by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s 57th annual Grammy Awards show
stretched on and on and on until 11:40
p.m. — what kind of “awards” show is it that keeps going for half an hour after
all the big marquee awards have been handed out? — and it was at least the
second time I’ve seen Stevie Wonder as the guest presenter of the big award,
Record of the Year, on stage with Jamie Foxx (a real-life blind
singer-songwriter united with a guy who played a blind singer-songwriter in a movie), with the
envelope with the winner’s name printed in Braille so Wonder could read it (and
Foxx couldn’t, which was the carefully set-up gag). It’s interesting to chart
the changes in the music business that have once again made Record of the Year
(for a single song) instead of Album of the Year the key marquee Grammy —
Prince presented Album of the Year to Beck (an interesting commonality in that
they’re both known professionally by their first names only, though at least
Beck didn’t spend years trying to convince us that his “real” name was an
oddball self-designed hieroglyphic!) with a preamble saying that, “like books
and Black lives, albums still matter.” (This was one of my worst-ever cultural
predictions; when CD’s came in I thought that their longer playing time and
lack of a side turnover would encourage artists to create more album-length works and concept albums; instead the
ease with which listeners could pick out a particular song from a CD led to fewer concept albums and more detachable singles — and the
rise of downloading and streaming have returned the business of recorded music
to what it was in the cylinder and 78 rpm disc era, in which records are sold
one or two songs at a time.)
Beck may have won Album of the Year but Record of
the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist all went to Sam Smith, the
openly Gay British singer-songwriter who’s made it to superstardom with a hit
called “Stay With Me” based on a real-life dysfunctional relationship he had —
as he joked during his final acceptance speech, “I’d like to thank the man who
inspired this song — he broke my heart but he won me four Grammys!” Smith has a
weirdly high-pitched voice, not falsetto but the sort of voice that in a
previous era of music history would have made him an Irish tenor — pure, clean,
with virtually no vibrato and at the upper edge of the tenor range. (By chance
I’d heard earlier in the day a record by the greatest Irish tenor of all time,
John McCormack, and though Smith isn’t at McCormack’s level as a technician his
vocal timbre is strikingly similar and no doubt adds to the mood of romantic
yearning at the heart of his hit song.) Ironically, on the program the Grammy
producers had him sing the song as a duet with Mary J. Blige, who actually took
the lower line when they sang
together! The 57th Annual Grammy Awards telecast was a lumbering
monster of a show, though it helped that despite the wild opener — AC/DC doing
“Highway to Hell” as pretty much by-the-numbers heavy metal — most of the music
presented was at the quieter side of today’s pop, which was fine by me; even
Kanye West, ordinarily one of the most repulsive presences in music (if you can
call his obnoxious by-the-numbers rapping that), actually sang rather than rapped on the two songs he performed,
and he revealed himself to be the possessor of a small, tight but not
unappealing little soul tenor. Miranda Lambert did a song called “Little Red
Wagon” (not the old blues of that
title, alas) that, like quite a few of the numbers, was way overproduced (all those neon-bright lights! All
those strobes! All that dry ice!) but also showed off her talents even though I
like her on ballads better.
Tom Jones got dredged up from Vegas-lounge hell or
however he’s making his living these days to duet on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’
Feeling” (a tribute to the married songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who
wrote it), and though the Righteous Brothers’ version remains definitive this
wasn’t at all bad (and I say that as a distinct non-fan of the Wailin’ Welshman). Madonna came out and
did a song called “Living on Love,” prefacing it with a rap calling for a love
revolution; she’s been doing this schtick for three decades now (has it really been that long?), presenting swinging her ass as if it were
some sort of political statement, but one has to admire the well-preserved
state of her body. Then Ed Sheeran — who’s probably gnashing his teeth in
frustration that the rapid rise of Sam Smith has cut short the time he could bask in the limelight as the next new hot
singer-songwriter — did something called (I’m guessing here) “’Til It’s 17”
with various guest artists, including Herbie Hancock (buried deep in the mix
but still adding some tasteful jazz piano) and Questlove, and he hung out for a
guest appearance with a reunited Electric Light Orchestra (of all people) on a
medley of “She Is a Woman” (once again, I’m guessing at the title) and “Mr.
