I accidentally forgot to watch the Grammys Sunday night. OK – it was actually more intentionally accidentally forgetting to watch.

I suppose if I really wanted to watch it I wouldn’t have forgotten to watch it. In fact, if I was even slightly interested, I might have watched it. I simply didn’t care. I purposefully opted out of watching it and purposefully didn’t give it any thought.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love music. I dig the 80’s acts like Prince, Oingo Boingo, and Talking Heads. I’m still a metalhead at heart, a headbanging Metallicat, more Iron than Iron Maiden, and in my dreams I’m still jumping into an Anthrax mosh-pit. I jam old school rock like ACDC, Van Halen, Zeppelin. I like foreign music like Goldfish, Parov Stelar, and Alice Francis. I like old school Jazz and Swing and I like Classical music with a weak spot for Beethoven.

I love music.

You show me a new sound and my ears perk up and it turns me into a one-eyed Ross Perot. In the shower I sing like Geoff Tate and my neighbors agree, often complimenting me by telling me that my vocal chords sounds like I’m torching the Stray Cats. I do like the Stray Cats, though I don’t sing any of their songs.

Wait, maybe they are saying it sounds like I’m torturing Stray Cats, but that doesn’t seem like much of a compliment, so I’ll stick to the prior.

But while I love music, these award shows have long lost my interest. In 1989 the Grammys had a new category Best Hard Rock/Metal. Those of us old school Metallicats will remember this day for a long time. That night Jethro Tull’s album won and many of us felt like Metallica was robbed. But just like in sports, when your team gets robbed of a victory by a referees bad call you don’t just stop watching, right?

No, it takes more than that. Perhaps it’s miss after miss that eventually I realized I like what I like and hardware handed out at an awards show isn’t going to change my mind. The same is true with the Oscars and film festivals. When a movie trailer starts off with “Academy Award Winner” or proclamations of its film festival victories, you know the film is going to suck. Sometimes they get it right, but more often than not they get it wrong.

And though I learned the rule, “If it won awards, it sucks,” I had a movie recommended to me that was supposed to be terrific and won Academy Awards. So I watched it. That movie? The Pianist. Now, you might think it was a good movie, but what I saw a was a coward who’d would never stand up against the Nazis, even while he watched all his friends and family die at their hands. In the end he was a vagrant crawling on his knees and hiding in rubble. And though the movie celebrates this man’s ability to survive, I trudged through a harrowing movie that celebrated a coward, the kind that makes despotism possible.

Award shows aren’t for me, but somehow, I always end up hearing about what happened. Last year I was laid up in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, but no, I wasn’t in enough agony, the television had to slap me with Will Smith smacking Chris Rock.  This year I got to find out who Sam Smith is. Thanks for that Grammys, my IQ dropped 10 points by learning about him. In fact, we are all dumber today because we now know who Sam Smith is. And what was that Shania Twain was wearing? Is she trying to become a moo-vie star?

Gone are the days when stars were debonair and urbane. Now they strut around in clothes unsuitable even for clowns. We’re expected to applaud their style, yet we’d laugh at a co-worker showing up to any event dressed like much of the today’s stars. They spend thousands of dollars and look like wealthy idiots. If a designer made a dress or tux out of horse manure, they’d all clamor to be the star to wear it.

And I’ll only mention their political grandstanding. It’s annoying to everybody as we all know but failing to mention it is well negligent. That just one more reason to not watch it. These award shows have long been dominated by the less intelligent and the lowest class of America. They are who they are, looking for some new way to be edgy, maybe they’ll even do something sexual because nobody ever does that, right?

They aren’t edgy, they’re morons.

They’re about as creative as Seth Rogen making himself laugh by cussing and talking about pot. Unoriginal, but in fairness he only does it when he doesn’t have something funny to say, which is most of the time. Every decade of music has some amazing gems, but this decade is the exception with many of today’s songs being revised hits of the past.

All the awards shows prove is that we as Americans are racing towards the apocalypse. We’re following the lemmings on the stage as they lead us off the cliff. These idols of today’s music world are busy teaching people to be failures, convincing people to live a life of emptiness by their example. They encourage people to pursue the same emptiness they exhibit when the constantly try to be more outrageous than each other. They desperately clamor for people’s attention, and we unwittingly give them what they seek.

All Sam Smith and CBS are going to do is think they got the attention they wanted. Poor Will Smith, what will he do now that his apology tour must come to an end? We’re all better off without them infecting our lives with that stupidity. And if Sam Smith is so “non-binary,” why is the song Unholy so exclusionary of other genders besides male and female? Shouldn’t he be more aware than the rest of us and be more inclusive?

These simply are not the kind of people we should look up to in any kind of way. Surely there are other artist far more deserving of our attention.