Paul Simon and Carlos Santana Protest New Grammy Rules

Paul Simon performs in Chicago, May 16, 2011 .

Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

A coalition of musicians including Paul Simon and Carlos Santana are voicing their opposition to the Recording Academy's elimination of more than 30 categories from the Grammy Awards. The artists claim that the Recording Academy unfairly targeted ethnic music in selecting categories for elimination and are demanding that the organization reinstate them.

"I believe the Grammys have done a disservice to many talented musicians by combining previously distinct and separate types of music into a catch-all of blurry larger categories," Simon wrote in a letter to Grammy president and CEO Neil Portnow. "They deserve the separate Grammy acknowledgements that they've been afforded until this change eliminated them."

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Portnow insists that the cuts in the number of categories is not limited to non-mainstream and ethnic music. "In this year's awards there were 34 mainstream categories. Next year there will be 20 mainstream categories. In non-mainstream categories there were 71. In the upcoming 54th awards, there will be 54," he told the Associated Press. The Academy has consolidated several categories, most notably by doing away with gender-based categories in pop, R&B, country and rock.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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