64th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, CDB-TV, aired April 3, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 5 last night I broke off writing the previous night's journal entry and got ready to watch the 64th annual Grammy Awards. (Blessedly, the awards show was presented “live” and not time-delayed three hours later the way most awards shows used to be on the West Coast – and all too many of them still are, the New York-centric media mavens still making West Coast audiences suck hind tit). The 64th annual Grammy Awards, which I watch regularly at least in part as a way of keeping up with what’s currently popular in music, were a relentless assault with a few moments of genuine artistry here and there. It began with the usual overblown opening number, which in previous years has showcased legendary figures like Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and Billy Joel but this time around was given over to Silk Sonic, a band formed by Bruno Mars (whom I’d heard of) and Anderson Paak (whom I hadn’t, though he was wearing a transparently phony wig that looked like he stumbled on an old Beatles wig in his grandfather’s garage). At first I heard the name as “Silk Scarf” and waited in vain for a reference to silk scarves because I assumed that was the song title, but instead they did a song about gambling because the show was in Las Vegas (at the MGM Grand, site of a legendary mass shooting on October 1, 2017 when 43 people were killed at the close of an outdoor country festival featuring Jason Aldean and one of my favorites, Maren Morris).

The host was Trevor Noah, whose overall lameness as a performer once again confirmed the wisdom of the decision of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to use multiple hosts instead of just one. As unfunny “joke” after unfunny “joke” poured out of the mouth of that tall, gangly, racially ambiguous South African, the weirder it seemed that of all people on earth, he was chosen to take Jon Stewart’s place on the Comedy Central news spoof The Daily Show. Noah did acknowledge that the Grammy telecast has become less an awards show and more a musical variety special on which they hand out a few awards – and that was borne out by how few awards were presented on the actual telecast: only Song of the Year, Best Country Album, Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance (no comment except I have a hard time accepting that “Best” and “Rap” belong in the same sentence; it would be like giving an award for Best Garbage), Best R&B Album, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Duet and Record (single) and Album of the Year – just nine of the 83 total awards given this year. The Album of the Year award went to Jon Batiste, who got more nominations (11) than anyone else, for We Are – from which he performed the song “Freedom,” an over-the-top (less Batiste’s performance than the fooforaw surrounding it) ode to, well, freedom. Between Batiste, the bandleader on Stephen Colbert’s show, winning Album of the Year (and three other Grammys in categories presented before the telecast), and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and bandleader for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, winning a Grammy (as well as an Oscar the previous week) for his 2021 documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Summer of Soul, it was a good night for musicians from late-night talk shows at last night’s Grammys.

After the aural assault of Silk Sonic kicked off the show, the second number was Olivia Rodrigo’s star-mahing hit, “Driver’s License,” in which she plays a young girl who’s just turned old enough to have a driver’s license – only the young man she wants to pick up in her new car is out driving around with another woman. Though Rodrigo’s other songs are O.K. pieces of dance-pop that had made me write her off as just another baby diva wanna-be, “Driver’s License” is a haunting ballad which Rodrigo performed beautifully and did not overlay it with too much “production.” She contented herself with just one onstage prop, a dummy car she could get out of as the song began. (Needless to say, her number was preceded by a typically unfunny “joke” by Trevor Noah to the effect that Rodrigo had been “carded” backstage and had had to show her real driver’s license.) Next up was J. Belvin and Maria Becerra doing a song in Spanish – c’mon, guys, would it be so hard to subtitle it so us monolingual English-speakers would know what the song was about? It sounded good, otherwise, even though her voice definitely outclassed his. Then the Korean pop band BTS, dressed in black costumes and moving in ways that suggested they’re warming up to play a gang of seven Korean ninjas that would menace James Bond in his next movie, doing their mega-hit “Smooth Like Butter.” (I like butter as much as the next person, but I don’t want to hear a song about it.) Then a Spanish-language singer whose name I wrote down as Aimé Nuvelar did yet another Spanish-language song I liked musically but I wish they’d provided subtitles so I’d know what the hell it’s about.

Afterwards we got a performance by Lil Nas X (not to be confused with Nas, who appeared later on in the show) and Jack Harlow doing a medley including a song called “Call Me by Your Name,” and Billie Eilish doing “I’m Happier Away from You.” (Eilish also got the Trevor Noah so-called “joke” treatment; he said that Billie’s brother and collaborator Finneas must have the last name “Eilish,” when in fact their last name is O’Connell: her full name is Billie Eilish O’Connell and the two of them were nominated for Song of the Year, which goes to the songwriters rather than the performers, under the names “Billile Eilish O’Connell” and “Finneas O’Connell – alas, they didn’t win and the crappy “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic won instead). Then came one of the strongest songs of the evening, “Right on Time” by Brandi Carlile, which she performed backed only by her own piano on the first chorus and a tasteful string arrangement thereafter – as I’ve said on previous music awards shows, the artists I’m inclined to like best are the ones that keep their performances simple and don’t drown them in production values: no fireworks, no scantily clad dancers, no regiments of choristers marching in formation and making it look like we’re about to watch Metropolis: The Musical. Every time I see an artist make one of those overproduced videos – even (especially) ones with real talent, like Janet Jackson or Beyoncé – I feel, “Why are you doing all this? Don’t you trust your voice to communicate the message without all this crap around you?”

