by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 60th
Annual Grammy Awards were telecast on CBS starting at 4:30 p.m. — an odd
starting time which seems to have been set up for the convenience of attendees
and viewers in New York City, where the show was held for the first time in 15
years (and the New York chauvinism of some of the guests got really wearing) and where it would have started at
7:30 p.m. their time. At least it’s better than us getting palmed off with a
taped rebroadcast three hours after the actual event (though they re-ran the
entire show after it ended), which is still pulled on us for some of the lesser
awards shows but has blessedly been made intolerable for the big awards by the
advent of the Internet and its capacity for communicating major news in real
time. The show opened with one of the most hideous and awful presences in pop
music today, rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose seemingly endless song (if, to quote
Dwight MacDonald about Israeli actress Haya Harareet, I may use the term for
courtesy) was interrupted by another of the most repulsive celebrities currently operating, Dave Chappelle,
an excruciatingly unfunny Black “comedian” who got on my shit list when he
signed a huge contract with one of the major networks to renew his TV show —
and then disappeared for months. Chappelle interrupted Lamar’s number — an
incredibly overproduced farrago of chorus boys in black costumes that made the
piece look like yet another attempt at Metropolis: The Musical — to say that we needed to listen to the
“truth” of what he was saying about the status of Black people in America. I
wouldn’t have minded listening to what Kendrick Lamar had to say about the
status of Black people in America, except that was impossible because, with the
exception of a stray word or phrase here and there, I couldn’t for the life of
me make out what he was saying. One would think that the sine qua non of a rapper would at least be able to make
sure the audience understood the words, but Lamar’s piece was so overproduced, and he spat out whatever he
was saying so fast and often in such strict rhythm that his drummer was
literally drowning him out, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it — which was
also my problem with his similarly overproduced, militaristic number at the
Grammys two years ago, immediately following the opening number of the musical Hamilton, of which I wrote at the time, “Alas, after
we got a demonstration from the Hamilton cast of what rap can be, we got 10 seemingly endless minutes of
Kendrick Lamar demonstrating the musical disaster it usually is, in a so-called
‘song’ which begins with Lamar declaring that he’s Black (‘I think I would have
noticed that; you didn’t have to tell me,’ I joked) and is supposedly being
performed in a prison (a gimmick Elvis Presley did better in the title number
to Jailhouse Rock — I’m not
usually that big an Elvis
fan but Kendrick Lamar makes him look better by comparison!).”
Lamar and Jay-Z
were up for Album of the Year last night, but blessedly they both lost … to
Bruno Mars, another performer I can’t stand but at least someone who makes music. I’d like Bruno Mars better if his
overweening ego hadn’t led him, on a previous Grammy telecast, to refuse to
appear (which since he didn’t have an album in then-current release actually
made sense) unless they whipped up a pointless, ridiculous “tribute” to Bob
Marley in which he sang two of Marley’s lamer romantic ballads and Sting did
one of his vaguely reggae-ish originals in between — a disaster that enraged me
at the time because it not only ignored Marley’s socially conscious material
(like “Get Up, Stand Up,” “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Rasta Man Chant”) it didn’t
even do any of his good love songs like “Is It Love?” I also don’t like Bruno Mars because it
seems like he’s trying so hard to channel Michael Jackson — though I haven’t heard it, on the
strength of her previous work I’d have wanted to see Lorde’s Melodrama win Album of the Year — but at least Mars
saved the top three awards (Album, Record and Song of the Year) for real music instead of rap-crap!!!!!! The show droned on
for nearly four hours and, as usual with the Grammys, the musical performances
were far more powerful and interesting than the actual awards: after the show
began with Kendrick Lamar’s disaster Lady Gaga and Mark Ronson redeemed things
with a beautiful ballad called “Girl (Where Do You Think You’re Going?)” that
once more underscored that, like a lot of the powerful female talents of today
(two of whom, Maren Morris and Alessia Cara, were showcased later on the
program, though in numbers with other artists that took the edge off their
effectiveness), Lady Gaga is too talented to stay stuck in only one style.
