65th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Pierre Cossette Productions, CBS-TV, aired February 5, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, February 5, I watched the 65th annual Grammy Awards telecast on CBS, which turned out to be the lumbering beast awards shows usually turn into. The host was Trevor Noah, who’s not one of my favorite people, though he made a few rather obvious attempts at topical humor, including a joke about the Chinese “weather balloon” that drifted obnoxiously over the United States and just happened to fly over states with major U.S. military installations. The 65th annual Grammy Awards show was billed as the first in three years not hampered by COVID-19 restrictions (though I just read a report that the Journal of the American Medical Association has just published a study revealing that COVID-19 is still the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S.), and the producers shifted the balance dramatically from actual musical performances to giving out awards. In previous years the Grammy telecast has generally featured 20 performances and nine awards; this year there were just 12 performances (not counting the quite lovely “In Memoriam” segment, in which Kacey Musgraves performed Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” quite beautifully, though without the dollop of pure white soul Lynn herself brought to it) as a tribute to the late country great. There were some surprising names in the “In Memoriam” segment, including Pharoah Sanders (whose death I’d he,ad of in, of all places, the Bixography Forum Web site, a venue usually devoted to earlier styles of jazz than Sanders’) and Jerry Lee Lewis (well, the M.F. had to die sometime!), which is an indication of how remote I am from the news that doesn’t get talked about on MS-NBC. (The two biggest names in music who died in 2022, David Crosby and Jeff Beck, I did hear of via MS-NBC.)

There were 14 actual on-air awards (aside from the ones presented in a private pre-Grammy ceremony), and Beyoncé broke Sir Georg Solti’s record for the most Grammys ever won by a single individual. Trevor Noah’s jokes about the Chinese spy balloon missed the obvious one that Beyoncé was going to buy it from the Chinese government and use it in her next video. Beyoncé is a talented soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington, Etta James – whom she actually played quite effectively in the film Cadillac Records – and Diana Ross, whom she more or less played, also quite well, in the film Dreamgirls – but I don’t like her current act, especially those preposterous videos that, as I’ve said before, look like they were directed by the love-child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. Beyoncé’s Renaissance was up for Album of the Year – as was Adele’s 30 – and I remember the last time the two were up against each other in the category and Adele’s 25 beat out Beyoncé’s Lemonade. This year they both lost, and the Album of the Year went to Harry Styles for Harry’s House. (There’s been the predictable kvetching about the Grammys’ alleged problem with Black women – though three Black women, Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill, have won the Grammy for Album of the Year.) I’ll admit Harry Styles’s appeal pretty much baffles me; he’s cute, all right, and he performed his song, “In This World,” in a hot sequined outfit, though as the friend I was watching the Grammys with said, he’s trying to be David Bowie and isn’t.

The show opened with a strange piece of music by someone called “Bad Bunny,” whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio (“Martinez” is his family name and “Ocasio” is his mother’s maiden name, sometimes affixed to the names of Hispanics: I’ll never forget how wney I went to Cuba in December 1977 the official signs identified the country’s then-leader as “Fidel Castro Ruz” and his brother and eventual successor as “Raúl Castro Ruz”), doing what appeared to be a jumble of four different songs. Two were rapped and two were sung, and all four were in Spanish – which would have been O.K. if the Grammy show producers had provided subtitles, but they didn’t. Not that I could have understood them even if they’d been in English; one of the many things that irk me about rap (or “hip-hop,” the euphemism used by people who actually like it) is that rappers generally deliver their lyrics in an unintelligible mumble. Later on, when Bad Bunny’s album Un Verano Sin Ti won the Grammy Award for “Best Música Urbana Album” (I’m not making that up, you know!), he started his acceptance speech in English, quickly switched to Spanish and alternated between the two for the rest, though he was clearly more comfortable in Spanish than English (no surprise!).

The second song performed at the 2023 Grammys was by far the best: Brandi Carlile’s searing “Broken Horses,” a rock song with country influences delivered in an impassioned, almost relentless way by the singer/songwriter who won deserved Grammys for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance. I remember my disappointment with one of the previous Grammy Awards when Kacey Musgraves win Album of the Year, and I joked afterwards in my blog post that if they were going to give it to a country album, it should have been Brandi Carlile’s. Brandi Carlile is one of those amazing artists that can do it all: hard rock, soft rock, pure country, pop ballads. And when the Grammy producers allowed the artists to pick someone they especially admired to introduce their performance, Carlile chose her wife Catherine and their daughters. Carlile “came out” as a Lesbian in November 2002 and shortly thereafter she told the Los Angeles Times, "I don't have to have a lot of formality around it ... there were people before me who paved the way." (I’m guessing at least two of the people who paved the way for her were k. d. lang and Melissa Etheridge.)

