The Grammys When The Music Is A Machine

The music played. Few cared. The Celebration was a poorly written play performed by actors. It was sad. But the money was made.

"What Have They Done to My Song, Ma" is a super sad song from 1970 written and performed by Melanie (Safka). Like Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar," the Kinks' "Moneygoround," Jimmy Webb's "P. F. Sloan," CCR's "Wrote a Song For Everyone" and Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," it's a look at what life is like for a singer/songwriter once the music industry sinks their hooks into them. In this case, the narrator is lamenting how her simple song has been repackaged and reinvented, presumably in pursuit of a hit. She feels alienated from it, and now can hardly bear to hear it.

“If the people are buying tears - I’ll be rich some day…” she sings.

In 1996, upon receiving the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, Pearl Jam's lead singer Eddie Vedder remarked, "I don't know what this means. I don't think it means anything."

I was thinking about it last night, when the Grammy Award show was acted out like a bad play—thin characters, poorly scripted moments, and no real connection to the meaning of music.

It wasn’t a recognition of artistry, a celebration of real… well, real anything. It was a corporate coronation. A soulless spectacle of brands disguised as artists. A business model masquerading as culture.

There's always been a ladder to climb.

In the heyday of boxing the stories were about a kid from the streets, fighting their way up to become a champ.

There's nothing more American, more egalitarian, inspiring or hopeful.

We, all of us, love stories of scrappy underdogs, coming up, coming from behind, coming out of nowhere and from nowhere.

And so it was in music.

Scenes.

It could be any place from 19th century New Orleans to late 20th Seattle. New York's Village or the most remote hills of the South. Music came from places. People deeply rooted in a sense of place and time. The Mississippi Delta. The punk explosion of London. Caribbean islands. Music came from somewhere. It had roots.

Bands.

The lone singer has always been kind of a bird’s song. And single instrumentalists are lonely characters. Music is something we make together, and enjoy together. “Banding” together is the most natural human thing to do. And for generations, maybe hundreds of generations, that’s what music was—people coming together, creating something real.

That was the story of popular music from the start.

People with a genuine love of music that they could not ignore. Raising themselves up. Banding together and creating scenes.

And all that still exists.

But it has nothing to do with modern music. A giant corporate machine.

Picking, well, victims really.

Money machines making bets on this sad lone person or that.

Making them stars.

More like the Devil promising fame in return for a soul than anything else.

The Grammys aren’t a ladder. They’re a pit.

A deep, empty pit that the public is asked to peer down into. To lift up these hollow figures and put them on a pedestal that we can somehow still look down on - these poor lonely soulless birds - caged by our attention, our praise, and—most importantly—our money.

Because in the end, that’s all that matters.

Not the music. Not the artistry. Just the transaction.

A cavalcade of souless souls. A charade. A play badly written in which the caged birds must sing - echoing up from their pit of despair.

There are a few ways to look at it.

I’m going to ignore the ridiculous fact that The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles each won a Grammy last night. And it wasn’t in a “Legacy” or “seniors” category.

But there were few bands in this year's Grammy's.

There were no fighters.

There were no scenes.

And few who were authentically connected to a sense of place.

Only branded content, with copywriten backstories. Plausible but not real. Songs about the songs, that once said something new.

The thin characters playing their parts but not belonging to anything, anyplace, or any time.

And the worst part? The music played. And no one cared. And no one listened. Yet the money, was made, painfully extracted from a public drained of its own musical life.

While the real music—the kind that comes from somewhere, from something, from people banding together—the music from outside the machine, waiting to be heard but is now almost lost in the din of money and music machine.

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A supportive scene is an organic community where musicians, fans, and venues fuel creativity through collaboration, shared spaces, and direct audience connection. Success comes from talent, hustle, and mutual support.

Music industry insiderism is a gatekept system where success depends on navigating bureaucracy, schmoozing the right people, and securing institutional validation through grants, showcases, and industry politics—often favoring connections over creativity.

In short: Scenes grow music from the ground up. Industry insiderism picks winners from the top down.

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Chappell Roan: The Algorithm’s Chosen One

This is not about Chappell Roan or whoever she was before she was remanufactured into Chappell Roan. I could have picked any of them. Nothing typifies the story like the machine-manufactured narrative passed off as an organic rise to success.

“Once upon a time”, music had scenes, movements, real human struggle, and people banding together in a fight to be heard. Now? It has pipelines. Talent scouting has been replaced by data mining, and the industry isn’t looking for the next great artist—they’re looking for the next pliable and predictable success.

