The Grammys and Cultural Centralization

Seth Rogen brought up an interesting point on an episode of LeBron James’s show The Shop a few years ago. Basically he lamented that the award for best movie always goes to some art house film, and not actually the movie that the most people enjoyed.

“More people have seen Pineapple Express in the last 10 years than Dances With Wolves”, he joked.

He has a point. When talking about film as art, why is there a small cohort of “experts” deciding what is “best”? Shouldn’t the consumers of art have a say? Or would that turn into the Grammys, the official award of cultural homogenization?

When talking about these award shows, and analyzing the winners and losers, the whole thing starts to feel a little bit like Gell-Mann Amnesia, a coin termed by Michael Crichton.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” 
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

Let’s say there is a genre of music you know really well. In my case that is Rap and Hip-Hop. The Grammys have historically been notoriously poor in selecting nominees in that category. I could pull up the entire history, but all that needs to be known is that Macklemore once won Best Rap Album over Kendrick Lamar. A grievance so egregious that Macklemore famously called up Kendrick afterwards to apologize. This has been obvious to me since I was a kid. Award shows are rigged. From one of my favorite albums (astonishingly from 1997):

“See, he keeps it clear, and he strikes the fear, and he caught a Grammy for marketing strategy of the year.” - Atmosphere (1997)

Even Jay-Z said this week that the Grammys are “a marketing thing”. If we know that the critics are horribly out of touch and misinformed about one genre, shouldn’t we assume they are that way about the rest of it? Gell-Man Amnesia. And who exactly are these mysterious voters that artists are marketing to and trying to impress? What does all of this to do the quality/content of art in the aggregate?

Money controls what art is proliferated, only the proliferated art gets award recognition, and award recognition generates more money.

This creates a vicious cycle of centralization of culture. Anyone is allowed to make art, and true art generates true fans, but true art still does not have equal opportunity in monetization. This theme is not dissimilar to many institutions in America. A small cohort of people telling the masses what is good/bad, right/wrong, virtuous/sinful without explaining the rules, or the science behind the decisions. The inverse of a Grammy win is to be canceled. You “say all the right shibboleths” (to quote SBF) and you get a trophy. You go against the tribe, you risk getting your platform revoked. These are some of the inherent risks we accept as participating in a centralized system.

Let’s take a moment to examine what a TikTok or YouTube award ceremony look like if they had a full blown Creator of the Year event in a decentralized manner. Awards would be voted on or determined by metrics. Whether that is plays, or likes, or views, or view-to-completion, or total duration, there are any number of ways to objectively say who “won” on the platform each year.

Why aren’t Grammys that way? Obviously because we can’t trust the “non-experts” (ie consumers) to make that judgement call. Marvel movies and Taylor Swift would sweep every category every year. Is that bad? To cultural elitists, yes. I can commiserate. I’m a hip hop snob, a beer snob, a stand up comedy snob. Everyone is a snob on some level, whether that is the brand of shoe you wear or the brand of mayonnaise you buy. (Loro Piana and Trader Joe’s Organic if you are wondering)

The awards are important, too. They mean something to society as they are objectively monetizable, but increasingly people don’t care about the awards, and are actively mocking them or gravitating away. Eminem said he will not attend the Grammy ceremony any longer. This is what happens when centralization gets out of touch with consensus and conventional wisdom. Institutional fail, distrust is sowed. Writers leave the NYT for Substack.

There is a lot of talk about decentralization in many different markets. Manufacturing was centralized in China for years, but now for resiliency many organizations are onshoring that responsibility. Megacorporations are constantly losing their best talent to start startups. Technology in general is becoming more decentralized as open source software proliferates vs what was formerly private intellectual property. This is the major macro societal trend that the ethos of cryptocurrencies were tapping into. DEXs and DAOs. Decentralized power was the goal, not the rampant speculation on top of centralized market rails. The problem with centralization of culture is not inherently that a small group controls resources. That structure actually works for many things, such as small businesses, or raising families. The problem is that if one must centralize, it is the choosing of the elite that is most important. Los Angeles chose Jonathon Gold as the steward of restaurant reviews for many years, and it served them well. Lots of people look to Anthony Fantano for music now (for some reason). NBA fans chose Zach Lowe as their analyst, and with his single vote for NBA awards, he does a fantastic job of publicly detailing his thinking process and criteria each year (because so much is at stake for these players).

The thing about controlling the art that proliferates is that it is our culture. It is the background noise of our day, it is our relaxation at night, it is in our heads when we shower, and in our cars on our commute. It increasingly shapes the way we think and feel about the world.

If Taylor Swift says to vote for X politician, we do what she says. Nobody really cared about global warming until Leo made a documentary about it (sorry Al Gore!). I am definitely not telling Taylor and Leo to “shut up and dribble”, but I am asking that you as a consumer think about the origination of their proliferations. Of course they have talent, and they had to walk the walk once the door was opened, but that door doesn’t open for everyone. A mysterious thumb on the scale can influence millions of people’s opinions decades later.

Obviously this extends into politics. Another form of, or even an extension of, cultural elitism. “I don’t like this person because [insert homogenized cultural opinion here]”. As Balaji documented in his book The Network State, historically those who end up controlling the culture or controlling what’s moral or virtuous end up controlling the state and the with it the resources. Power centralizes until morality groups pop up against it and rebel.

What does it all mean Basil? Transparency in the Grammys and Oscars? Who is voting? What is their criteria? Of the entire corpus of content produced each year, which stuff was actually reviewed by each voter? Are you just salty about Macklemore from 7 years ago? There is too much content for each voter to consume it all, and clearly there is a bias towards marketing dollars as it pushes the content to the front of the reviewing line. I have a hard time believing name recognition didn’t play into Ozzy Osbourne winning a Grammy in 2023, the same way it got Trump an election in 2016. With the Oscars there is a bias towards elitism and snobbery which I am all for, but it’s like a hot sauce competition. If the hottest sauce is only consumable by a few people, does that make it best?

Once again any topic can be boiled down to energy or education. This all boils down to an education issue. We simply don’t want people voting who are uneducated when it comes to art. We want to trust the “experts” for their opinion, but we are also trusting them to not be corrupt. It was once suggested to me by someone extremely wealthy (with the best intentions) that we should have a test to allow people to vote in Presidential elections. I quickly retorted that would end up having huge cultural bias depending on who crafted the test. Decentralization and transparency is the solution, not increased centralization and obfuscation. People should be educated enough to call bullshit when ridiculous things happen, like Macklemore even being considered for a Grammy, let alone winning one. We need to impart more critical thinking into society, question how the experts and critics got into place, and hold them accountable for their representation.

All over Europe they have a value added tax (VAT) that gets inserted into each leg of the supply chain. This is to ensure that there isn’t a middle man extracting all the value and that each leg of the chain actually "adds value”. This is what we should do with our consumption of media, culture, politics, and art. How did this proliferate and why? Is it real, and what do I think about it? Come to conclusions before seeking outside opinion. BYOB: Bring Your Own Brain.