What a sad, fraught, fucked-up night of television. The week before this year's Grammy Awards, the show had already become a vast neon-lit symbol of everything that has always been wrong with the entertainment industry. In the days just before the show, Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan was kicked out of office, and she then went public with all sorts of accusations -- cronyism, vote-fixing, insider favoritism, sexual harassment, a rape cover-up -- that simply served to reaffirm the suspicion that people naturally feel for shows like the Grammys.
And then, hours before the show, Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash. Bryant had basically lived his entire adult life in the Staples Center, the same building where the Grammys were taking place. That meant that, even without all the allegations around the Dugan situation, the whole show would be just as depressing and death-shocked as the one that went down just after Whitney Houston's death in 2012.
Still, the Grammys are the Grammys, and so a show marked by depression quickly became one marked by numbness. That's just what this show does: It bombards you with ballad after ballad until your soul exits your body and you just sit on the couch in a vague stupor waiting for something at least amusingly ridiculous to happen. And yet there are all these people working very hard in an attempt to move you. The structure of the show simply makes that almost impossible. When someone does manage to shake off the torpor and deliver something powerful, it almost feels like a miracle.
We here at Stereogum have made an annual tradition of getting granular with this rough, dispiriting show. So let's look, once again, at all of this year's performances, from the soul-scouring worst to the wow-something's-happening-here best.
21. The Ken Ehrlich clusterfuck
Ken Ehrlich has served as producer for every Grammy telecast since 1980. In that position, he has supervised the show as it has become a boring, overstuffed, culturally irrelevant drag. (Maybe it was that before 1980, too, but I wasn't alive yet, so I wouldn't know.) This year, the organization behind the Grammys has gone into panicked damage-control mode because of the old-boys’ network mentality that allows for things like one guy producing the fucking show for 40 years in a row. This year’s show is Ken Ehrlich’s final one as producer. Good fucking riddance. As his farewell to himself, Ehrlich booked a whole shitpile of famous people to sing a song from the musical Fame, and he put it on the air at 11:30 at night, just before handing out the two biggest awards of the evening. The audacity is simply stunning. All of the people involved in this thing -- Cyndi Lauper, Camila Cabello, Gary Clark Jr., Debbie Allen, Joshua Bell, Common, Misty Copeland, Lang Lang, Ben Platt, the War And Treaty, probably some others that I missed -- should be ashamed. I’d say that I hope whoever produces next year will do a better job, but I have seen decades of Grammy telecasts. I know better than to hope.
20. Aerosmith & Run-D.M.C.
The deck was stacked against these two venerated institutions. Nothing they could’ve possibly done would’ve been more compelling than the video of Joey Kramer being turned away from the Aerosmith practice studio. Still, it sort of defeats the purpose of putting legends on your show if those legends sound like butt. This performance sounded almost radically terrible. D.M.C. famously lost his voice decades ago; he has apparently dedicated his life to doing push-ups ever since. I don’t know what everyone else’s excuse is. There’s something positively adorable about Aerosmith running back “Livin’ On The Edge” 27 years later, like they’re making some big statement with it, when that song didn’t even mean anything in 1993. Today, it’s just as spectacularly pointless as the restaging of a music video that’s twice as old as Billie Eilish.
19. Alicia Keys ("Someone You Loved" Parody Bit)
This lady was in a no-win situation! The entire organization behind the Grammys went into nuclear meltdown the week before the show! Then she had to helm the show taking place in the Staples Center on the night after Kobe Bryant died! That fucking sucks! She was always destined to go up onstage and say something about how we were all going to move past negativity, and it was always destined to clang horribly. Maybe she wasn't destined to sing a parody of “Someone You Loved,” but what was she supposed to do? She had to do something. Maybe it was this. Whoof. (Note: I'm not including the basically-impromptu Boyz II Men duet during the opening as one of the show's performances, but it was nice.)
18. Camila Cabello
As a dad, I should be the world’s biggest mark for a drippy love song directed at a father. Nope! Not this time! Camila Cabello’s home baby-movies are cute and all, but it takes a deep level of indulgence to believe that the television-viewing public needs to see them. I’m going to need my nakedly manipulative heartstring-yanking spectacles to be maybe just slightly less nakedly manipulative than this teacher's-pet move.
17. Blake Shelton & Gwen Stefani
After the awkwardly shattered opening of the show, this was a sign that the Grammys would continue as usual: Famous people singing drab ballads while attempting to communicate sincerity. The song is a perfectly professional autopilot love ballad, and it was cute when they held hands and sang to each other, though it would've been cuter if they had any musical chemistry whatsoever. Still: I am not remotely invested in the grand romantic saga of Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani. It doesn't matter. On a night like this, it especially doesn't matter. It's mind-boggling how little it matters. This performance really worked as a signal to the audience: Go ahead. Get yourself a snack. See what else is on. We are determined to ensure that nothing exciting happens tonight.
16. Alicia Keys & Brittany Howard
The Grammys did not have room for a Lana Del Rey performance, but they did have room for host Alicia Keys to flog her just-fine new single in what was either her second or her third performance of the night. That’s pretty dumb! Also, Brittany Howard did not actually do anything except sit there for the bit where Keys said that they were "just vibing on this song" like she was not about to follow it up with an extremely staged performance.
15. Gary Clark Jr. & The Roots
In theory, I’m into the idea of Gary Clark Jr. performing his anti-Trump fuck you, I’m as American as anyone shred-rock anthem on a huge stage. In practice, it’s 11:15 at night, everybody else in my house is already asleep, and I just want to see who won the Royal Rumble and go to bed.
14. Trombone Shorty & the Preservation Hall Jazz Band
It’s funny. Cell-phone footage of drunk people dancing in a second-line in honor of 5th Ward Weebie can make me tear up. New Orleans jazz dudes marching across the Grammy stage to do a mock second-line for all the notable people who died in music in the past year -- a list that, according to the Grammy producers, does not include 5th Ward Weebie or David Berman or Mark Hollis or Scott Walker or Ranking Roger or Keith Flint or the correct spelling of Ric Ocasek's name -- makes me feel nothing.
13. The Jonas Brothers
Great coordinated black-and-gold outfits. Beautiful coordinated black-and-gold outfits. These goofs debuted what was apparently a new song. They're going to need some better new songs. The Jonases get some credit for attempting to use a Bo Diddley beat live in TV in 2020, and then they immediately lose all that credit by staging a goofy sub-Broadway dance party to go along with it.
12. Lizzo
Lizzo understands how the game is played. When you make your VMA debut, you perform in front of a gigantic inflatable ass. When you make your Grammy debut, you bring an orchestra and a ballet troupe. Lizzo's show-opening spectacle was clearly devised as an imperial-statement moment, a statement of dominance on the night when she was ready to take her place in the pantheon. (It went to Billie Eilish instead.) Lizzo's performance didn’t quite work out that way. Her two-song medley was shticky, which is fine. She is shticky. It was a true representation of what she does. But it was also muddy and messy. Her voice sounded overmatched, and her piped-in recorded vocals sounded overpowering. The orchestral arrangement of “Truth Hurts” just did not work. There were cool moments, like the flute suddenly flying up to her. Lizzo is certainly a fun performer, and after the year she just had, she deserved a triumphant moment. But the best moment of her performance wasn’t actually a part of her performance. It was her hugging her dancers afterward, celebrating what she’d just done.
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