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Quiz: Which one of these is a performance worthy of the Grammys’ biggest winner?
1. A searing, mesmerizing, politically attuned performance, with the kind of authentic chops and underdog narrative the Grammys would seem to love to showcase, by a rapper who’s technically brilliant and thematically ambitious, who’s coming off his best album, and arguably the year’s most important.
2. A performance of an old "promotional single" featuring the guy from fun., only about 30 decibels of audible singing, and a set from your local children’s theatre production of Oz! (scene: Fighting Trees), shrugged off by LL Cool J with a puzzling remark about how at least she isn’t lip-syncing.
Hint: This is the Grammys. The Grammys are chosen by Grammy voters. Those people.
Second hint: This is an awards show, the bastard offspring of the long awards ceremony and the shameless ratings stunt, which means it’s slowly devolved into a glorified live-action Twitter feud with incidental performances. Like most awards shows, the Grammys goosed itself before air with some external drama, in this case a lewd remark by Kanye West that Taylor Swift may or may have not have OK’ed. On the other hand, the last time Kendrick Lamar inspired awards-show drama, it involved him not winning Grammys—but getting "robbed," as the winner said.
The Grammys are an exercise in pomp and inevitability. They are also, historically, an exercise in being wrong about rap. So it was inevitable that To Pimp a Butterfly, the most deserving entry in the Album of the Year category, would lose out to 1989, a good pop LP that would have been deserving in another year, but one whose resonance stemmed more from it being a Polaroid of the year in Taylor and her squad, than its music alone. It was probably also inevitable that Swift's acceptance speech would Make a Statement About Feminism, defined therein as the political movement of not supporting Taylor Swift. "I want to say to all the young women out there—there are going to be people along the way who will to try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame," she said. In theory, her "Grammy moment"—to use the show’s favorite phrase—was punctuated by a worthy sentiment; in context, it became tabloid fodder for a feud, and was positioned in a way that served Swift personally more than her audience, a claim often lobbed at her particular brand of feminism.
Here, then, is a list of things that happened during the Grammys that were worse for women than anything Taylor Swift acknowledged.
1. Beyoncé, who released the most vital (and actually feminist) single of the year so far, once again ending up in the thankless slot of cleaning up after Taylor/Kanye drama. Beyoncé, being Beyoncé, would never go off script. Not here, not now. She barely did at those VMAs, either. But you could certainly call her perfunctory appearance presenting Record of the Year sort of undercutting, particularly in context. After the show, a ton of people on Twitter (disclaimer: author included) were trolled by an official-looking but fake Tidal announcement about a supposed new Beyoncé album. It seemed plausible! It would be the least messy Tidal release of the year. It would have been a better end to the night than beef and uh, Pitbull.
2. Sole patron saint of record sales Adele—who triumphed over very real vocal trauma with a, let’s say, successful album—undercut by a botched sound job that bordered on sabotage. (Adele’s explanation: "The piano mics fell onto the piano strings… Shit happens.") If Adele can’t get the world’s most failproof tech job, what hope does anyone else have? Also, one would think that a phenomenal Adele performance might inspire more record sales than the latest iteration of the Grammys’ other performance tradition: the increasingly earnest, increasingly exhausted "please buy music, we’ve got content to feed" speech. This year, it cut into a spot by 12-year-old Indonesian piano prodigy Joey Alexander, giving it the feel of a demented telethon in which anvils would fall on the kid’s fingers and keys for every minute without a donation. (The cuts to the audience’s bored, captive faces were an extra bit of cruelty to a kid who probably just had the coolest moment of his life, and who probably streams a ton of music.)
