We were probably too busy reacting to the fact that Gojira picked up a a Grammy nomination for Magma to yesterday to notice what might have been the biggest surprise of the whole ceremony. Kip Winger is nominated for a Grammy – for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Yes, that Winger, the one that Stewart liked on Beavis and Butt-Head. Yes, the onetime bassist for Alice Cooper that had a five year run with his own band, Winger. His album C.F. Kip Winger: Conversations with Nijinsky is now a Grammp-nominated album.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Winger says he didn’t really attempt to compose classical music until he was 35. That was pretty much after Winger first disbanded in 1994. The C.F. stands for “Charles Frederick,” and somewhere along the line, he read about Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who he wrote about. He calls the album “the unseen dances of Nijinsky – had he not gone insane.” And finally, he sees his first Grammy nomination as an artistic vindication: 

We took a lot of heat. I personally took a lot of heat in the music business with MTV and all that stuff. The irony of my life was that my whole thing is like, there’s two things I want to do in life: study music and write music. So being kind of a musicologist geek that I am, it was ironic to become known as a poseur-y ’80s figure. 

For me, I just feel really, I do feel proud of myself that I really stuck to my guns and just kept going. This is what I am. And this is what’s important to me.

So in short, suck it, Mike Judge!