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Get free articles and features available only to subscribers. For armchair quarterbacks of a musical persuasion, the only activity more entertaining than watching the annual Grammy awards is second-guessing the choices. With the Grammy's forty-ninth night of nights coming up February 11, we couldn't resist surveying the golden girl's all-time most glaring slights.
With 20/20 hindsight, Grammy watchers expect a degree of prescience from the National Academy of Recording Arts Sciences; we expect that this year's Best Song will still be hummed, downloaded and karaoke-butchered ages and ages hence. It hasn't always worked that way. At the Academy's first-ever fête, in 1959, competition for Album of the Year included Ella Fitzgerald singing the Irving Berlin songbook, Frank Sinatra's swingin' Come Fly with Me and Van Cliburn's triumphant Tchaikovsky: Concerto No.
1 in B Flat Minor, Op. 23. These contenders lost out to the soundtrack for the TV series Peter Gunn.
Five years later, Maurice Jarre's majestic score to Lawrence of Arabia lost, in two different categories, to the films Tom Jones and Mondo Cane. (Mondo what?!
) Also in the Best Score category, the Academy forsook Mikis Theodorakis's Zorba the Greek for Johnny Mandel's The Sandpiper in 1965 and, as 1968's Best Instrumental Theme, anointed Mason Williams's Classical Gas rather than Hugo Montenegro's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Jazz, folk, country and Broadway have not been spared Grammy's cold shoulder. While few among us would disparage Henry Mancini's heart-tugging "Moon River," did our Huckleberry friend really deserve to best Dave Brubeck's trailblazing "Take Five" in 1961?
In 1964, did Gale Garnett's "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" deserve the gold over Bob Dylan's "The Times, They Are A-Changin'"? Was Jeannie C. Riley's 1968 "Harper Valley P.
T.A." a better vocal than Tammy Wynette's twangy tearjerker, "D-I-V-O-R-C-E"?
And then there was 1996, when the award for Best Album from a Musical went not to the exuberant, genre-blending Rent but to Celtic kitsch-fest Riverdance. The Best New Artist category, always a good barometer of the clarity or cloudiness of the Academy's crystal ball, shows that 1967 was a cloudy year; Jefferson Airplane was up for the award, but the Academy decided it wanted somebody else to love, in the person of Bobbie Gentry. Elton John lost to The Carpenters in 1970, Indigo Girls to lip-synchers Milli Vanilli in 1989, Alanis Morissette to Hootie the Blowfish in 1995.
In classical categories, the slights are a notch more subtle. Certainly Pierre Boulez conducting Berg's Wozzeck was a thoroughly commendable pick in 1967, but wouldn't a more blood-quickening selection have been Julius Rudel at the podium, with Beverly Sills in the footlights, for Handel's Julius Caesar? In 1992, wouldn't Cecilia Bartoli's scorching Rossini Heroines have proved a more forward-thinking choice than a posthumous nod to Leonard Bernstein for Mahler's Ninth?
Competing for Best Classical Vocal Soloist, the redoubtable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was Grammy's version of Susan Lucci, losing out year after year — once apiece to Eileen Farrell, Montserrat Caballé, Beverly Sills and Janet Baker, twice to Luciano Pavarotti and a remarkable nine times to Leontyne Price — although he did score statuettes in 1970 and 1972. The same cannot be said of still-Grammyless Philip Glass. The composer's landmark opera Satyagraha lost in 1985 to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem; his Company to Witold Lutoslawski's Symphony No.
3 in 1986; and his evocative score to The Hours to Howard Shore's schlocky The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2003. If these are slights, they pale in comparison with the reactionary treatment Grammy has given her rock 'n' rollers through the years. In 1965, The Beatles' "Help!
" and "Yesterday" lost to The Statler Brothers and Herb Alpert the Tijuana Brass. The following year, the Fab Four's "Eleanor Rigby," along with the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and The Mamas The Papas' "Monday, Monday," all fell before the dubious charms of The New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral." A little ditty called "Mrs.
Robinson" was up for 1968's Song of the Year but lost to a slightly less enduring chestnut called "Little Green Apples," while in 1972, Don McLean's haunting rock elegy, "American Pie," was passed over in three different categories. Three singers at the top of their form — Bruce Springsteen in Born in the U.S.
A., Tina Turner in Private Dancer and Prince in Purple Rain — numbered among the contenders for 1984's Album of the Year, but pabulum-popster Lionel Richie nabbed the prize. Fast-forward to 1990, when "Nothing Compares 2 U," beautifully, harrowingly sung by Sinead O'Connor, fell to "Another Day in Paradise" by mainstream mainstay Phil Collins.
Who will emerge as the latest crop of Grammy groaners? February 11 is the date for television viewers to turn on, tune in and find out. 
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