The Red Hot Chili Peppers Don't Deserve A Grammy For Best Rock Song — And We Know You're Mad

No one really cares about the Grammys, including the Grammys, it seems. Why else would they remain so out of touch with the times and so lazy regarding nominations and winners, especially rock and heavier music? As reported by NPR, 66-year-old pianist and Grammy voter Bruce Brubaker hazards the guess that we all know: Voters choose based on recognizable, legacy names and probably never listen to nominees, like an 8-year-old choosing the hamburger no matter all the other menu options. This is why names from 30, 40, 50 years ago and more keep coming up year after year, like The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, and the 2025 winner for Best Rock Performance, The Beatles, which hasn't existed since 1970.

This doesn't mean that musicians like the Beatles or the Stones are bad — far from it. But really, when '70s and '80s rocker Bruce Springsteen wins best rock song in 2003, 2008, and 2009, the choice of winner starts to look as cursory and throwaway as the Grammys themselves. "Rock" didn't even exist as a standalone Grammys genre until 1980, well after legendary bands like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, and Fleetwood Mac dominated popular music. Eight years later, we got the still-controversial Grammy win of Jethro Tull, the flute guys, beating out Metallica for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. Then in 1992, after Nirvana's "Nevermind," Pearl Jam's "Ten," and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger" came out, Sting won Best Rock Song for "Soul Cages." 

Ultimately, there are loads of bad Grammy choices for rock songs, but we're going to settle on one winner in one year. Sorry, Red Hot Chili Peppers, but you and 2007's "Dani California" have got to go.

We probably spent more time dissecting rock song nominees and winners for this article than Grammy voters did in 2007, or indeed throughout the whole '00s. Back then, Grammy categories were even more botched than they are now, with "rock" being split between the bizarre and nonsensical Best Rock Instrumental Performance, Best Rock Solo Vocal Performance, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Best Rock Song, and several more categories with unnecessarily lengthy names. Why these categories? No clue, though they thankfully got simplified in 2019. 

In 2007, however, the Red Hot Chili Peppers won Best Rock Song for "Dani California," beating out (sigh) Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and some guy named Gary Lightbody (ok, he's the singer of Snow Patrol, makers of the colossal hit, "Chasing Cars," which you'd recognize). We'll at least give the Grammys credit for choosing two out of four artists that had been relevant within the past three decades. And if these had been the only four rock albums to be released that year, then, yeah, we'd probably have to go with RHCP, too.

As for "Dani California," it's yet another RHCP song about the hollowness of chasing Californian fame, like "Californication" off the 1999 album of the same name, for which they won 2000's Best Rock Song, "Scar Tissue." The lyrics of "Dani California" are yet more of the same shtick that Weird Al mocked way back on 1993's Bedrock Anthem, a parody of RHCP's "Give It Away" featuring "Yabba-dabba-yabba-dabba-dabba do now" as its main chorus line. But hey, maybe the Grammy voters saw the rock-throughout-the-years montage on "Dani California's" video and thought they were voting for their childhood favorite, Elvis.

Let's be clear. "Dani California," on its own merits, is neither a bad song nor among the worst Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. Rather, it embodies how myopic the Grammys are when it comes to combing through the zeitgeist beyond whatever big name the voters know, or whatever big song graced their ears last Wednesday. 

At the time of the 2007 Grammys, song nominees had to be released from October 1 of the previous year to September 30 of the year in question. We're going to slightly fudge these numbers to make a point, starting in July 2006, when Muse released "Black Holes and Revelations," with its smash hit "Supermassive Black Hole" and permanent live-show closer, "Knights of Cydonia." In October 2006, My Chemical Romance released its lauded and beloved emo-rock album, "The Black Parade," and in March 2007, Clutch released "From Beale Street to Oblivion" with the superb throwback track "Electric Worry" and its "Vámonos, Vámonos" earworm chorus line. Then in June 2007, Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA) released the grimy "Era Vulgaris," featuring the excellent "Sick, Sick, Sick" and "Suture Up Your Future," followed by Radiohead with its masterful, shockingly bright and open-sounding "In Rainbows" in October 2007,

Where were any of these in the 2006, 2007, or even 2008 Grammys, alongside "Dani California" or otherwise? Except for QOTSA in 2008, nope. Were they vital and vibrant efforts that defined the rock moment and outshone the work of a '90s legacy band in the making (RHCP)? Yep. But as Muse might have wondered and Matt Belamy sings on "Knights of Cydonia," which could have been awarded Best Rock Song in perpetuity (especially taking its hologram-and-robot-filled western martial arts video into account), "How can we win when fools can be kings"?