Grammys ‘irrelevant’? That’s a minority report

Oops, he did it again!

Or am I alone in thinking that pop music critic Robert Hilburn had a bad meal before sitting down to watch the Grammys as he must have last year when he went so off course in his review of the show?

That, to paraphrase the second paragraph in his review of this year’s show (“Affirmation,” Feb. 9), in which he begs for a response to the question, “Or am I alone in thinking the 46th annual edition of the Grammy Awards felt torturously slow and mostly irrelevant?”

Well, Bob, since you asked a question to which there are always multiple answers, let me just say that while you may not be alone, you seem to be in the minority.

In the past two years, the Grammys have increased viewership by nearly 30%, much of it accounted for by younger audiences tuning in and staying with the show for the entire three and a half hours. Slow and irrelevant, indeed.

And you’d certainly have been in the minority if you went by the 13,000 attendees at Staples Center who rose to their feet continuously during the live show, from the opening strains of “Purple Rain” to the show-stopping “Hey Ya!” finale performance by OutKast’s Andre 3000.

And yes, Bob, you might even be a bit off base when you state that youth was not served early in the show, pointing to “Purple Rain” (which featured 22-year-old Beyonce performing with Prince), “I Saw Her Standing There” (which featured hip-hop genius Pharrell Williams on drums) and “A House Is Not a Home” (with Alicia Keys) as the focus of the first hour or so of the show. Or did you just leave the room for the White Stripes’ blazing “Seven Nation Army,” or Christina Aguilera’s show-stopping “Beautiful”?

You don’t need to look at bios to know that none of the aforementioned are old enough to know the terms “vinyl” or “LP.”

And, just as you did last year when you chose to damn with faint praise three or four of the 18 performances on the show, the “torturously slow and irrelevant show” must have forced you to miss the next couple of hours, which demonstrated an amazing melding of musical genres, such as the Foo Fighters tearing it up with Chick Corea, Sting sharing a blazing version of “Roxanne” with dance hall reggae prince Sean Paul, and a beautiful blending of the voices of Sarah McLachlan and Alison Krauss.

Not to mention other notable Grammy moments, including an 11-minute look at funk from “the roots to the fruits” with Earth Wind and Fire, OutKast, Robert Randolph and P-Funk.

I can only assume you ran out of underwhelming statements, since you so quickly turned to praising the Recording Academy for some of its award choices, but frankly, Bob, by then you had made it perfectly clear that your annual Grammy show bias needed to lead your review.

This has been a difficult year for the music community. Downloading has cost thousands of jobs, young bands with great music are having an increasingly difficult time finding labels willing to take a chance on new music, and radio and MTV have narrowed their playlists to a point where, ironically, fewer artists make it to the top of the charts, but stay there longer.

The new artists who you once wrote about and I put on television have fewer chances of breaking through, and the Grammy Awards remain one place where that can happen, if not enough.

I would have hoped that you would have commented on the performance by Robert Randolph and the Family Band in our “Funk Is Back” segment, a blazing demonstration of pedal steel guitar playing that brought down the house. Or recognized that, in the coming weeks, seeing artists like Chick Corea and Arturo Sandoval teamed with much more mainstream performers like the Foo Fighters and Justin Timberlake might result in music fans seeking out new musical experiences that they were exposed to on the Grammy show.

I would have hoped you would have seen fit to comment that this year’s show, coming as it did on the heels of the MTV Super Bowl halftime show the previous Sunday, sang out loud and clear that, as I hoped Queen Latifah would tip you, “it’s about the music” -- because it was.

Next year, if you’re not feeling too well, rather than writing your review before the show airs -- as I secretly suspect you’ve done the past two years -- why not just skip our little venture and leave the critique to other writers who don’t bring the baggage of all your years of slamming the Grammys to the party? It will certainly make you feel better, not to mention the dozens of people I heard from who asked me what show you saw.

On the other hand, maybe your underappreciation of what we do year after year will just keep us trying harder, so that someday after the Grammys, someone will call me and say, “Did you see what Hilburn said? He really loved the show. You guys must have done something wrong!”

Ken Ehrlich was the producer of the 46th annual Grammy Awards.