Also in the Times today, Jeff Leeds looks at Grammy preparations, leding with the travails of Amy Winehouse. The story vouchsafes that Winehouse is “troubled” but primly doesn’t say what most people would, which is that Winehouse is too busy drinking and drugging herself to death to play a club gig, much less get her ass on a plane and rehearse and pull off a performance on live TV. (Her most recent filmed appearance was a video that supposedly shows her smoking crack.)

Leeds is a smart guy, and he is presumably more in touch with what’s going on at the Grammys than I am, but is it really true that Winehouse “was expected to be the dominant figure at the 50th annual awards ceremony”? When was the last time a contemporaneously artistically vibrant figure was dominant at the Grammys?*

Too much of this article blithely accepts both the Grammys as a whole and anything its organizers say at face value. For example:

Mr. Ehrlich said he faced an added challenge this year, in that the nominees in the major categories did not necessarily intersect with the roster of the last few decades’ most well-known stars. (Bruce Springsteen’s album “Magic” had been seen as a likely album of the year contender but failed to draw a nomination.)

“Even 5 or 10 years ago there were 15 or 20 names that were universal,” Mr. Ehrlich said. Today, he added, “there are a great number of extremely popular acts, great live acts, but I don’t know that we have that same number of what we used to call one-name acts.”

First, the “added challenge” Ehrlich talks about is of course a perennial one; how to deal with the unavoidable fact that the woolyheaded NARAS membership is out of touch with music, both commercially and critically speaking. Second, NARAS has a way of dealing with this “challenge”: it has a secret committee that is empowered to tweak the nominations list to get more commercially appealing artists onto the show, so it will get higher ratings. Isn’t that’s NARAS’s primary concern?

The article ends with a passage that might have come out of the Onion, except that it’s more in the realm of the “unfunny preposterous,” rather than “funny preposterous”:

The academy has also rolled out an upmarket fashion line, with belts, jackets and other apparel, that will be sold at boutique retail stores.

The clothing line and other recent promotions reflect “a watershed moment for us,” said Evan Greene, chief marketing officer for the academy. “It’s really a tremendous opportunity for us to sort of direct how our brand is perceived moving forward. Where brands get themselves in trouble, especially brands in a leadership position, is where they start to get comfortable.”

Hey—I’ll trade you my Christopher Cross belt buckle for your Starland Vocal Band tour jacket! Oh yeah? Well, I have a Shelby Lynne baseball cap. Inside, it has some interesting “artist facts”! Did you know that she won a “best new artist” Grammy in 2001, even though she’d been releasing albums for a dozen years and had had a hit single back in 1988?

* Okay, friendo: It was Outkast, a couple of years ago. One of the interesting random weirdnesses about the Grammys is that it has arguably been relatively—I said relatively—perceptive about black music. The organization seems somehow more in tune with black pop than any other form of popular music. Stevie Wonder’s dominance in the 1970s is the best evidence of this, though more recent “album of the year” wins by Lauryn Hill and Outkast count as well. (Let’s leave Natalie Cole out of it. A lot of the Grammy awards in the 1970s, for some reason, were quite defensible. They never quite recognized the most vital recordings of the time, but they weren’t, year in and year out, the morass of absurdities and ephemera they have been in the years since.) Winehouse’s dizzying mastery of a tricked-out classic R&B sound might conceivably fall into this pattern, but beside the fact that it’s hard to imagine NARAS giving a major award to someone who might be dead of an overdose before the ceremony, if Winehouse were to win album of the year it would be by far the most radical award in the organization’s history.