The Grammys for 2010 are over and I have to admit I didn't really watch the awards show.  I did, however, catch snippets of it and have to conclude that the musical world has passed me by.  I'm not quite sure what I was doing but clearly it wasn't keeping up with what is happening and has happened when it comes to popular music.  Oh, I recognize the names of a few of the performers and know that I have heard a few of the award winning songs, but for the most part, the Grammys are but one more award show that I don't watch.

 

Along with the Grammys there is the C&W awards show for music.  I've lost count for the number of awards shows there are for movies and TV.  They seem to be growing like the reality shows.  Someone comes up with a winning show and it is copied over and over again.  I think there are two creative minds in the arts - one for movies and one for music.  Everyone else take their clues from them.

 

But I digress.  The reason I mention the Grammys is because I think I am in the same position that my parents were sixty years ago when rock 'n roll came on the scene.  My parent's genre for music was that of the thirties and forties.  It was the era of singers like Frank Sinatra, Vera Lynn and the rest.  It was the era of the big bands such as Sammy Kaye, Glenn Miller and the rest.

 

When Bill Haley and the Comets arrived, those of my parent's age didn't understand it and didn't like it.  They thought that the new music was the slippery slope to ruin and damnation.  They tried their best not to listen to it although it was filling the airways and record stores.  But we teenagers of that time thrived on it.  I sometimes wonder if it was, in part, a teen rebellion against parental control.

 

So it is again, only sixty years later.  Hip hop, R&B, Rap and all the rest reigns supreme.  Artists like Beyoncé, Black Eye Peas, Taylor Swift (I've heard of them) were in the running.  So was Lady Gaga (I wonder who came up with that name).  And so it is that now I am the not-with-it-generation.  I don't really understand what is happening in the music world, but unlike those of my parent's generation I don't hate it.  For the most part I just let it pass me by.  I am stuck in the 1950s and 1960s and quite content to be there. 

 

As for the younger generation of today, I simply smile.  Sixty years from now it will be their turn to not understand and perhaps hate the music of the teenagers of that day.  As they say, what goes 'round comes 'round.