"I don't know if it was a mistake"

Words of wisdom from the Grammy's exec called Ken who was asked to comment on the decision not  to ask Lorde, the only woman in the lineup of nominees for Album of the Year 2018, to perform her own music on the night of the awards ceremony (she was instead asked to be part of a group tribute to Tom Petty. She declined. Go girl!).

Another Grammy's exec, this one called Neil -- hang on, there's a pattern forming here; I don't know if that's a mistake -- offered his view that 'it's always hard' (I doubt that, Neil), but the show they delivered, including 'endless appearances' by Sting and Bono, and a 45-minute opera, was 'the best we could do to put on a really balanced show.' Balance on *this* Neil. 

Timely feminist poem written in the 70s by Jenny Holzer
pinned to Lorde's Grammy night dress in a Time's Up protest.

Huston we have a problem: the world's top music execs in charge of deciding who gets to showcase their talents to the world and ultimately to succeed as artists in that world, if industry support is necessary to that success, which it no doubt is, are called Ken and Neil and are men who fit their generic white-male privileged names to a tedious tee in thinking that blatant gender exclusion is not a form of systemic imbalance and discrimination, or at least who know it is but who have the audacity to go public with this brazen bullshit and to hold up their hands and say: 'I don't know'; 'We did our best'; 'It's hard.'

Good on Lorde's mother for posting this in response to illustrate the systematic nature of the US music industry's discrimination against female artists since the inception of the Grammys, a sexism that is maybe even more brazen today than ever in the push-back against the 2017-18 women-led Me Too and Time's Up movements against gender inequality and male sexual harassment in the entertainment business and beyond.

Your time's almost up, boys; so take courage indeed, girls; 'The worst is a harbinger of the best.'