The Grammys Go to High School.

This year, teen bands are up for awards in all the major categories. Have the Grammys lost their fuddy-duddy minds?

The Grammy Awards discovered teenagers this year. When the 42nd annual Grammy Awards are handed out on February 23, music by and for teenagers will be all over the top categories. Ricky Martin, TLC, the Backstreet Boys, and 'N Sync all have multiple nominations, while Best New Artist could be a battle of the ex-Mouseketeers: Britney Spears, 17, and Christina Aguilera, 19, are both contenders. For the Grammys, it's a veritable youth movement. Which raises an impertinent question: What took so long?

The short answer is that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization formed to give out the Grammy Awards, doesn't trust young whippersnappers. The Grammys are music's equivalent of the Oscars: awards given by people in the business to their colleagues, who are attempting to recognize quality as distinct from commercial clout (though hits still have a definite advantage). But most music fans take the Grammys with more than a grain of salt. The 10,000 academy members who vote are the people who do the grunt work as well as the glamour jobs in the music business: not just recognizable faces but studio musicians, producers, engineers, mixers, art directors, liner-note writers, and anyone else who has amassed credits on at least six albums.

So Britney Spears, with only one album, can't vote for herself. But a record-company vice president who's listed as executive producer for a dozen albums no one liked can fill in a ballot every year, as long as his or her academy dues are paid up.

SAP, NOT RAP

With music-business pros casting the votes, it's inevitable that the Grammys are going to be conservative. From the beginning, they have favored music that aims for professionalism: not rude, innovative rock, or hip-hop, but pretty, even sappy ballads. The Grammys got started soon after the birth of rock `n' roll in the 1950s, and for years they were downright reactionary. The early voters were used to the Tin Pan Alley system: songwriters wrote songs, producers chose and arranged them, and singers just sang. They didn't like self-made music or scruffy outsiders, so they ignored the likes of Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley to give awards to Henry Mancini and Bobby Darin. For 1965, the year Bob Dylan invented folk-rock with Bringing It All Back Home and the Beatles transformed pop-rock with Rubber Soul, the Grammys' Album of the Year was by Frank Sinatra. The Rolling Stones didn't get a Grammy Award until, believe it or not, 1994.

Eventually, the recording academy wised up a little. Tired of people complaining about all the music it was ignoring, the academy started adding categories to the list. There were 28 categories in 1958; now, there are 98. There's still an Album of the Year, but also a Best Pop Album, Rock Album, and Rap Album, along with polka, merengue, and spoken-word. And there are subgenres: not just rock but hard rock, metal, and alternative, where bands like Limp Bizkit and Nine Inch Nails are tucked away. (They may top the charts, but the Grammy Awards can't bring themselves to consider them mainstream.) Big categories like pop and country also have male, female, and "duo or group" subdivisions. Yet even with all those categories, the Grammys still go to embarrassing choices: How about Jethro Tull for the first hard rock/metal Grammy award in 1988?

WHO KNOWS?

Lately, the Grammy Awards have been a little more sensible. In the 1990s, they recognized artistic triumphs by Alanis Morissette and Lauryn Hill. But they remain cranky and unpredictable. This year, the performers nominated for Album of the Year include not just the Backstreet Boys, TLC, a resurgent Santana, and the country hitmakers the Dixie Chicks, but also Diana Krall, singing the Tin Pan Alley standards that Grammy voters still love. There's no guarantee that the Grammy voters won't do what they did in 1991, when they utterly rejected current rock and pop to laud Natalie Cole's collection of standards, Unforgettable. At that point, the Grammys could have been renamed the Grannys.

Yet in a way, acts like the Backstreet Boys, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears fit the old Grammy biases perfectly. They're singers who sing what their songwriters and producers supply, taking direction from the music-business professionals. And the Backstreet Boys, in particular, specialize in ballads that wouldn't embarrass anybody's parents, or even a granny. So the teenage presence at this year's Grammy Awards isn't really a rebellion. It's a sign that for this year, anyway, the young whippersnappers seem like they're under control.

AND THE NOMINEES ARE ...

BEST SINGLE

"I Want It That Way," Backstreet Boys
"Believe," Cher
"Livin' la Vida Loca," Ricky Martin
"Smooth," Santana
"No Scrubs," TLC

BEST ALBUM

Millennium, Backstreet Boys
Fly, Dixie Chicks
When I Look in Your Eyes, Diana Krall
Supernatural, Santana
Fanmail, TLC

BEST NEW ARTIST

Christina Aguilera
Macy Gray
Kid Rock
Britney Spears
Susan Tedeschi

BEST POP ALBUM

Millennium, Backstreet Boys
Believe, Cher
Ricky Martin, Ricky Martin
Mirrorball, Sarah McLachlan
Brand New Day, Sting

BEST ROCK ALBUM

Breakdown, Melissa Etheridge
Significant Other, Limp Bizkit
Echo, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Californication, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Supernatural, Santana

BEST RAP ALBUM

E.L.E., Busta Rhymes
Da Real World, Missy Elliott
The Slim Shady LP, Eminem
I Am, Nas
Things Fall Apart, the Roots