Blue Sky” (that one I remember,
even though ELO’s history once Roy Wood left after the first album is a
combination of commercial success and artistic devastation — in the late 1970’s
I remember playing the LP’s of ELO’s predecessor band, The Move, for friends
who swore they hated ELO and were
astonished that they liked The Move — but then without the creative tension
between Wood and ELO’s leader, Jeff Lynne, ELO was essentially to The Move what
Wings were to The Beatles). After that we heard a duet called “My Heart Is Open” with Adam Levine and Gwen
Stefani — neither of them great
voices but both right for this song — and then an odd song called “Take Me to
Church” by someone named Mozier into which Annie Lennox came out and added a
second vocal mid-song, which segued into a Lennox cover of Screamin’ Jay
Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” That was fascinating, even though Lennox’ thin 1980’s pop voice hardly
delivered the song with Hawkins’ fire and venom — Charles, I think, liked it
even less than I did and I joked that the real Hawkins was going to come out of
his actual coffin and drag her
down to hell with him!
After that
Pharrell Williams, looking like a bellboy in a 1940’s movie set in Eastern
Europe, led a small army of performers in his song “Happy” — I didn’t think
anyone could possibly write a more banal song about happiness than Bobby
McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but somehow Williams managed it — with a
dark Metropolis-style
introduction that didn’t at all mesh with the main theme and a bizarre insert
by, of all people, classical pianist Lang Lang, pounding a piano as if he were
some demented version of Liberace cross-bred with Pete Townshend or Jimi
Hendrix and he were going to chop it to kindling when he was done.
(Fortunately, he didn’t.) After the next commercial break, the show cut to a
film clip of President Obama, of all people, giving one of his typically
low-keyed announcements, in his case warning of the dangers of domestic
violence and promoting a new Web site, which segued into a presentation by real
domestic-violence victim Brooke Axtell and a song by Katy Perry called “By the
Grace of God” that turned out to be one of the most moving and emotionally
intense pieces on the program even without the wrenching context provided by Obama and Axtell. (After Obama’s
speech I had rather sourly joked that the next thing they would present would
be a performance by Chris Brown.) Afterwards there was a film clip of the band
Imagine Dragons doing “Shot All Over” (another guess at the title) that was
presented so oddly it wasn’t clear whether it was a commercial, part of the
show or something in between. Then came one of the great moments of the
program, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga duetting on “Cheek to Cheek” — their album
of that title may be one of the unlikeliest collaborations of all time, but
Gaga proved that she’s one dance-music artist who can handle the less
strait-jacketed, more swinging rhythm and phrasing for standard songs to work,
and she and Bennett were clearly actually improvising on the song instead of churning out an exact copy of
their record. After that they
trotted out Usher and a harpist to pay tribute to Stevie Wonder (and promote
the upcoming Grammy special on Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, scheduled for February 16) with one of Wonder’s
most banal songs, “If It’s Magic,” partially redeemed only by a surprising
guest appearance by Wonder himself, taking out the song on harmonica.
Next up
was the country segment, kicked off by Eric Church doing a song called “Give Me
Back My Home Town” — it doesn’t help that both Bruce Springsteen and Chrissie
Hynde have done considerably more with this song concept than he did, and it
seemed weird that while he was singing the screens behind him were showing
clips of racially motivated violence ranging from old Ku Klux Klan lynchings to
the more recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, but it’s still a competent
piece of songwriting craftsmanship and it was nice to hear. Things perked up
when Brandy Clark came out accompanied by Dwight Yoakam — he sang enough that
it approached duet status but it was still pretty much her show with him
backing her — on a song called “A Real Good Time to Hold My Hand” — earlier,
during the brief clips of the Best Country Record nominee, Charles had noted
that the women in the category, Clark and Miranda Lambert, had sounded
genuinely country while the guys had come off like Creedence Clearwater Revival
(though I think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a closer parallel to the sound of so many
modern male country artists — what in the 1970’s we called “Southern rock”) —
and then there was an unlikely “country” threesome with Rihanna, Kanye West
and, of all people, Paul McCartney, standing in the back and strumming a big
guitar but contributing nothing vocally, on a song whose title I guessed as
“Make It Here by Monday” — it was odd, but it worked. After that they went into the Latin segment, with Juanés — whom
Charles could remember being hailed as a deathless male sex god decades ago
(he’s still a good-looking man but the camera got close enough to show us the
crags and wrinkles on his face) — on a song called “Juntos,” followed by
someone or something called Sia, who wasn’t there in person but contributed a
video of her hit song “Chandelier” which figured various women in body
stockings designed to make them look nude, cavorting on a mock-Egyptian set
that didn’t seem to relate in any way to the song; the piece sounded like O.K.
