I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, Or At Least Miley Cyrus

Like many Americans I, for some reason still unknown to me, spent my Sunday night watching the Grammy’s (unlike most Americans I did it wearing a pink snuggie eating spam, which might actually be illegal in Singapore). Now, the Grammy’s are just another reason for celebrities to get together and drink and get free dresses, but unlike the Oscars, I actually watch them. That is because the people at the Grammy’s are at least talented (or in the case of Jenifer Lopez, jumped the fence). Thankfully, this means that the Grammy’s really consist of about five actual awards and a whole bunch of singing. Whereas the Oscars are a bunch of boring people like Nicole Kidman talking a lot and pretending that their jobs require skill and wasn’t just reading and looking good (trust me, if acting took skill Jessica Alba would be a waitress somewhere in Texas).

The only problem sometimes with the Grammy’s is that in their effort to produce “one-of-a-kind” performances, they pair the weirdest people together, which doesn’t so much produce awe-inspiring performance as much as awkward tension. For instance, take the first duet of the night between Elton John and Lady Gaga. One was sexually confused, dressed in strange alien outfits and sings songs about dancing. The other is Lady Gaga. But the awkward pairings weren’t limited to the performers. Ke$ha and Justin Bieber were paired as presenters, but came across looking like a ten-year-old boy and his recently grounded crack-whore sister who was trying to borrow his bike so she could ride down to the abortion clinic.

Now amidst all of that there were some good performances. Coincidentally, they were all from oldies bands, which is further proof that music today sucks. Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck, Andrea Boccelli and Bon Jovi actually sounded good, whereas T-Pain and Jamie Foxx sort of just jumped around while a recording of their song played in the background. Then there was Eminem and Lil Wayne, who I think were rapping. It was sort of hard to tell considering CBS cut all of the sound on entire sections until they looked like some sort of retarded charades game where the answer was always “black people!” I guess I can understand, since CBS was the channel that aired the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl (for those of you who don’t know what I am referring to, surprisingly it does not involve Lady Gaga). But this is hypocritical, considering they are the same station that willingly airs David Caruso uncensored on television.

But for me the highlight of the evening was the tribute to Michael Jackson, which featured Carrie Underwood and four other not as good-looking people who we don’t really care about at this moment. The song was great, but the one thing that bothered me was that the tribute was in 3-D. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a pair of those stupid 3-D glasses just lying around, especially since I started buying generic cereal in bags. So like many of you, the video looked to me like something I would see after I drank an entire bottle of rum and had been smashed over the head with a baseball bat. I blame Avatar for this. After that movie came out, everything has to be 3-D, including C-Span. President Obama tried to get his State of the Union address to be aired in 3-D to make his finger pointing more effective, but he was warned that a 3-D image of Hilary Clinton might cause nationwide panic. Of course, Obama also wanted to show up painted in blue a riding a giant flying lizard and rally the country to fight for Ewa, but that’s a whole other story.

Of course, eventually they had to give out the actual awards. By the way, does anybody think that Stephen Colbert’s daughter was way too big a part of the show? Anyway, the whole awards thing was sort of anticlimactic, since everyone knew that Taylor Swift and Beyonce were going to win everything. In fact, in the unaired segment of the ceremony Swift was named the Pro Bowl MVP. I mean, it was so unexciting that Beyonce wasn’t even there to accept her trophy because she was backstage trying to organize her army of RoboCops (which was apparently made up of the entire unemployed population of Michigan). Of course, Taylor Swift tried to show some mock surprise when she won, but her acting made even Jessica Alba cringe. She could afford to take her time to get up on stage, since at least this time she got to make her acceptance speech with Kanye West noticeably absent (probably because she hired one of the Jonas Brothers to assassinate him).

I’m sure there were other exciting moments that happened, but I have to admit I didn’t watch the entire ceremony. Independence Day was also on TV, so I was sort of switching back and forth. Which led to me mixing up the shows a bit. I mean, at one point I could have sworn I saw Will Smith trying to kill Fergie while the aliens sang with Will.I.Am. Oh wait, never mind that’s actually right.