After Brandi Carlile’s haunting performance came several minutes of typical rap garbage by Nas, who was introduced as a 30-year veteran of the music scene (so he’s been shoveling this rap shit that long?). After that Chris Stapleton, the Bruce Vilanch of country music – the overweight schlub who managed a superstar career in a genre in which the obligatory look for men is ultra-tight blue jeans flashing a huge basket (and for women it’s outfits that make them look like street hookers), first proclaimed his undying love for his wife of 30 years or so and then did a song called “Why You Got to Be So Cold?” The disconnect between his self-description of his home life (and his away life, since he takes her ahd their kids with him when he tours) and the content of his song was so jarring I can only assume the song is from the point of view of a character and is not how the real Chris Stapleton feels at all. Then came one of the most horrible innovations of this Grammy telecast: a mixed-race gospel group called the Maverick City Music did a performance from the MGM Grand’s rooftop – only the telecast cut away from them in mid-song for a commercial break,and they were still singing (albeit a different song) when the break ended and the telecast cut back to them. Later the neo-bluegrass act Billy Strings got the same treatment – a real shame, especially since they were two of the strongest acts on the program and one (this one, anyway) would have liked to hear and see their performances complete.

After Maverick City Music’s regrettably truncated performance came a weird number by John Legend – doing some of the most heartfelt soul singing of his career – backed by some Ukrainian singers and introduced by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky (or at least someone who looked very much like him; it occurred to me they might have been doing the old Stephen Colbert number of hiring an actor to impersonate a famous person, but I’m pretty sure this was the real Zelensky even though it’s hard to imagine an early-1940’s broadcast in which Winston Churchill would have appeared remotely as guest host on the Kraft Music Hall), in an ode of solidarity to Ukraine that began with the old spiritual “Go Down, Moses” and worked up from there. The next performer was Lady Gaga, introduced by Tony Bennett via a remote link, doing a couple of songs from the Cole Porter tribute album Love for Sale that they made together (and which will apparently be Tony Bennett’s final recording since he’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and no longer can perform), “Love for Sale” and “Do I Love You?” She did the former uptempo and without the marvelously world-weary verse (but then Dinah Washington didn’t include the verse, either, and hers is my favorite one: like Doris Day’s performance of Rodgers’ and Hart’s song “Ten Cents a Dance” in the film Love Me or Leave Me, Dinah’s “Love for Sale” buzzes with sheer anger at the way she’s being exploited, and she does two choruses, the first at slow tempo and the second speeded up), but for “Do I Love You?” she included the verse and phrased it beautifully. (Until I heard Lady Gaga’s first recorded duet with Tony Bennett, “The Lady Is a Tramp,” I would have assumed Gaga was strictly a dance-music performer who couldn’t master the looser rhythms and more subtle phrasing needed to sing standards. She was right and I was wrong.)

After that and the truncated performance by Billy Strings (whose real name is William Apostol, by the way), next up was a tribute to the late Stephen Sondheim consisting of two songs he wrote by himself, “Not a Day Goes By” and “Send In the Clowns,” and one from the West Side Story score for which Leonard Bernstein wrote the music and Sondheim the lyrics, “Somewhere.” This was the introduction to the “In Memoriam” segment, and, regrettably, the four singers – Cynthia Erivo, Lesile Odom, Jr., Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler – were not identified until they were finished, and in a quickly barked-out manner at that. Then came Joh Batiste’s way over-the-top staging of his song “Freedom,” after which Justin Bieber along with two Black guest stars, Daniel Caesar and Giveon (both of whom had better, sweeter voices than he), did a song called “I Want Peaches Down in Georgia.” As the evening droned on, H.E.R. – one of those artists who no longer releases her music in physical formats (damn this pestilential age of downloading and “streaming”!!!!!), which disappointed me greatly when her second album came out and it wasn’t available physically, did a bizarre medley, accompanied by Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Travis Barker and Lenny Kravitz, of her own songs “Damage” and “We Made It” and a cover of Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” in what Entertainment Weekly’s Web site called a “full circle moment” but which wasn’t that impressive to me.

The show creaked to a close with Carrie Underwood’s “Ghost Story” and the Brothers Osborne’s “Dead Man’s Curve” (a new song, not the 1960’s Jan and Dean hit), providing a rousing but also rather dark conclusion to a show that, even with the idiotic commercial breaks ruining the performances by two of the best acts on the show and the relegation of 74 of the 83 total awards to ceremonies held elsewhere ahd earlier, still managed to run just over half an hour longer than the three hours CBS allotted to it. It also seemed weird that this show was held one week after the Oscars – it was originally scheduled for January but was put off due to COVID-19 concerns – but those are the breaks sometimes. One aspect of the show was John Legend’s beautiful tribute to the Ukrainian resistance wouldn’t have happened if the show had taken place in January since the Russian “special military operation” against Ukraine wouldn’t have happened yet, either!