pop and on its own I might enjoy it, but like a lot of the material on last
night’s show it was dragged down by the visual portion of the presentation.
After that was a low-keyed duet
by Beck and Chris Martin of Coldplay on a song called “Your Heart Is a Dream” —
the song was one of the loveliest pieces of music heard all night but there was
nothing about it that couldn’t have been done in the 1960’s; indeed, it sounded
very much like the sort of record the Everly Brothers were making in the late
1960’s to try to modernize their image and sound hip.
Then they gave out a few
awards — as I noted above, the Grammy Awards have become a giant music variety
show (though quite frankly the music is no longer varied enough — they used to
acknowledge the existence of classical and jazz by allowing great artists in
those fields at least brief segments to strut their stuff in pure form; now
they spackle people like Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock into giant pop
productions that throw the commercial supremacy of what’s left of the Top 40
into their faces) with a few awards presentations thrown in like confetti — and
with the Record of the Year presented but the show having still a half-hour
left to go, first we got National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
president Neil Portnow and a couple of other people doing a sententious
presentation urging the audience to lobby for strict intellectual-property
legislation to protect “the artists” and make sure musicians will still
continue to create great songs by ensuring they will be paid for them. Reality
check: it’s the people Neil Portnow is representing — the giant music
corporations (that, like all other companies, are merging and thereby becoming
less numerous, less competitive and more gargantuan) — who have historically
screwed actual creative musicians out of the money due them, and more musicians
these days are using the new Internet distribution channels Portnow wants to
restrict or shut down to get their music to the people without corporate middlemen intervening and taking the
lion’s share of the income. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad the year
Arcade Fire won Album of the Year — not only do they make great music, they
release their CD’s on a label they own themselves and therefore don’t have to share their income with a mega-corporation.
After that came the show’s
finale, Beyoncé doing the Thomas A. Dorsey gospel classic “Precious Lord” segueing into Black singer-songwriter
John Legend and positive rapper Common (“positive” in the sense that he’s
actually trying to communicate good ideals and values through his music instead
of glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, capitalist acquisitiveness and the
other foul subject matter of the repulsive “gangsta” style) doing their song
“Glory” from the film Selma.
Though the host, L. L. Cool J (interesting that they picked a rapper to host a
show that included very little rap), didn’t mention that “Precious Lord” was
the favorite song of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1968 Mahalia Jackson
sang it at King’s funeral and in 1972 Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia
Jackson’s funeral), if nothing else the juxtaposition added the final point to
a show that, however unwittingly, demonstrated how all the African-American-based popular music of the last
120 years or so — ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, R&B, rock, soul, even rap —
stems from the Black church and the spiritual and gospel traditions. Song after
song last night — including Sam Smith’s big hit (he got sued for plagiarism by
Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, who clamed “Stay With Me” included material from their
song “I Won’t Back Down,” but if his lawyers had been savvier they probably
could have found a public-domain spiritual or gospel song that contained that
lick and thereby claimed a common ancestor), and Mosier’s song oddly perched
between sin and salvation — showed its roots in the Black church, particularly
with those great, exalting chords that have powered so much of this music. I
can’t help but savor the irony that opponents of rock from the 1950’s to the
1980’s (and opponents of ragtime, jazz and swing before them!) regularly
denounced it as “the devil’s music” — which couldn’t have been farther from the
truth; however bizarre the connection sometimes, and however perverted its
values have become (particularly in the heavy-metal bands’ tributes to Satan
and the evil messages of gangsta rap), ultimately this is not the Devil’s music
but the Lord’s.
