I've become increasingly convinced that the Grammys' sole purpose for existence is to give people something to complain about. I mean, no one's opinion of any musician has ever been altered by finding out that that artist won a Grammy, but if the old fogies who run the joint give an award to the wrong person, we can moan about it till the cows come home. This year, we didn't even need to wait for the show to start.
At around 6:30, it was announced that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis had won Best Rap Album for The Heist, an album that spawned three huge singles, but didn't garner a great deal of critical respect. It had beaten out several far more respected rap albums, including Kanye West's Yeezus, and Kendrick Lamar's good kid m.A.A.d city. This was all the internet needed to lose its collective mind. The combination of giving it to a cheesy rapper over several more credible nominees, and giving it to the lone white rapper in the field, proved deadly, as tweets poured in, some blasting the Grammys, but many more of them blasting Macklemore, accusing him of appropriating black culture (note: you could accuse every white rapper of doing this, I think the aggravating factor with Macklemore is how horribly safe he is). We still had a full hour until the show began, and we'd already had a huge controversy on our hands.
After that, however, the Grammys actually made a lot of correct calls the rest of the night. First off, Daft Punk winning Album of the Year is pretty damn awesome. Not as much of an out-of-nowhere surprise as when Arcade Fire won three years ago, but awesome nonetheless. Plus, there was that brief moment when Taylor Swift thought she had won, then had to awkwardly sit back down. Which was hilarious, even if you like Taylor Swift. We still have to deal with the awkwardness of Record of the Year and Song of the Year being two separate categories, but at least they made solid calls both times, with "Get Lucky" winning the former, while Lorde's "Royals" took the latter. I've heard "Royals" more than enough times in one lifetime, but I'm pretty sure it was good back in October so, yeah, good call.
Ok, let's talk about the performances. Not all of them, because this thing went on for about three days, and I can't possibly think of shit to say about all of them. My favorite performance of the night was the collaboration between Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons, which mashed up "m.A.A.d City," and "Radioactive" (see video below). While I loved Kendrick's album, this performance really solidified his genius to me - he made Imagine Dragons seem downright tolerable! Good even! "Radioactive" was quite possibly my absolute least favorite song of 2013, but when it was Kendrick's backup music, it somehow sounded fucking awesome.
The opening performance of "Drunk In Love" by Beyonce and Jay-Z was pretty damn great too. I'm kind of glad we've all just decided to agree that Beyonce is amazing, and not just parse her lyrics for anything that might be anti-feminist if you deliberately choose to interpret it in an anti-feminist context. I mean, she's been giving us killer jams for 15 years now, and it's high time we stopped finding fault and just embraced her brilliance. Somehow, this performance seemed like a reflection of that, where we could all just appreciate B's awesomeness, and, well, bow down bitches.
Usually, there's at least one train wreck at these awards, but while I'd love to get good and snarky about something, I'm struggling to find a truly terrible performance. There were a few that I had mixed feelings about, however. On one hand, Macklemore is at least trying to do something good with "Same Love," even if you think the song sucks, or that he makes it too much about himself, he at least wants to be on the right side. That said, I thought the onstage marriages were a bit much, because they seemed to reduce the fight for marriage equality to a simple publicity stunt. There are 36 states where same-sex marriage still isn't legal, so it felt like a bit of a premature victory party. On the other hand, Queen Latifah was there, and that alone made it kind of cool...
As for Robin Thicke and Chicago, it was an amusing contrast to the infamous performance with Miley at the VMAs, which gave the indication that Thicke might be trying to clean up his act a little bit. It wasn't anything special, though. I had to suffer through one verse of "Blurred Lines" in exchange for one verse of "Saturday In The Park," then we moved on.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr playing together was fun, but it was somewhat underwhelming. The two teamed up to play "Queenie Eye," an admittedly strong track off Paul McCartney's New, but that was it. I mean, you have 50% of The Beatles on stage together, and you don't even do one Beatles song? And somehow, you put this right in the middle of the show, when it would have been an excellent closer. I sure hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Some of the better performances were the more understated ones, like Kasey Musgraves' solo acoustic rendition of "Follow Your Arrow," which had the unenviable task of following the Kendrick Lamar/Imagine Dragons performance. The mellow, acoustic performance was a stark contrast to the bombast we had just witnessed, but the song was strong enough that it managed to hold its own anyway. I also enjoyed John Legend's performance of "All Of Me," an underrated ballad which could have more staying power than one might expect.
Metallica doing "One" with Lang Lang was awesome, and did a far better job of mixing Metallica with classical than that S&M album back in 1999 did. Did anyone listen to that more than once? "One Leaf Clover" was good, but other than that, it sucked. I was worried this would be a repeat of that, but instead, it was one of the better performances of the night, and probably turned a few metalheads on to classical music.
Unfortunately, for all the goodwill this show earned, they really fucked up when they cut off Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age right in the middle of their show-closing performance. Admittedly, I'm kind of stunned that NIN and QOTSA were even invited to the place, but what the fuck was that about?! The show had already ran 45 minutes too long and now it goes too far?! Sheesh.
Still, most of the performances were good, the bad ones weren't that bad, and an album that normal people actually like won Album of the Year. There were some mistakes - Macklemore winning Best Rap Album was especially boneheaded - but this was much better than most Grammys, and really, I can't ask for a whole lot more than that. Here's to low expectations being slightly exceeded!
.jpg)