The
next song was “Beautiful Prayer” by Sam Smith, who came on wearing an odd white
jacket that looked like some fashion designer’s idea of crossing a lab coat
with a monk’s robe — is there some Grammy rule that openly Gay performers have
to dress androgynously? (The only other openly Gay artist on last night, Elton
John, performed his much-ballyhooed duet with Miley Cyrus on “Tiny Dancer”
wearing a sequined black leather
jacket with his first name emblazoned on the back. He also has almost no voice
left — Elton John never had more than a serviceable voice; he achieved stardom
because he and Bernie Taupin wrote such fabulous songs and his voice, though
not great, at least in its early days was powerful and flexible enough to put
the songs over.) Then the group Little Big Town did a song called “Better Man,”
apparently written for them by Taylor Swift, and while there’s an even better
song called “Better Man” by Pearl Jam this was a good one and an especially
fine vehicle for the great white soul voice of the Little Big Town female
member with long, dark hair. Then there was a tribute to the late Chuck Berry
and Fats Domino that was disappointing simply because it wasn’t longer; given
Berry’s importance in the history of rock his “final exit” should have been
heralded on the Grammys by an extended medley with various artists paying
tribute to him with a snippet of his songs; instead he and Fats got lumped
together with Jon Batiste of Stephen Colbert’s backing band, Stay Human, doing
“Ain’t That a Shame” (and playing a considerably flashier, trickier piano part
than the original) and Gary Clark, Jr. playing “Maybelline.” Then someone or
something called Childish Gambino — his name sounds like a particularly
immature Mafioso character on The
Godfather or The
Sopranos but he’s
actually a quite good Black neo-soul singer — did a song called “Terrified,”
and Pink turned in one of the highlights of the evening with a power ballad
called “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.”
I loved this performance because it stayed simple:
for once Pink didn’t have herself hoisted to the rafters on a trapeze with
Cirque du Soleil wanna-bes as her chorus line; instead she stood on stage and
sang her heart out in one of the most powerful and vivid white-soul
performances of a night that had quite a few good ones. Next up was a
surprisingly amusing routine with James Corden, who hosted and was generally
inoffensive even though the few times I’ve watched his own show I’ve found him
boring and wondered how this guy with no discernible talent got on TV, taking
Sting and Shaggy on a New York subway, trying to do a Big Apple version of his schtick of doing sing-alongs with his musical guests
in the car ostensibly taking them to his studio — and getting a lot of irate
passengers telling them to just shut up. The next number was a forgettable
entry by Bruno Mars with someone named Candy B. as his duet partner on a song
called “Finesse,” after which Sting got trotted in to sing a three-decades-old
song, “Englishman in New York.” Sting originally wrote it about Quentin Crisp
but it got trotted out because he was an Englishman in New York last night, and he did it competently enough
and reminded us of how great he was, especially in the decade between the
breakup of the Police and the recording of his masterpiece, The Soul Cages. After that came a teaming of Rihanna with
two rap people, rapper Bryan Taller (at least that’s what I think I wrote in my notes) and D.J. Khalid, on a
forgettable song called “What I Wish.” Then Maren Morris, one of my current
favorites, came out with the Brothers Osborne and Eric Church, all of whom had
performed at the country music festival in Las Vegas that ended tragically with
a mass shooting just after the set by headliner Jason Aldean, to memorialize
the fans lost that day with … well, I was hoping they would do a classic
country song on the subject like the Carter Family’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,”
but instead they trotted out Eric Clapton’s bathetic “Tears in Heaven” (though
Morris did make the song
sound more soulful than anyone else has, including Clapton himself).
That was
followed by Kesha’s song “Praying,” about the record producer who first
discovered her and then raped her, leading to her refusal to work with him
again, which since she was still contractually bound to him meant she couldn’t
record at all for the next three years — an eternity in a music career — though
the song she wrote about the experience, expressing her anger but also praying
for his soul, would have been powerful enough on its own but got a wrenching
performance from her that was one of the highlights of the night. The next performers were U2,
who had done a cameo appearance in the middle of Kendrick Lamar’s travesty that
provided its only redeeming moment but whose own song, “Get Out of Your Own
Way” with a projected backdrop of giant eyes, performed on a barge parked in
front of the Statue of Liberty, just made their act seem tired. (Bono is 30
years older than he was when he recorded The Joshua Tree, and looks it.) Then came the
Elton John-Miley Cyrus duet, followed by a much more powerful duet on a song
called “Middle” between Maren Morris and someone or something called Zodd —
this was the full-length song paid for by Target as a commercial, and I hope
its appearance means that a CD with this great song on it will be available
there. After that Ben Platt did “Somewhere” as a tribute to the 100th
anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein — he was O.K. but the song itself
is pretty indestructible — and then came one of the highlights of the night: as
a tribute to the still-living Andrew Lloyd Webber (who was shown in the
audience) Patti LuPone came out and sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from Evita — she’d also sung it on the
1981 Grammys but her vocal chops were still intact and the song, which is
midway between a Broadway show tune and an operatic aria, made its full effect;
she’d be too old to play Evita on stage again but she can still belt out this
number with wrenching power!
