John Roderick's Rhetoric This Week

John Roderick of the Long Winters has dinner with Alan Parsons. An excerpt:

You see, I'm a member of the Recording Academy, which is the organization that puts on the Grammy Awards. Technically, I guess, I'm partly responsible for how terrible and irrelevant the Grammy Awards are, because although I'm supposed to vote on the winners I've never bothered to actually figure out the ballot and choose which excremental hip-hop video deserves to be video of the year, etc. My failure to vote means that winners are all chosen by ninety-year-old producers from Nashville who had one hit with Kenny Loggins back in '78. I look at the Academy mostly as a sort of fraternal organization, like the Benevolent Order of the Dwarf Oafs, where I gather with other old, ponytailed musicians unashamedly wearing black jeans and satin jackets. Then we take turns sitting in front of a giant Kenwood stereo and listening to Billy Squier on Memorex tape.

MP3: The Long Winters, "Fire Island, AK"