“Music’s biggest night,” they call it. Well, it was big, all right. But size isn’t everything, apparently.

The 52nd annual Grammy Awards brought most of pop’s big guns together inside the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. Comedian Stephen Colbert put it best when, prior to announcing the winner of the Song of the Year Grammy (to Beyonce, naturally), he praised the evening for celebrating “one of our most important rights as Americans—the right for celebrities to congratulate each other.”

Hilarious! When the camera scanned the first few rows of the crowd, however, no one seemed to think Colbert was too funny.

A sense of humor was hugely necessary to sit through the whole spectacle, though. Within the first 30 minutes of the show, we’d heard rehashed ‘80s dance pop, punk rock played as show tunes, more ‘80s dance pop, and Beyonce covering Alanis Morissette.

If you thought about all of the exciting things that happened in music this year—big movements in electronic sound within a vibrant DJ culture; a host of inventive and incredibly successful jam bands; a burgeoning new singer/songwriter movement, and a niche in alternative music that is marrying pop and rock convention with elements of the avant garde, progressive music, ambient sounds and various indigenous influences —watching the Grammys might have made you wanna cry. It’s always better to laugh, though. This presentation was so far away from anything resembling reality that it’s tough to get too worked up about it.

After all, the show kicked off with a bizarre performance from Lady Gaga, who popped up on a riser looking like the love child of Marilyn Manson and Donatella Versace, performing her multinominated “Poker Face,” and then dueting with Elton John for a truly strange medley of Gaga’s “Speechless” and Elton’s “Your Song.” Personally, I thought Elton was better when he worked it with Eminem a few Grammys back.

Green Day took the stage to perform “21 Guns,” from their excellent “21st Century Breakdown” album, joined by the cast of the musical “American Idiot,” which will open on Broadway in March. In the context of the album, the ballad works quite well, surrounded as it is by some well-produced and polished, but still gnarly, punk rock. Here, however, it sounded like something from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.” The band looked a little bit confused and uncomfortable. Which was nice, because that’s exactly how I felt.

Trotting Stevie Nicks out to sing “Rhiannon” with Taylor Swift was meant, one assumes, to suggest that Swift is to her generation what Nicks was and is to hers. That was tough to swallow once Swift started singing the Fleetwood Mac tune next to the gravel-voiced but still spot-on Nicks—Swift was out of tune and her tone was thin and reedy. Swift fared better on her own when the pair went into the younger singer’s “You Belong To Me,” though the nursery rhyme-like melody left Nicks without much to do.

OK, I quibble, but that’s because I care! One of the themes that ran like a thread throughout the evening was the idea of the “mash-up”—an interesting tangent explored by DJs who would intermingle two widely varied songs with a new beat providing continuity. This was big news about 10 years ago. The Grammys took this idea and applied it to this year’s spectacle, which found artists with little in common joining forces and performing mostly ill-conceived “mash-up medleys” of each other’s tunes.

The nadir of this tendency may well have been the Jamie Foxx-T-Pain-Slash debacle, which found the Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist blowing the solo from that band’s “November Rain” while Foxx cavorted and rapped in some sort of gladiator’s outfit, and T-Pain did his auto-tune thing, resplendent in white tux with tails. Seriously.

This was all immensely entertaining, in a perverse sort of way, and, of course, over-the-top histrionics have always been a big part of popular music. But the Grammys were so pop-centric this year that they offered an unfairly biased view of what happened in music during the year in question.

“Popular music” today is an umbrella term that is meant to cover pretty much any form that isn’t classical or jazz. The Grammys, however, concentrated almost all of their attention on pure “pop” — the most mainstream bubble-gum stuff being made. Beyonce, Swift, Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas are in essence interchangeable — their differences are mainly of the surface variety. All deserve nominations in some category, but stuffing them into nearly every major slot was bogus.

It’s impossible to ignore that the music industry is in shambles. Sales are way down, and most of the truly creative music is being made outside of the mainstream industry itself — on stages, where bands ignored by the Grammys play to large, young, enthused crowds nightly; on independent labels that market directly to the fans through alternative means like My Space and Facebook; through live concert recordings which are traded freely or sold at a fraction of the cost of a major- label release. You never would’ve known this from watching Sunday’s Grammy broadcast, where everyone was partying like it was 1989.

Once again, Colbert hit it squarely on the head. “You may be the coolest people in the world,” Colbert quipped. “But Susan Boyle, a 48 year-old cat lady in sensible shoes, outsold all of you.”

It’s time for the Grammys to hit us where we really live. For once.

Jeff Miers reflects on the Grammy Awards night