3. Due to a long history of the rock canon being male-dominated, female artists seldom receive the kind of tributes that (still-living) acts like Lionel Richie enjoy. They tend instead to be performers in those tributes, such as last’s night Demi Lovato/Meghan Trainor/John Legend/Tyrese/Luke Bryan lowlight, which was reminiscent of the endless consolation performances in an "American Idol" finale. (Specifically: Legend is the talented R&B guy who comes in third and doesn’t win. Tyrese is ninth. Demi is the talented vocalist who comes in second and also doesn’t win. Meghan Trainor is the less talented vocalist, the Carmen Rasmusen of the lot, who definitely doesn’t win. Luke Bryan is Ryan Seacrest. To seal the comparison, Seacrest himself came out shortly after.) These artists all have current music out, some of it good, Grammy-nominated, or both. You’d never know it. And the Grammys’ emphasis on megamix-style mashups results in people like Andra Day, a rising R&B artist of the traditional sort, and Ellie Goulding, in surprisingly good vocal form, being tossed into jerry-rigged mashups—the sort of duets dreamt up by people who don’t think either artist can stand alone (which is patently untrue). The post-Grammy sales bump is real, and in the cutthroat world of rising pop artists, they need all the help they can get; last night's ceremony provided little.
4. Amy Wadge, a songwriter on Ed Sheeran’s "Thinking Out Loud"—the winner of Song of the Year, an award for songwriters—getting cut off. Unlike many things in life, this one can’t be blamed on Ed; to his (minimal) credit, Sheeran seemed genuinely willing to let Wadge do normal, reasonable awards-show things like say words on camera, unlike the producers, who decided the world would really rather see a mediocre Eagles tribute.
5. Country having a great night—albeit one in which "country" was defined almost single-handedly by Chris Stapleton. The awards sweeper, artisanal authenticity craftsman, and Max Martinimpersonator is, in fact, often great, but women who make this sort of neo-traditional music—the likes of Cam, Ashley Monroe, and Kacey Musgraves—rarely tend to receive as a hallowed reception as an AoTY nod. Meanwhile, in country that actually gets airplay: Carrie Underwood, a star of the awards-show-friendly sort and a genuine force onstage, was given a chemistry-free duet of her worst single in years.
6. The unstated context. It would have been awkward, at best, to mention Rihanna’s abrupt cancellation of her Grammy performance (cited reason: "bronchitis"), but it does mean the loss of a performance by a black woman releasing the most interesting music of her career. (See also: Lauryn Hill’s absence from the Weeknd’s performance was also awkward and unstated.) Similarly, it would have been near-impossible to get it into the telecast on such short notice, but the night of the Grammys was also the night of the death of Prince collaborator Vanity, a woman whose success was also undercut in her day.
The rest of the awards ceremony, as always, was an exercise in fortunately/unfortunately.
Fortunately: A success story from the Grammys that wasn’t undercut: That of Alabama Shakes, whose Sound & Color lost Album of the Year but won the show—specifically, with Brittany Howard’s buoyant turn on “Don’t Wanna Fight.” Don’t be surprised if Alabama Shakes see a sales bump—they deserve it.
Unfortunately: Their triumph will likely be overshadowed by Swift-Kendrick-related drama. Even this write-up did it!
Fortunately: The Grammys are often wrong about rap, but this year they weren’t wrong about R&B; D’Angelo swept his categories deservedly.
Unfortunately: You wouldn’t know this from the show. (Similarly, Kendrick did sweep some categories—the hip-hop categories, which weren’t televised outside of the rap album award.) Miguel and the Weeknd were seemingly given the directive "be as vanilla as possible," which in Miguel’s case left him about ten bars of song and in the Weeknd’s case turned him into both MJ incarnate and, puzzlingly, an acoustic yacht-rocker.
Fortunately: Despite its jumbled megamix format, Lady Gaga’s tribute to David Bowie was best-case scenario for the Grammys: an artist undoubtedly influenced by the man, rather than one thrown dartboard-style at his legacy, performing at her best and least gimmicky.
Unfortunately: The other tributes were totally dartboard. The worst of the lot: Earth, Wind & Fire honored by the mainstream’s one designated a cappella act, Pentatonix, inexplicably dressed as "Game of Thrones" LARPers. Second-worst: Motörhead honored by Johnny Depp, playing a parody of Johnny Depp.
Fortunately: I wasn’t not expecting to plead, a third through the show, for Alexander Hamilton to save us all (disclaimer: I spent a good portion of last year’s show with a friend who’d followed Hamilton from the beginning), but the performance of Hamilton, though a puzzling song choice better suited to the Tonys where it’d need no introduction, was unquestionably a highlight of the night.
Unfortunately: Now you and I definitely won’t get tickets.