The 2019 Grammys were the worst Grammys ever, as pronounced by almost everyone the night before. It was the foregone conclusion—the months leading up to the show were a clown car of bad press. First, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow announced his forthcoming resignation, after claiming last year’s lack of female winners was the sad result of women needing to “step up.” The immediate days before were even worse: nominees Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, and Drake all refused to perform. The pre-Grammys were then hijacked by a feud between Ariana Grande and show producer Ken Ehrlich, who allegedly wanted her to mash up “7 Rings” with a “producer’s choice” of some undoubted bullshit. Ehrlich said it was too late for her to plan something else. Grande said she could “pull a performance together overnight.” Ehrlich instead pulled together some defensiveness overnight. It was all very public and very embarrassing for everyone involved. (For once the truth was somewhere in the middle. Ariana Grande did pull something together: an emoji ad.)
Then a strange thing happened. Freed of several performers people might actually want to see, of mining the unobtainium that is the “Grammy Moment”—basically of the burden of being good—the Grammys were actually… kind of good!
One Taught Me Love
The Grammys are so expert at producing arcane award fuckups that it is a weird relief when the winners cleave to critical consensus. The Academy’s album of the year, like everyone else’s, was Kacey Musgraves’ warm, deserving Golden Hour. The Grammys’ song and record of the year, like everyone else’s, was Childish Gambino’s grenade of a single, “This Is America.” This is undoubtedly due in part to the Academy expanding its voter base to a less white-male-boomer crowd—a crowd still in sync with consensus, just today’s and not yesterday’s. It’s about the millionth time someone’s called these great records great. But you can just picture the alternative, right? Those ghosts of Grammys past in this year’s would-be winners: Record of the Year “Rockstar” by Post Malone; Album of the Year Scorpion; Best New Artist Chris Stapleton, in a landslide write-in vote.
Kendrick may not have shown up, but neither did the usual classic-rock medleys full of reanimated bleached skeletons, or the bizarro trout-flavored yogurt pairings of artists from clashing genres. Most of what was left ranged from decent to great. In Lamar’s absence, Janelle Monáe filled in the coveted role of “obviously star performer,” and the spectacle of her “Make Me Feel,” all purple Prince lighting and guitar heroics and PVC outfits, was indeed great. The performance, not as great. The song was kept in curiously low gear, even the yelpy freakout breakdown and call to “let the vagina have a monologue” (which you can say on broadcast TV, it turns out). On the Janelle scale, this lands somewhere around “Yoga.” But on the Grammy scale, it busts the chart.
Elsewhere, Chloe x Halle’s Donny Hathaway/Roberta Flack tribute and the soul and shredding of H.E.R. were both highlights, if a bit lab-perfected for the Academy (and BTS apparently). Diana Ross and Dolly Parton were in fine, magnanimous voice. Cardi B was operating at about 60% Cardi B on “Money,” but the staging was sumptuous, and that piano getting twerked on was an unexpected Cardi touch. (She also had the night’s best line, as she tends to, upon breathlessly accepting the award for Best Rap Album: “The nerves are so bad. Maybe I better start smoking weed!”) Live-love-laugh-font lyrics scroll aside, Brandi Carlile didn’t sing “The Joke” so much as roar it into existence. James Blake did his James Blake thing well on a stage you’d think isn’t suited for it, and Travis Scott provided one of the vanishingly few tethers the show has to rap by being willing to perform at literally anything, anywhere. Even Katy Perry, whose main connection to down-home country music is once singing the words “daisy dukes,” was in shockingly decent form during the tribute to Dolly Parton.
One Taught Me Patience
Katy wasn’t the only one. The nice, and odd, thing about these loose, lackadaisical, sure-why-not Grammys is that things that should not work, did:
- Alicia Keys hosting the Alicia Keys Show, held at the Staples Center with an ancillary awards ceremony, dishing a night of heartening Grammys chicken soup between two pianos. On the menu: a tasting of “Killing Me Softly,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Use Somebody,” and the “Maple Leaf Rag”; seemingly CBD-inspired musings about how music is great, particularly when written or performed by Alicia Keys; wondering aloud whether beer bongs are one entity or two. Yet compared to James Corden and LL Cool J’s past skits and flop sweat, she stepped it up.
