So the Grammy Awards show just happened — no, I didn’t watch it either — and to the amazement of the modern music industry, the likes of Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Adele and Lizzo (all women, or very close to being one) all lost out in the Best Song category to a complete nobody, a complete unknown (to them) named Bonnie Raitt.
“Who?” they asked. “What’s she ever done? I’ve never even seen her on InstaGram or Tik-Tok!”
As this article points out, and as anyone over 50 would know, this “unknown” Bonnie Raitt (73) has already won fourteen (14) Grammys before, and was been inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame (a dubious honor, but nevertheless).
The fact that Bonnie’s wonderful Nick Of Time album won just about everything back in 1989 — long before most of these Gen Z twerps were even born — will no doubt come as a shock, but there you go.
So well done, me old darling. You’ve certainly given this self-absorbed bunch of weenies something to talk about.
Maybe kids today weren’t/aren’t forced to listen to their parents music. Growing up I had a Sony Walkman (walkperson?), but that required carrying extra batteries and several cassettes.
The result was that my parents gave me an appreciation for 50’s and 60’s music that was before my time (in addition to “current” 70s/80s country music). My father used to blast his music on our home stereo (a 1970s reel-to-reel that I still own and use). Then of course there were the road trips where I wasn’t permitted to take control of the stereo until I was old enough to buy my own car.
My 16-year old is as out of touch on my music as I am on hers (probably more-so).
If kids don’t know classic music, at some point it isn’t their fault. It’s just bad parenting.
I worked at a place where most of us listened to some sort of walkman type device. In modern form it was a phone or MP3 player of some sort. Instead of swapping music to listen to, i asked a younger co worker what he was listening to and gave his music a try. He asked what I was listening to and he had never heard of such groups as The Who, Rolling Stones, CCR, etc. Jaime was a good kid and his mother worked with us part time so I told him that it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know classic rock. I told him that I’d give his mother a hard time when she came in on Saturday for not educating her son.
JQ
I’ve noticed a string of female singers who have adopted Bonnie Raitt’s singing style and voice.
Susan Tedeschi for one and another one on a State Farm TV commercial, just to mention a couple.
Maybe it’s just me. I sometimes hear what I can only assume passes for Todays music from current singers. It all sounds the same. some mumbled incomprehensible lyrics repeated in a single key with little to no variation, all drowned out by bad ” Background music”. Then somewhere along the line, there’s a single change in pitch to a different level of mumbled incomprehensible lyrics.
Do I have it right?
Don’t forget the auto-tune.
I’m a longtime Bonnie Raitt fan. Boucoup talent. Plus a hot redhead who can sling a guitar. What’s not to like? My favorite version of a classic Mose Allison song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwUswWA7cRc
When I was a 22 year old man, I considered Bonnie Raitt the second most beautiful woman alive, short of my late wife only. She’s got cigarette lips (those wrinkles caused by too many puffs on a cigarette), but otherwise she’s still rocking it. And I can’t believe that they gave her best song, instead of best blues or something similar.
I’ve been a fan of Bonnie Raitt since her first album. Looking up that album on Wikipedia brought back memories of the album cover and the song list. She wasn’t from here in Minnesota, but she had a close connection to Minnesota music. I’ve played Bocce Ball with her friend John Koerner at parties by a lake in northern Minnesota (the group would work back and forth along the shore, regularly stopping at the keg and getting tangled in the woodpile, the Sauna, and the rather rustic music stage.)