For those who are interested, here’s an absolutely brutal summation of last night’s Grammy telecast. Brutal cuz it’s true.

What is music to you? To your heart? To your life?

Maybe it is this: Ecstasy and repetition. Identity and release. Music is the electric connection between your buzzing, happy, elated head and the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Music is the way your heart thumps when the kick drum pushes the air of the old theatre. Music is your connection with the primeval memory of the rhythm of sweatshops and plantations, the high sigh of shtetl weddings, and the sand dances of Saharan ceremony.

Music is memory: Playground chants and first-love stares; tenth grade stargazing and skating on beer slick in sophomore dorm basement parties; evenings spent watching bleached-blonde-dyed Brits scratching the air and climbing imaginary ladders in smoky, blue-lit old vaudeville halls; nights passed sharing stale air with shimmering, sibilant, shrieking cowpunk Canadians in narrow booze cans in the gray hours before dawn; mornings spent mummified in sheets waiting for the record store to open. Music is that song in the car on the way home from Hebrew school, that song bursting into your ears on the 7 train on the way to your new job. Music is the mnemonics of melody, ecstasy and repetition, identity and release.

The Grammy telecast had nothing to do with any of that.

Worth the read.