan also had his problems with “The Ed Sullivan Show,’ for years the nation’s highest-rated variety program. When he was invited to perform on the show in 1962, network censors said he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” because the song, which mocked the ultra-right-wing organization, was too controversial. Dylan refused to go on the show.

Indeed, some public opposition to a Dylan nomination continued throughout the ‘60s as the nation moved deeper into its Vietnam nightmare. But the Grammys didn’t have to worry about Dylan protests. He didn’t win a Grammy for best album until 1997’s “Time Out of Mind,” six years after he was given the lifetime achievement award.

Jimi Hendrix: 1967

The Grammys were showing some signs of recognizing rock ‘n’ roll as an art form, but then who could overlook the cuddly Beatles? The band won a Grammy for best new artist in 1964 and for best album in 1967 for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

But other, more outwardly rebellious rock forces, including the Rolling Stones, were still bypassed in the voting. The voters did nominate a counterculture rock group for best new artist in 1967, but it was the wrong one: the Jefferson Airplane. A better choice that year would have been the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose leader showed that you can express the sentiments of a generation as eloquently with a guitar as with a pen.

Hendrix was as flamboyant and defiant a symbol of the new youth social order as any single figure in the ‘60s, so he made adults nervous. In the fury of his guitar playing, those adults saw in him a Pied Piper who promoted a lawless, anything-goes code of behavior embracing drugs, sex and, most threatening of all, a breaking down of racial barriers.

Imagine Hendrix performing at the Grammy ceremony and setting his guitar on fire as he did at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Parents and editorialists around the country would have warned that kids would soon be setting fires in their rooms. Hendrix, who died a drug-related death in 1970, never won a Grammy, but he was presented with a lifetime achievement award in 1992.

N.W.A: 1989

This seminal rap group’s “Straight Outta Compton” was an album with much of the same revolutionary spirit of Presley, Dylan and Hendrix, but there was no way the group was going to get a Grammy nomination in 1989. Group members Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Yella and M.C. Ren were the architects of gangsta rap, which was seen as an even more insidious attack on Grammy sensibilities than rock. N.W.A’s music was so volatile, with such themes as anger at police misconduct, that a top-level FBI official accused the group of encouraging “violence against and disrespect for” law enforcement officers.

There were troubling elements in “Straight Outta Compton,” just as there are unsettling elements in Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The language in both cases is frequently lewd and vulgar. But there is also music that is superbly crafted and that connects with audiences on a deeply rooted sociological level.

The fact that Eminem’s album is nominated represents progress--even if protests are expected outside the Grammy ceremony tonight at Staples Center.

Eleven years ago, N.W.A wasn’t even nominated for best new artist. The winner that year? Milli Vanilli--the duo that later was stripped of the award when it was learned they hadn’t sung the vocals on their album. The real scandal, however, was that the Grammy voters chose to honor such an inconsequential record at all. That’s what really should have been protested.

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GRAMMY WATCH

* The lyrics to Eminem’s “Stan.” F4

* A Q&A; with tonight’s host, Jon Stewart. F5