- St. Vincent and Dua Lipa launching 50,000 pieces of fanfic in the span of four minutes. It was surprising enough that “Masseduction” was performed at all, given how it seemed so much like the kind of good record the Academy gives a few un-televised awards and then ignores forever. It seemed questionable to hitch it to Dua Lipa, whose main similarity to St. Vincent is having a bob haircut. But who expected Annie Clark and Dua Lipa to masseduce one another on stage, trading Marina Abramović staredowns, caressing cheeks, and dropping a guitar solo into “One Kiss” that’s equal parts Slash and slash? The chemistry was so palpable that the Grammys had to kill it immediately by cutting to Bob Newhart, alongside a 67 years younger, visibly squirming Alessia Cara.
- About once a year the Grammys producers spit out a hell-combination of artists, like Deadmau5 and the Foo Fighters (2012), or a Meghan Trainor/Tyrese/Luke Bryan tribute to Lionel Richie (2016), or Post Malone with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This last one was easily the least anticipated part of the night. And yet Post shows up put-together, with impressive staging and a surprisingly legit acoustic set. It sounded more like A Star Is Born than Gaga’s bad-romanced “Shallow” performance; if you had just wandered into the room, you might have even mistaken it for Bradley Cooper showing up after all to display his not-bad Americana chops. Then Posty dove into a tunnel of orange smoke and emerged, like an algorithmic crocodile out of a waterfall, as the trap-rock Post Malone you know and... know. And yet, up to that point, it was somehow the second-best performance of the night. (The less said about the Chili Peppers’ part, the better my mentions will be for the year.)
One Taught Me Pain
“This Is America” is a Childish Gambino showcase; it’s always awkward when the showcase doesn’t show. (His Google commercial doesn’t count, though we’ve got, oh, five years before brands snap up more performances than the actual show.) Everyone has to stall, like Alicia Keys fondly reminiscing about how John Mayer Macklemored her in the halcyon year of 2005. But stalling cannot last forever, the Grammy must be announced, and the following is a meticulous transcription of his win for Song of the Year:
They got it together a bit more by the time Gambino won Record of the Year, and co-producer Ludwig Göransson and engineer-mixer Riley Mackin—two people whose names you just read for the first time—hauled out the elephant in the room: “Obviously we’re not Donald.”
Also obvious: Nothing has ever been less sung live than Jennifer Lopez’s Motown medley. Lopez is a likable performer whose skills are not this; it’s an odd but classic Grammy choice to have her be the face and 75% of the screentime of a tribute to a label Berry Gordy designed as a vehicle for black artists to cross over. The one explanation is maybe that giving her the Motown medley prevented her from screwing up the Aretha tribute. That was sung by Andra Day, “American Idol” winner Fantasia, and gospel singer Yolanda Adams, with actual vocals and actual reverence.
But Lopez’s set was the old Grammys: the weird political optics. All major award shows must ask themselves whether they really want to attempt the 100-step quadrille that’s making a topical statement on a television show broadcast to states red and blue. Most shows decide not to, and the Grammys were no exception. A few artists spoke about things like mental health—“this world is anxiety,” basically—and taking pride in one’s heritage. A few artists went mildly rogue—J. Balvin holding up a newspaper reading “build bridges not walls,” Dua Lipa sniping at Portnow’s “step up” comment—but the one mention of the current president was to thank him, for signing the Music Modernization Act, an admittedly good thing he had very little to do with. And yet Michelle Obama got the biggest applause of the night—more than any of the music, amid much talk of the legendary healing power of music—for essentially saying she’s listened to songs before. (It’s especially weird given she has released a superstar Grammy-baity female empowerment single, two of whose artists (Chloe x Halle) were Grammy performers.) The point was that she was there, which said a thing, and a thing being said was enough.
