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.

In the WSJ today ($) there’s a feature on Levon Helm, who has been holding a Sunday jam session at his Woodstock home for several years and released an album last year. The article, however, is breathlessly pegged to the Grammys:

It’s a long way from the sugar maples of upstate New York to the klieg lights of Los Angeles, but Levon Helm is Grammy-bound. It’s been a long time coming for the veteran drummer, singer and actor whose storied career with the Band and Bob Dylan took him to the summit of rock stardom in the ’70s. Whatever the impact of the writers’ strike on the event itself, Mr. Helm will be an honoree come Sunday.

Helm is getting a lifetime achievement award as a member of the Band, and an album he recorded is up for best traditional folk album. The Journal story raises two issues:

• As I wrote recently, the confounding thing about the Grammys is the myriad absurdist questions that come up whenever you try to focus on virtually anything that has to do with the misbegotten, silly awards and the organization that dispenses them. Why is Helm being nominated as a folk artist? Like Bruce Springsteen, he’s a faded rock artist dabbling in a slightly different genre, and benefiting from his celebrity involvement in it. (Springsteen won a best folk album Grammy for his pinched “Seeger Sessions” album a couple of years ago.) Why is the Band getting a lifetime achievement award now, 22 and nine years, respectively, after the deaths of Richard Manuel and Rick Danko? And, um, I was just reading the Wall Street Journal, which wrote this about the Band:

The Band’s first two albums — “Music From Big Pink” (1968) and “The Band” (1969) — remain timeless classics. From 19th-century folk ballads to modern-day R&B, the group had found a way to distill traditional music without sacrificing the spirit of rock. They were anachronists with soul, their voices locking into harmonies that were refreshingly unsophisticated for the time, and they were self-sufficient. Each played a variety of instruments, three of them sang lead and they all benefited from Mr. Robertson’s songwriting genius.

Boy: “timeless’; “classics”; “genius.” Why haven’t they ever won a Grammy before?

• I have a lot of respect for Ashley Kahn, whom I know from NPR and who wrote the Journal piece, but why do the Grammys get credit for recognizing an artist now, when it never paid attention to him when he was young and important and, um, good? The journalistic issue, for which I blame the Journal’s editors, is a slightly finer one: Why doesn’t this get mentioned? I don’t know of a reliable resource that has a complete list of Grammy nominations, but odds are the Band were never even nominated for their signal albums, which include “The Band,” “Music from Big Pink,” “Rock of Ages,” and “The Last Waltz,” not to mention their deserving co-billing on “The Basement Tapes,” “Before the Flood” and “Planet Waves.”

In closing, I would propose Hitsville’s First Rule of Grammy Coverage: In giving NARAS credit for any nominations of an actual great recording artist, the article should give in complete detail the organization’s historical disregard for the artist in question.

How the Grammys, set for Feb. 10, will be affected by the writers strike is the subject of an NYT Jeff Leeds story:

The Grammy Awards on Feb. 10 were supposed to be a balm to the ailing music industry, a 50th-anniversary celebration of artistry and longevity at a time of mass layoffs and sharply declining sales. Instead the music world began bracing for the latest havoc from the continuing strike by Hollywood writers, as a stalemate with the Writers Guild of America threatened to force record labels and organizers of the Grammy Awards to proceed with a show with severely diminished star wattage.

This is of course another dispatch from the “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people” desk. Interesting tidbit farther down in the story: “Grammy organizers said the show would proceed even if striking writers picket the ceremony, held at the Staples Center arena here.” If that happened, we will be able to see which pop, rap and rock stars find it expedient to cross a picket line. You can be sure that Kanye West will walk past strikers, starving children, and the bleeding to get to the ceremony; but the story also specifically and pointedly mentions Alicia Keys, who has performed for the striking writers, and the Foo Fighters, both of whom are also on the show’s current schedule.

The Foo Fighters are playing because, in a classic piece of Grammys randomness, it was suddenly decided that Dave Grohl had made one of the best records of the year, a distinction his former band never received.

Entertainment industry awards show range from the defensible (for better or worse a scrupulously overseen accounting of Hollywood’s feelings about itself) to the indefensible (just about all the others). The Grammys are a special case, existing in its own category of badness, for many but particularly these three reasons:

• Decades of awards that consistently fall upon on a spectrum ranging from the haphazard or the absurdist to the silly and the just plain wrong. To ask how the Foo Fighters become an album-of-the-year band is to ask why Evanescence (or Maroon 5, or Paula Cole, or Hootie & the Blowfish) was a best new artist, or why U2, after a 20-something-year career, is suddenly routinely winning album, song and record of the year awards.

And whatever happened to Christopher Cross, anyway?

• Michael Greene, the renegade NARAS CEO, and MusiCares, the worst charity in the history of the world. The Academy let Greene run wild for so long that the LA Times’ Chuck Philips and Michael A. Hiltzik eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the corruption. Among other things, MusiCares was found to have devoted about one percent of the money it raised to, uh, caring.

• Speaking of corruption, the Grammys, as you know, reflects the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ views of the best recordings of the year. Since those members, as we have seen, are boneheads, but also, and more importantly, because the group makes a ton of money of its awards show on TV each year and has to beef up ratings, its leadership devised a crafty scheme some years back. (This aspect of the Academy’s voting procedures is almost never mentioned in coverage of the awards.) It allows a secret committee secretly to revise the nominations in the top four categories. (Album, song and record of the year, and best new artist.) This allows the leadership to proceed with a show that might not only contain fewer embarrassments but also, not coincidentally, feature a nominations lineup of artists with a bigger fan base than, say, latter-day Steely Dan, not to mention a younger one.