Posthumous awards are for fallen soldiers. Artists get them only when someone hasn't been paying attention.
The Grammy Awards are into their 49th year, with a fresh batch of trophies and honours to be given out this week, culminating in tomorrow night's live TV broadcast.
Several prizes will go to dead people who never got a chance to thank their managers on camera while they were alive.
Maria Callas, Jim Morrison (and the Doors), Jerry Garcia (and the Grateful Dead) and Bob Wills are all going to get their first taste of Grammy favour, through the Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award.
That prize, which might as well be called the Better Late Than Never Award, is just one of the means through which the academy acts out its growing preoccupation with the dead and the defunct.
Another is its newfound interest in reviving bands that expired long ago.
One of the draws for Sunday's broadcast is a reunion by the Police, which disbanded in 1984.
The academy wanted a similar reunion of Sly and the Family Stone for last year's broadcast, but since that group was beyond retrieving it was simulated by a posse of stars (Sly Stone, who hadn't been on a stage in two decades, walked on for a few minutes and left). True to form, the original Family Stone was never noticed in its prime by the academy, even though it played at Woodstock.
Joan Baez also played at Woodstock, and she too is getting a Lifetime Achievement Award this year.
I don't know what the betting line is on such things, but I'm prepared to stake a small sum that eventually everyone who appeared at Woodstock will get one of these awards, as a penance and guilt offering. Woodstock represents everything that the academy wasn't paying attention to during the golden age of rock, namely rock itself. The first Grammy for a rock recording wasn't given out till 1980, by which time even the Sex Pistols weren't around any more.
For the music-industry boomers who now control the distribution of Grammy awards, that late recognition must be painful to contemplate. No wonder they made Jimi Hendrix a lifetime achiever in 1992, though it's unclear why Jimi had to wait six years longer than the Rolling Stones, who aside from Brian Jones weren't even dead.
The academy's penchant for rewarding the dead for the whole extent of what they did while alive got started with Charlie Parker in 1984.
Parker missed getting a real Grammy by dying too early: He blew his final chorus in 1955, four years before Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie got the first jazz Grammys in 1959. Since then, Enrico Caruso, Billie Holiday, Igor Stravinsky, Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, Arturo Toscanini, Marvin Gaye and (last year) Robert Johnson have all been toasted in the grave as lifetime achievers.
The presence on that list of Caruso, the tenor who became the world's first big recording star, shows that the academy's necrophilia may be linked to its own sense of its role in history.
The main business of the Grammy Awards is to applaud present success, but the academy seems to have embraced the idea that it should also put its seal on important achievements from the whole era of recorded sound. Stay tuned for Better Late Than Never awards for George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Bix Beiderbecke and Sophie Tucker.
Another big reason the academy has one eye on the grave is that the boomer generation and its superstars are closer to the end of the trip than the beginning.
Bob Dylan turned 65 this year. A lot of iconic figures who flamed out early, such as Hendrix, Morrison and Janis Joplin, have been dead for longer than they were alive. Getting the band together one more time, as the academy is doing this year with the Police, and as Live 8 did two years ago with Pink Floyd, is partly about denying transience and finality, especially as they affect performers who defined the sounds of a generation's youth.
2005 was the Year of the Dead for the Grammy Awards. The recently deceased Ray Charles was the star of the show, taking eight awards. Alicia Keys and Jamie Foxx apotheosized him with a duet, and Joss Stone and Melissa Etheridge (bald from recent chemotherapy) did the same for lifetime achiever Joplin.
Tim McGraw performed Like You Were Dying, U2 did a single that Bono dedicated to his dead father, and Gretchen Wilson and Johnny Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd (a band known in part for the plane crash that killed or seriously injured all of its members in 1977) performed Free Bird, which begins If I leave here tomorrow / would you still remember me? But nobody expressed the necrophilic vibe better than Kanye West, who appeared to die while performing his single Jesus Walks, and was resurrected as a white-clad angel with giant feathery wings.
Fortunately, a return from the dead is possible for rock bands, if only temporarily.
Sunday's show will be at least the second recent reunion for the Police, which played together at the time of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. And even bands that seem broken beyond repair still have back-catalogues. In the 35 years since Jim Morrison's death, the remaining members of the Doors have spent more time feuding over the legacy than making music together, but with the 40th anniversary of the band's disc debut at hand, they've got a new box set on the market, and a band-written coffee-table book, with an official documentary on the way.
All that activity has to bump up the lifetime achievement a few clicks. And even when all the Doors have left the Earth, their residue will remain. When your product is recorded music, death shall have no dominion.
The Grammy Awards are broadcast live tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and Global.
Record of the year: One of those categories that defines alternate views of the world, whether sweet and cheerful (Corinne Bailey Rae's Put Your Records On), passionate and world-wary (Gnarls Barkley's Crazy) or grandly self-absorbed (Mary J. Blige's Be Without You). Crazy by a length.
Album of the year: Should go to Gnarls Barkley, the only nominee whose work showed any real depth, but will go to Justin Timberlake, because the ability to see through his shallow simulations is apparently not widespread.
New artist: Chris Brown will take this, because he won a similar prize at the recent Billboard Awards (plus artist of the year), and because this singing, dancing, acting man is bound to remind people of Jamie Foxx.
Pop collab with vocals: Another defining choice, between the venerable fogeydom of For Once in My Life (Tony Bennett Stevie Wonder), the cheese-and-chalk revision of One (Mary J.
Blige and U2) and the fresh-cut beat-mongering of Promiscuous (Nelly Furtado and Timbaland). Timbaland Nelly take it.
Pop vocal album: Two former Mouseketeers go nose to nose, as Justin Timberlake (FutureSex / LoveSounds) tries to outswivel Christina Aguilera (Back to Basics).
Xtina's album is a bit self-indulgent, but it's got a nervy kind of ambition, while Timbo's latest is all cold calculation.
Rock album: The Raconteurs should take this with Broken Boy Soldiers, but it will likely go to Neil Young (Living With War), because his subject is timely and he's a living legend, eh?
Alternative album: A hard choice between the Arctic Monkeys' vivid kitchen-sink debut (Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not), Thom Yorke's existential nocturnes (The Eraser) and Gnarls Barkley's knowing introspection (St.
Elsewhere). I'd like a three-way tie, but St. Elsewhere will probably prevail.
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