There was also an elaborate tribute to Motown, which unlike the God-awful one a few years ago with Jennifer Lopez was at least done with two major Motown artists, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. The occasion was the presentation of the “35th Annual MusiCares Award” to Robinson and Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, and the one non-Motown artist who participated was,of all people, Chris Stapleton, a heavy-set, scraggly, homely guy whom I’ve referred to before as the Bruce Vilanch of country music. The songs were Robinson’s “The Way You Do the Things You Do” (sung by Wonder instead) and “Tears of a Clown” (which they sang as a duet) and Wonder’s “Higher Ground,” on which Stapleton contributed a surprisingly good guitar solo. Lizzo, a performer I’d like a lot better if she weren’t so foul-mouthed (whoever was working the eight-second bleep machine got quite a workout during this show, including during the acceptance speeches) but whom I admire anyway because, like Adele and Megan Thee Stallion, she’s unafraid and unashamed to present herself as a “woman of size” and even has recruited similarly zaftig women to be her backup dancers, did her hit “About Damn Time,” which later won Record of the Year (the award for the best angle). After that Madonna, of all people, introduced the song “Unholy” performed as a duet between openly Gay Sam Smith and openly Transwoman Kim Petras. Then Mary J. Blige did her song “Good Morning, Gorgeous,” which began as a Streisand-esque ballad with strings and then turned into raunchy soul.

After that came a predictably awful segment celebrating the “50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop” (has this pestilence on the music world really been around that long?). Supposedly the “50th anniversary” proclamation was based on the emergence of the New York D.J. Grandmaster Flash, though he didn’t record until 1978 and his biggest hit, ”The Message,” came out in 1982. (It was one of the rappers in Flash’s posse, Keef Cowboy, who came up with the term “hip-hop” as a reproduction of the sound of soldiers marching in cadence – which gives me yet another reason to hate this stuff.) What followed were a group of M.C.’s barking unintelligible phrases in rapid-fire rhythms. The one bright spot was when Queen Latifah (a woman who’s proven herself as a singer and actress as well as a rapper) came out and dissed the male rappers on stage (and elsewhere) for constantly referring to women as “bitches” and “ho’s.” “Good for her!” I exclaimed, before the rest of the performance degenerated into the usual rap garbage. The next performer was country singer Luke Combs, who did “Going, Going, Gone” – a typical tears-in-my-beer country breakup song but a welcome respite from all the rap crap. There was one more musical performance, Steve Lacy (a name I remember as a white jazz soprano saxophonist from the 1950’s and 1960’s; but this Steve Lacy is Black, plays electric guitar and sings, and is obviously trying to fill the slot left open by the death of Prince) doing “Bad Habits.”

For the finale the Grammys picked D. J. Khaled (one of the few male rappers I find tolerable) and various guests doing something called “God Did.” While it’s nice, in a way, to hear rappers returning the form to at least one of its roots – the cadence of ministers preaching in African-American churches, once Khaled’s guest stars started cluttering up the stage the performance lost focus and became dull. Though there were few bright spots in the 65th annual Grammy Awards show, one of them (besides Brandi Carlile’s incandescent performance) was the winner of the Best New Artist award, Samara Joy, a jazz singer in the style of Ella Fitzgerald (whom she strikingly resembles – biopic, anyone?) and Billie Holiday. Though she didn’t get to perform on the actual show, they played a track from her debut album Linger Awhile as they announced her award and I was quite impressed. (She also won for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.) Another high point was the awards won by veteran artists: Bonnie Raitt won for Song of the Year for “Just Like That” (which judging from her acceptance speech appears to be a song to promote people willing their organs for donation to transplant recipients) and Willie Nelson won for Best Country Album for A Beautiful Time, which according to Wikipedia is Nelson’s 72nd solo studio album and was released on April 29, 2022: Nelson’s 89tn birthday. Let’s hear it for the survivors!