Michael & the Grammy

Robert Hilburn almost hit the nail on the head in his analysis of Michael Jackson’s failure to win any Grammys (“A Good--and ‘Bad’--Night,” March 4).

You see, it took 30 years for National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences members to recognize substance over flash. Jackson’s material today is too visual, overproduced and insultingly pretentious and egomaniacal.

When my grandfather Emile invented the disk record exactly a century ago (and coined the word gramophone from which NARAS gets its “Grammy”), he envisioned a medium dedicated to the listener’s auditory senses and imagination . . . not a forum where the imagination exists only in the mind of the visual-backup sales-support byproduct creator.

OLIVER BERLINER

NARAS Life-Member

Beverly Hills