The remaining songs were “Broken Clocks” by Sza
(pronounced “Suzzah,” in case you were wondering) — a bitchy post on CNN at https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2018/01/28/grammy-awards-2018-brutally-honest-reviews-every-performance-ranked/1073461001/
said it was a travesty that this person lost Best New Artist last year to
Alessia Cara (the CNN writer, Maeve McDermott, also hailed Kendrick Lamar’s
piece of incomprehensible shit as the best performance of the night, so it’s a
safe bet that her taste and mine are diametrically opposed!), but to my mind
Cara is far superior: Sza seems to be channeling Sade (not a bad model) whereas
Cara sings with real emotion and soul. “Broken Clocks” is a nice song and Sza
does it well enough, but it’s not in the same league as “Scars to Your Beautiful”!
Chris Stapleton, the Bruce Vilanch of country music — I’ve noted in these pages
before how this guy who looks like a drunken schlub at a bar rose from writing songs for other
people to having a career of his own and has beat out all those hot guys in tight
jeans for award after award on various shows — paid tribute to Tom Petty with a
duet with Emmylou Harris on “Wildflowers.” For a finale Logic, a white rapper I liked much better
than Kendrick Lamar — partly because with his close-cropped hair and tight blue
jeans he looked like someone I might cruise in a Gay bar but mainly because at
least he rapped slowly enough I could actually understand most of what he was
saying — came out with Alessia Cara and Khalid for a song whose title was a
phone number, “1-800-273-8155.” Given that the participants were wearing shirts
with the phone number on one side and the slogan “You Are Not Alone” on the
other, I presume that’s a suicide hotline; Alessia Cara once again proved that
she, like Lady Gaga and Maren Morris, is one of those performers that can do
almost anything, and her
belting was the highlight of the production.
Somewhere along the way there was
a not particularly funny number spoofing the spoken-word Grammys and noting
that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both won for their audiobooks, and
suggesting that if the current President is going to win a spoken-word Grammy
it’s going to be for Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury. I had stepped out of the room while this
was on but was still listening and noted that one of the voices did sound rather familiar — it was Hillary
Clinton, delivering the evening’s most blatant anti-Trump voice (though some
have pushed it more than others, the big awards shows have generally made it
clear that in this divided country creative artists are generally on the other
side from Trump) and pissing off Nikki Haley, Trump’s pick as U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations (and whom Wolff hinted in his book was having an affair
with Trump), who tweeted, “I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists
read the Fire and Fury book killed it. Don’t ruin great music with trash. Some of us love
music without the politics thrown in it.” Donald Trump, Sr. so far hasn’t
weighed in on the controversy, but Donald Trump, Jr. has: Baby Trump tweeted, “Getting to read a #fakenews book excerpt at the Grammys
seems like a great consolation prize for losing the presidency. The more
Hillary goes on television the more the American people realize how awesome it
is to have @realDonaldTrump in office.” The show closed
after Logic’s anti-suicide number (and his own anti-Trump statement to the
effect that immigrants made this country great and their home countries are not
s---holes — alas, CBS’s standards-and-practices people bleeped Trump’s
obscenity) — marking the end of a predictably lumbering show that had some
stellar moments (almost all from women — Patti LuPone, Lady Gaga, Maren Morris —
though better on her Target spot than on the show itself — Alessia Cara and the
awesome Kesha), and at least we were spared the indignity of having the Album
of the Year award go to a piece of rap garbage!!!!!
