The afternoon of the 1998 Grammys, Bob Dylan’s team assembled a group of youngish, good-looking extras they’d hired to stand behind him during his performance that evening. This group was there to, in their words, “give Bob a good vibe.”
“If you watch us in the background, you can see how liberally this was interpreted,” one of those extras, Michael Portnoy, recently recalled. “The casting director put us through a rigorous series of auditions where we were tested on our ability to sway arrhythmically to the beat.”
Rehearsal went off without a hitch. But during the telecast that night, shortly after Dylan and his band had launched into “Love Sick,” a laid-back rocker off his comeback album Time Out of Mind, Portnoy emerged from the background and suddenly ripped off his shirt and revealed a cryptic message scrawled on his chest: “SOY BOMB.” He then stormed the stage and, next to Dylan, began to perform a bizarre interpretive dance that I can only describe as Artie, the Strongest Man in the World letting loose at a Nine Inch Nails concert.
Every frame of this moment is ridiculous, beginning with the opening seconds during which you are reminded that the host of the 40th Annual Grammys was Kelsey Grammer, who was wearing a suit that screams “business-casual Puritan.” And then of course there’s the grizzled, deeply annoyed look on Dylan’s face. The most surreal thing about the Soy Bomb Incident, though, in retrospect, is how long it lasted. “I was very surprised I got to dance for so long!” Portnoy said in a recent interview. “But no one filming the event had any clue that it wasn’t part of the act.”
Portnoy, it turns out, was a performance artist, and he considered “Soy Bomb” a two-word poem. “Soy … represents dense nutritional life,” he (sort of) explained, “Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life.” Not that anyone was supposed to understand that. In a 2013 interview with MTV, when Portnoy (now a resident stage-crashing expert, and an accomplished artist in more high-brow contexts) was asked to comment upon a stage-crashing at the MTV Movie Awards, he said that the no. 1 rule of such an act is that it “should be inscrutable. It doesn’t quite add up or make complete sense.” (After the Soy Bomb Incident, Portnoy briefly enjoyed mainstream notoriety. He allegedly turned down movie and promotional offers — except one from Sir Richard Branson, who hired Portnoy to “soy bomb” him while he was giving a speech to record executives in a hotel ballroom: “If I’m remembering correctly, I had ‘SO Y VIRGIN?’ on my chest. And when I came in, he pulled up his shirt, and it said ‘Y NOT!’” When pressed, Portnoy added, “It was their idea, not mine.”)
Twenty years have passed since Soy Bomb. It stands now as a dispatch from a simpler, sillier time, when a random guy with the word “BOMB” on his chest could appear before a nationally televised audience without immediately being tazed or worse. Award shows are now engineered to ensure that puzzling surprises like this don’t happen — unless, of course, you are Kanye West, Steve Harvey, or the producers of La La Land.
These moments are welcome schisms in the cultural universe, reminders of the inherent strangeness and arbitrary nature of award shows themselves. Which is to say that Soy Bomb had a wise, prophetic message we’d do well to remember going into this weekend. The Grammys are absurd.
A man ripping off his shirt and gyrating next to Bob Dylan for 35 seconds was, somehow, not the weirdest thing to happen at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards. Soy Bomb barely registers in the top five. This was the same night that the ceremony’s closing performer, Luciano Pavarotti, called out sick while the show was already underway, causing producers to scramble to find someone in the building who could sing the aria “Nessun Dorma” on a moment’s notice. Aretha Franklin — who had performed the song earlier in the week at a dinner in Pavarotti’s honor — agreed to do it without even rehearsing, and knocked it out of the goddamn park. And, never forget, this was also the night that Ol’ Dirty Bastard crashed the stage while Shawn Colvin was accepting the Grammy for Song of the Year and — protesting the award that Wu-Tang Clan had lost to Puff Daddy (years before Kanye West was even invited to these things, I might add) — proclaimed, “Wu-Tang is for the children.”
And yet, 20 years later, isn’t the strangest fact in that paragraph that Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” was named 1998’s Song of the Year? Or that the Album of the Year Grammy went to Dylan’s Time Out of Mind — a fine record, to be sure, but not nearly as inventive and era-defining as one of the albums it beat, Radiohead’s OK Computer. Puff Daddy, Hanson, Erykah Badu, and Fiona Apple were all nominated for Best New Artist that year. You know which one of them won? Paula Cole.
The Grammys have modernized slightly through the past two decades, and this year’s nominees are more promising than most. The Album of the Year contenders are most of the records that will probably, in retrospect, stand as examples of what popular music in 2017 actually sounded like: Kendrick Lamar’s Damn., Lorde’s Melodrama, and Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic. Hip-hop is now finally recognized in the major categories to an extent that would, no doubt, make the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard proud. The year’s defining single, the bilingual “Despacito,” could win two of the big four categories. Ahead of “Music’s Biggest Night,” you’d be forgiven for naively believing that the 60th Annual Grammys might make some sort of sense.
And yet, let us heed the lessons of that eventful 1998 ceremony: Winning is nice, but nothing actually matters. Time Out of Mind beat OK Computer. Given the choice between Puff Daddy, Fiona Apple, and Erykah Badu, the Recording Academy chose the woman who sang the Dawson’s Creek theme song as the artist who showed the most promise. And, of course, even if you win the mother of all Grammys, the thing most people will remember about you that year is how confused you looked when a stage crasher ripped off his shirt and danced absurdly beside you.
Best of luck to this year’s nominees.