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So, if you didn’t hear about the whole Al Walser grammy Nomination situation, and you read the above twitter post (which I snagged from stoneyroads.com) you might think… hmm, I guess Al Walser did a remix of Zedd? Ok… What’s the problem?

The problem is this: even though Al is acknowledging that the tune is a remix, he gives no mention to Zedd in the credits, and it seemed as though he was trying to take full credit for the tune – and it is also the tune that scored him a grammy nomination. Again, yes, I’m not going to capitalize the ‘g’ in grammy.

How did Al do it? It wasn’t because his music was awesome because… it isn’t. Not even for pop standards. The vocals on the song almost feel, at times, off-beat to the rhythm, like the artist was trying to fit way too many lyrics in, and didn’t bother proofing or redoing anything. (Wonky in a bad way)… The video itself is ridiculous (in that, “oooh wait, they’re serious?” type of way) but I won’t even get into the video. The main point here is that no one knew who the hell Al Walser was, and now he has this ‘award’ nomination? He didn’t have a hit song, or have an active online presence, or have more than about a thousand plays on his “hit,” song on youtube… Something just seemed off.

Vice Magazine did a great interview with Al, and when asked about some of his favorite artists and influences, he mentioned, “I love David Guetta. I think him and Will.i.am are the most instrumental for the EDM scene today.”

Hmm..

Turns out, Al was on a social networking site for the grammies, and – yes, I’ll back up a minute and restate that there is a fucking social network for the grammies. Ah, this story gets worse the more and more you hear about it. And the thing is, it just implicates more and more people… Its not just about one shitty musician and his shitty music, its the fact that he was able to troll his way to success because of the ignorance (or is it arrogance? .. or both?) of the musical institutions in place to ‘validate’ musicians.

Fuck the grammies.

And, really, to count electronic music as ‘new,’ (which so many of the rock-lovin’ Big Music world do) isn’t reaaallly being truthful or fair. Electronic dance music has been around since hip hop. For anyone counting, that’s more or less 4 decades.

While I’m on the topic of bashing dinosaur musical institutions, I’d also like to point out (as a side note) the awesome job Rolling Stone did to help get to the bottom of this whole story. They released an article about it, and, although it made Al seem like sort of a douche, at the same time, you knew after writing it that RS didn’t really take much time or care with it. It’s a few formulaic paragraphs long, and it’s about a goddamn grammy scandel – you know that if Al Walser was nominated for best Rock Song, Rolling Stone would be ALL over it, freaking out with a ten page spectacle about it, puking and bleeding and cursing about the un-ignorable ‘SHOCK AT THE grammy AWARDS,’ and how this is the craziest event of the year, etc… But nope, just a small article, as Rolling Stone has proved, time and time again, that although they’ll acknowledge electronic music (if they feel they have to) they’re pro’s at ignoring that pestering urge to actually be “journalists,” (an outdated term from the 20th century).

Evolution is happening fast, here. We’re watching the Old Guard fall out of relevancy SO quickly, you almost don’t hear it happening – but it is.

When they nominated Skrillex, a lot of people thought, “hmm.. well, that’s certainly strange, but… Meh, I guess he is somewhat popular, and, at VERY least, it IS modern electronic music… I don’t know….” But as far as music goes, Al makes Skrillex look like a goddamn genius! (…another interesting side note, Skrillex also looks like a genius next to KORN, as well) Plus, Al is (or, ‘should be’) at the bottom of a twenty-thousand artist list of grammy choices.

I guess this means KOAN Sound is still a million years away from getting proper mention at the old-wordly orgy of nonsense and arrogance known as the grammy awards?

This whole bullshit grammy situation is irritating a lot of people, and even though the grammy people are claiming to be embarrassed by the whole thing NOW, they still caused the whole mess, and proved that they’re completely irrelevant and short-sited when it comes to some newer forms of music… I mean… it isn’t as if this is the only time they’ve royally fucked up…