Brilliant Steely Dan

I hope Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn has time to recover from the Grammys. He must be exhausted from all that running to stay ahead of the hipness train and remain the leader of all that is cutting edge and now.

Hilburn has the audacity to claim the best album win by Steely Dan over this year’s blond, Eminem, is a “stain” on the Grammys (“ ‘Stan’ Carries the Night,” Feb. 22). Eminem rightfully dominated the rap categories, but Hilburn’s insult to a time-tested, musically brilliant, vastly talented band like Steely Dan just to keep his own street cred updated is woefully self-serving and transparent.

Hilburn’s denigrating of the past to sing the praises of transient trendmakers may be necessary to stay fashionable with the young and impressionable, but his apologies for Eminem’s excesses come across as the tired rants of a professional revolutionary chasing the cause du jour.

All that is new is not automatically genius, and all that lasts the test of time is not hopelessly unhip. If Mathers is not just a one-trick pony, his time will come.

JOHN CORCORAN

Calabasas

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From the safety of my West Hollywood home, I watched Eminem’s performance on TV. I was disappointed that Marshall Mathers appeared to have sold out. I did not see controversy. I would have liked Marshall to stand his ground as a true artist. But what I saw was a pathetic attempt by him to sell more records. And since when did Nielsen ratings become a constitutional right?

Let’s face it. Eminem is no different from a 21st century hate-mongering Boy Scout. If he really wanted to be the Bad Boy of Rap, he should have performed dressed as a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Explorer Scout with Dame Elton John perhaps dressed as the pope. Now that truly would have been controversial.

STEVE NOODLEMAN

West Hollywood

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Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? Cuz the butt-kissing, politically correct guy who showed up at the Grammys wasn’t the tell-it-like-it-is, cutting-edge artist that I have come to respect.

DARRELL IDA

Redondo Beach