The Grammys Go to High School.

• Author: PARELES, JON
• Position: Brief Article

This year, teen bands are up for awards in all the major categories. Have the Grammys lost their fuddy-duddy minds?

The Grammy Awards discovered teenagers this year. When the 42nd annual Grammy Awards are handed out on February 23, music by and for teenagers will be all over the top categories. Ricky Martin, TLC, the Backstreet Boys, and 'N Sync all have multiple nominations, while Best New Artist could be a battle of the ex-Mouseketeers: Britney Spears, 17, and Christina Aguilera, 19, are both contenders. For the Grammys, it's a veritable youth movement. Which raises an impertinent question: What took so long?

The short answer is that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization formed to give out the Grammy Awards, doesn't trust young whippersnappers. The Grammys are music's equivalent of the Oscars: awards given by people in the business to their colleagues, who are attempting to recognize quality as distinct from commercial clout (though hits still have a definite advantage). But most music fans take the Grammys with more than a grain of salt. The 10,000 academy members who vote are the people who do the grunt work as well as the glamour jobs in the music business: not just recognizable faces but studio musicians, producers, engineers, mixers, art directors, liner-note writers, and anyone else who has amassed credits on at least six albums.

So Britney Spears, with only one album, can't vote for herself. But a record-company vice president who's listed as executive producer for a dozen albums no one liked can fill in a ballot every year, as long as his or her academy dues are paid up.

SAP, NOT RAP

With music-business pros casting the votes, it's inevitable that the Grammys are going to be conservative. From the beginning, they have favored music that aims for professionalism: not rude, innovative rock, or hip-hop, but pretty, even sappy ballads. The Grammys got started soon after the birth of rock `n' roll in the 1950s, and for years they were downright reactionary. The early voters were used to the Tin Pan Alley system: songwriters wrote songs, producers chose and arranged them, and singers just sang. They didn't like self-made music or scruffy outsiders, so they ignored the likes of Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley to give awards to Henry Mancini and Bobby Darin. For 1965, the year Bob Dylan invented folk-rock with Bringing It All Back Home and the Beatles transformed pop-rock with Rubber Soul, the Grammys' Album...