Nowhere does it get more confusing than the Grammy's Best New Artist category. The Academy acknowledges artists when they chart. Or something like that. From the cheap seats where the logic doesn't reach, many of those who have been nominated through the years have often felt pretty old. But newness is in the eye of the beholder. To the nominees' parents, they've been around forever.

Here are the five!

The 2012 Grammy Awards are upon us and it's time to see what's what. Let's break down a few key categories and see where we stand as a nation. Let's start with...

Record of the Year

Last year this distinction when to Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now." Record of the Year is different from Song of the Year, though last year, Lady-A won that award, too. Record means a combination of great song, great production and great performance, while Song focuses on the writing part. Producers, mixers and other studio engineers count for Record, while the songwriter is counted in Song.

So, the nominees are:

Lana Del Rey's certainly got people talking! Her deer-on-Quaaludes performance this past Saturday has her up nominated for "Worst Saturday Night Live Performance." No less an authority than all-star rock critic NBC's Brian Williams declared her incompetence. Someone get Oprah's take on things! Because Juliette Lewis should not be throwing stones!

But having watched it myself, I found it enjoyably terrible. A bit slow, perhaps, and ill-at-ease, but as long as they spell your name right, who cares, right kid?

SNL has a long history of delivering subpar performances of all kinds. Sometimes it makes me think they deliberately send a mutilated or delayed mix into the monitors just to throw the performers off and to create controversy. But I'm just being paranoid. Chance are, everyone's bad performances are their own fault. Too much partying and not enough practice!

First, I would like to wish Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi a full recovery from lymphoma and hope he and the band will be taking the stage in 2012. Heavy Metal needs you, Tony.

Now, there's nothing like trying to do the impossible. With a genre that's been kicking around in some form since the early 1970s, distilling its essence into 25 essential tracks is essentially ridiculous. Because there are so few slots I established the rule that there could only be one track per band, except for Black Sabbath and Metallica because I make the rules and I like to be arbitrary. Classic antecedents to heavy metal such as the Beatles' "Helter Skelter," Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression" and Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" were passed over, while Led Zeppelin were allowed entry, since it made sense to me.