The Grammys have lengthy been a reliable engine of concern. Every yr, it appeared, one humiliation or one other would seize the ceremony, corresponding to when Macklemore defeated Drake, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Jay-Z for Best Rap Album, in 2014, or when, the yr earlier than, the band Fun. beat out Frank Ocean for Best New Artist. All the method again in 2002, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack someway gained Album of the Year as an alternative of OutKast’s “Stankonia”—a call that aged poorly even earlier than presenter Janet Jackson had completed studying it off the card. Throughout the Grammys’ almost seventy-year historical past, the Recording Academy has disproportionately favored the very white, the very male, and the very previous, constantly rewarding legacy acts and trade darlings reasonably than the yr’s most completed, important music. In 2018, Neil Portnow, who was then the president of the Academy, prompt that girls performers wanted to “step up” in the event that they wished to win extra awards. The remark confirmed what everybody already knew: the Grammys voting physique was an out-of-touch boys membership whose biases mirrored an establishment on the brink of irrelevance. (What else might clarify Beck beating Beyoncé, in 2015, for finest album?) When Portnow left his publish, in 2019, his alternative, Deborah Dugan, accused the Academy of vote-fixing and mismanaging funds, which the Academy denied; she was placed on depart after which ultimately let go. In the aftermath of those scandals, the Grammys have been on one thing of an apology tour, signalling to audiences and artists alike that they’ve heard the criticisms and they know. They know!
Heading into Sunday evening’s occasion, in Los Angeles, the Grammys had been surprisingly quick on salacious story strains. If one in every of the extra compelling causes to tune in to the present is to see simply how fallacious the Academy goes to get it, then this yr’s ceremony promised to be a little bit of a snoozer. The “big four” classes had few snubs; its nominees included preëminent stars corresponding to Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Sabrina Carpenter. There had been additionally three rap albums contending for Album of the Year—Clipse’s “Let God Sort Em Out,” Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX,” and Tyler, the Creator’s “Chromakopia”—the most nods the style has ever obtained in the class. Adele, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, in the meantime, wouldn’t be round to generate buzz over rivalries and record-breaking, and no main stars had been sitting out the ceremony in protest, as Drake, Ocean, and the Weeknd have in the previous. Would Sunday’s telecast truly be an correct reflection of the yr in business, major-label music? After many years of alleged corruption and catastrophic selections, was the Academy lastly going to get it proper?
Thankfully for the Grammys, Bad Bunny introduced sufficient narrative intrigue with him to hold the ceremony. Aside from being the first Spanish-language artist to be nominated directly for Album, Song, and Record of the Year, the Puerto Rican celebrity is scheduled to carry out at the Super Bowl halftime present, on Sunday. It’s the first time that the principal act can be carried out totally in Spanish, one thing the political proper has deemed disgraceful. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, stated that brokers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would “be all over” the Super Bowl, and D.H.S. adviser Corey Lewandowski scolded the N.F.L. for choosing “somebody who just seems to hate America so much.” (President Trump claimed to not know who Bad Bunny was, though he stated the prospect of a Bad Bunny halftime present was “absolutely ridiculous.”) Bad Bunny has brazenly criticized the Trump Administration’s immigration insurance policies, calling out the President himself and the malevolent militarization of ICE. Once once more, the Grammys had been at the coronary heart of a politically charged second through which its awards meant greater than mere recognition—its selections would perform as a cultural bellwether, a touch upon the place the trade stands on one in every of the most urgent human-rights problems with our time.
As the festivities started, it turned clear that Bad Bunny would certainly function the evening’s middle of gravity. The present’s competent but miraculously unfunny host, Trevor Noah, cozied as much as Bad Bunny at his desk and begged him to carry out—a ploy, maybe, to remind the viewers that the actual efficiency was quickly to come back, at the Super Bowl. Early in the night, when Bad Bunny’s album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” was awarded Best Música Urbana Album, his acceptance speech opened with a rousing name to motion: “ICE out,” he declared. (Artists from Carole King to Bieber wore pins that stated the similar.) In an evening heavy on political statements however quick on overt political performativity, his message was sharp and clear: “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” Earlier, Billie Eilish—who, preposterously, gained Song of the Year for “Wildflower,” a monitor from final yr’s Grammy-nominated album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” that had been repackaged as a single, permitting it to be included on this yr’s awards—affirmed, throughout her acceptance speech, that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” But it was Bad Bunny’s protestations that reverberated the loudest. “The hate gets more powerful with more hate,” he stated. “The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So, please, we need to be different.”