The Corps and the Freemasons

“Music Groups” like Universal Music Group describe themselves as “leaders in music-based entertainment’. To the investment groups and pension funds that own them that makes sense. But to anyone interested in music it sounds immediately more than a little weird. It describes the business the same way a fruity juicy beverage is described on its packaging when it doesn’t actually contain any fruit or juice.

The Freemasons, for reasons of their own from a distant past of their persecution and struggle, have a description for all this. They name these “peculiar institutions where the symbol has come to mistake itself for the thing symbolized.”

Enter Chappell Roan. A "self-made" artist plucked from obscurity by Atlantic Records, shaped, molded, and then repackaged for a second attempt when the first one didn’t stick. The story they settled on to sell? A quirky, queer, underdog triumphing against the odds. The reality? A barista waiting for the machine to pick her up again—because that’s how the system works now. It’s not about building a fanbase, gigging, or proving yourself in clubs. It’s about being the right kind of marketable at the right time.

Roan's narrative reads like a corporate checklist memo:
✅ Small-town origins for that “authentic” struggle
✅ Industry rejection for a redemption arc
✅ LGBTQ+ identity front and center for social currency
✅ Viral-ready aesthetic tailor-made for TikTok

And just like that—ta-da!—the industry-approved Cinderella emerges. But this isn’t a grassroots, organic rise; this is a product launch. Every element is engineered for maximum engagement, optimized for the algorithm, and stripped of anything that could actually challenge or disrupt the industry that created her.

This isn’t about Roan personally—it’s about what she represents. It’s about the box she’s been put in. One of a generation of artists whose “journeys” are written in boardrooms before they ever write a song. There’s no scrappy climb. No fight. No underground movement. Just a corporate assembly line churning out the next “artist” to fit the moment's ideological and commercial demands.

The Sellout

The concept of selling out once carried real weight—it was the ultimate artistic betrayal, a musician or creator abandoning their principles for mainstream success, corporate money, or mass appeal. In the punk and grunge eras, it was a sin punishable by ridicule, with bands like Green Day and Metallica facing accusations the moment they left indie labels for major deals. But today, the idea has all but vanished, swallowed by an era where survival in the arts requires a level of self-promotion, branding, and monetization that previous generations might have sneered at. Social media has blurred the line between art and commerce so thoroughly that we no longer expect artists to exist outside the system; they are the system, selling everything from NFTs to sponsored Instagram posts in a constant hustle to stay afloat. Where selling out was once a death sentence for credibility, it's now just business as usual. The question isn’t if an artist will commercialize their work—they have no other purpose.

And the Grammys? They play along. Because what they’re awarding isn’t music. It’s compliance. It’s the seamless execution of a business plan, the smooth operation of an industry machine designed not to nurture or inspire music, but to control it.

There was a time when popular music was dangerous. When it rattled power, subverted norms, and forced people to feel something real. Now? It’s just a carefully managed feedback loop, where the only thing being disrupted is the illusion that it was ever about the music at all.

What does this all matter?

Music is the leading indicator of all things. Nothing points to the future like music does.

If music shares a vision of a top-down culture where corporations and governments define us and grade us, and where only they can know and act and save us, where they tell the one story, then we will have lost the instruction manual to this planet earth. It’s an instruction manual made of many books scattered all over. Local stories filled with surprising details and unique experiences that must all fit together with great challenges to our own capacity for understanding.

The other day I was writing about what Wendell Berry would say about the tariffs. Since he’s on my mind, I’ll quote him at length here.

The loss of local cultures is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and moreover the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective “operator’s manual for spaceship earth” is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center. Recently, for example, I heard the dean of a prominent college of agriculture interviewed on the radio. What have we learned, he was asked, from last summer’s drouth? And he replied that “we” need to breed more drouth resistance into plants, and that “we” need a government “safety net” for farmers.

He might have said that farmers need to reexamine their farms and their circumstances in light of the drouth, and to think again on such subjects as diversification, scale, and the mutual helpfulness of neighbors. But he did not say that. To him, the drouth was merely an opportunity for agribusiness corporations and the government, by which the farmers and rural communities could only become more dependent on the economy that is destroying them.

This is as good an example as any of the centralized thinking of a centralized economy—to which the only effective answer that I know is a strong local economy and a strong local culture.

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