Grammy's Don't Show Respect Where Its Due

As I mentioned last night, I viewed the majority of the Grammy Awards as they aired. I must say I came out disillusioned by what I saw, a very conservative set of nominees and winners that left me slightly upset and more so perturbed. I feel one genre near and dear to me doesn't get the respect it deserves by the powers that be.
Toby Keith claims the Grammy's don't respect or give proper acknowledgement to country music. I think that may be a fair assessment, but keep this in mind. The Grammy's showed the Best Country Song award on television last night. A country singer, albeit pop-country, won 4 awards last night as well, including Album of the Year, that singer being Taylor Swift.
Now lets take a look at the hip-hop genre. No rap related awards were televised last night, making it the only major genre not to be televised last night I believe. I had to find out Relapse by Eminem was the Rap Album of the Year through the internet (props to Em, by the way). The only all-genre encompassing (meaning nominees from all genres included) award the genre won was Best Sung/Rap Collaboration. That went to "Run This Town" by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna. Furthermore, look at the performances. The only true rap performance was at the very end of the show with Drake, Lil Wayne, and Em. The only other thing that came close was Doug E. Fresh's brief cameo appearence with Jamie Foxx and T-Pain (an R&B song, not rap), and he didn't really provide much other than nostalgia (Fresh hasn't been relevant for 20 years). Country has 2 performances, R&B 3, then there were numerous pop and rock performances as well. Also, Drake, Wayne, and Em's performance was made basically into a farce because of the incessant censoring it was given. It made the songs they performed sound a lot more vulgar and ignorant than they really are, and ruined the performance in my mind. But what really bothers me is that these are supposed to be experts in music running this show. Shouldn't they know the lyrics to one of the more popular songs by 3 of the most popular names in the music industry (ok, 2), let alone their genre? Shouldn't the people running the show have known when to censor instead of just running through entire lines of music and blanking them out? It was straight up stupid and disrespectful. But I guess you can't expect much more from the 50 year old white men that run the award show, much like the rest of the world (no offense to 50 year old white men, but you guys don't know everything about everything).
So that situation just got me really frustrated. Its been 30 plus years since hip hop was born, you would think by now it would get the respect it deserves and not be considered a passing fad, but rather a very intricate and substantial entity in the music world that would command respect. I guess in some eyes, it still doesn't. And that's ok, I'm sure there are still plenty out there that consider Rock & Roll "Devil's Music" too.

-Hype