Was 1992 the Worst Grammys Ever?
Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorAnyone who feels the Grammy Awards can be stodgy today might want to consider how far the show has come since the 1990s.Not only was it an utterly abysmal time for fashion — The hair! The shoulder pads! The big, stiff suits! — but the music industry was riding the CD boom, which took profits to hitherto-unimagined heights and made hubris balloon even faster: The titans of the industry thought, as they often do, “We have made it, we’ll just keep doing exactly the same thing over and over and the masses will give us more and more money!” The sounds of the future — hip-hop, alternative, heavy metal — got obligatory new categories as a patronizing pat on the head for “the youngsters” (as Ed Sullivan, the mainstream entertainment curator of the Boomer generation, used to call them). By the early 1990s, the Grammy voting body had become ever more out-of-touch, complacent, arrogant and, most of all, old.