66th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Fallwell 17 Productions, CBS-TV, aired February 4, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 4) CBS-TV aired the 66th annual Grammy Awards, which like most awards shows was a lumbering beast. They aimed to get it all in at under three hours but the show extended to three hours and 40 minutes. In an unwelcome innovation most of the artists’ performances were prefaced by really pretentious introductory segments that offered their voice-overed views on their lives and their art before they went into the song itself. The show opened with Dua Lipa (whom it took me years before I understood that she was just one person, not two; the first name “Dua” threw me) singing an extended song that appeared to be called “Catch Me Before I Go Houdini.” I liked the fact that she name-checked such a long-forgotten celebrity as Harry Houdini, but other than that it was just another example of forgettable dance-pop. After Miley Cyrus received the Best Pop Solo Performance for her song “Flowers” – which she performed later on in the show (more of that when her time comes) – there was one of the two high points of the evening. Luke Combs came out to do his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from 1987, and to my astonishment instead of Combs singing and playing guitar we saw a heavy-set Black woman with greying hair. She was Tracy Chapman herself, joining Combs for a duet on the song that was one of the most powerful and emotionally moving moments of the show. My only disappointment was it happened way too early; I thought that everything else on the show would be a letdown. (I’m old enough to remember Tracy Chapman’s first appearance on the Grammys, also singing “Fast Car,” the year she beat out Sinéad O’Connor for Best New Artist. I loved and still love them both.) Then, after Colombian singer Karol G (her real name is Carolina Giraldo Navarro) won the ridiculously named “Best Música Urbana Album” category for Manaña Será Bonito, Sza (pronounced “Sizza”) performed a rather nasty and brutal song called “Kill Bill,” in which she murders her ex. After a brief opening section showing her and the doomed ex when they were still a couple, in which the key line of the lyric was “I’m with you,” suddenly her attitude towards him does a 180° and she stabs him in the back with a hurled dagger. Two of her (male) backup dancers then have a swordfight on stage – I joked that Sza’s insurance premiums for her tours must be sky-high given all the swordplay – and her overall singing had such a bad case of the mumbles I joked to my husband Charles, “Is she trying to be the Joan Sutherland of R&B?”

Things got a lot better with the next performance, Billie Eilish (O’Connell) and her brother Finneas doing their song “What Was I Made For?” from the soundtrack to the movie Barbie – and, to my relief, doing it straightforwardly, just her singing and him playing a black upright piano so well polished it reflected her like a mirror. I’ve joked that Finneas O’Connell is the Richard Carpenter of the 21st century, doomed to be in the background of his sister even though he co-writes all her songs and is a major part of her artistry. Following that Miley Cyrus came on for what she announced was her first-ever TV performance of “Flowers,” a song about a breakup in which the singer tells her ex, “I can love me better than you.” (At least it’s better than knocking the poor guy off like Sza does in her song.) Looking like her dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, in drag, Miley sang what I said amounted to an ode to vibrators. Then they gave out two more awards, Best Country Album to Lainey Wilson for Bell Bottom Country (I like Lainey Wilson but there are a lot of other far better women country artists out there, including one who turned up later on the show but just to do an introduction, Brandi Carlile) and Best R&B song to Sza for “Snooze” (which appeared to be the “I’m with you” prologue to “Kill Bill”). After that Olivia Rodrigo did her hit “Vampire,” about which host John Oliver (one of the most repulsive media presences around today; he’d opened the show with an excruciatingly unfunny monologue) said he wondered what she’d rhyme with “bloodsucker” and still have something you could say on TV. (Rodrigo’s original lyric was “fame fucker” but last night she changed it to “dream crusher.”) Then came one of the evening’s high points: U2 performing live from The Sphere in Las Vegas (where we were told TV cameras had never been permitted before; the inside looks like a giant IMAX theatre and the band members are dwarfed by their projected images on screen), doing a song called “Atomic City” (I’m guessing) that’s good but hardly at the level of what they were doing in the 1980’s with albums like The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. After that they had Bono present the next award, Best Pop Vocal Album, to Taylor Swift for Midnights.

Then came a rather sloppily produced “In Memoriam” segment that opened quite strongly with Stevie Wonder paying tribute to Tony Bennett and participating in a “ghost duet” with him on a song that was (separately) a hit for both of them: “For Once in My Life.” This gave Tony Bennett the interesting distinction of being involved in “ghost duets” on both sides of the grave; alive, he did one with Billie Holiday on his tribute album Tony Bennett On Holiday (the song was “God Bless the Child” and Bennett, instead of using one of Billie’s three studio versions, drew her vocal from the 1950 Universal short film with Count Basie’s small combo), and now here he was post-mortem as a film clip duetting with the live Stevie Wonder. After that the “In Memoriam” segment continued with Stevie Wonder singing “The Best Is Yet to Come,” Annie Lennox paying tribute to Sinéad O’Connor with Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Jon Batiste in a Bill Withers segment doing a medley of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and a less well-known song, “We Can Win,” and a stunning final tribute to Tina Turner featuring Fantasia Barrino doing “Proud Mary.” Her voice is lighter and doesn’t have the earth-mother quality of Tina’s, but she did the song quite well in her own way – and, as I pointed out to Charles, the guy who wrote the song, John Fogerty, is still very much alive. Then it was time for the rap tribute, with Shaun “Jay-Z” Carter winning the “Dr. Dre Global Impact Award” and delivering a thoroughly boring and disgusting rant about all the rap (excuse me, “hip-hop” – rap is the only musical genre I can think of that has two names, “hip-hop” if you like it and “rap” if you don’t) artists who have been unfairly slighted by the Grammys and how they’ve ended up publicly boycotting the show but privately watching it on hotel-room TV’s. After that things got better in a hurry with a half-song, half-MasterCard commercial from Sza called “Stuck in Paradise” which was a lot better than “Kill Bill” (at least it didn’t feature any swords!); Billie Eilish O’Connell and her brother Finneas winning a well-deserved Song of the Year award for “What Was I Made For?,” and the other high point of the evening besides the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs duet.

It was Joni Mitchell, 80 years old by now and looking very much like an aging but still powerful priestess of an all-woman cult, there to accept the award for Best Folk Performance. Dressed in an ornate robe, sitting in an elaborate throne-like chair and surrounded by an all-woman band who looked more like acolytes than backing players, Mitchell did her star-making song from decades ago, “Both Sides Now.” Brandi Carlile, who introduced her, said Mitchell had suffered a brain aneurysm 10 years ago and as a result she’d literally forgotten how to walk or talk. “She had to learn how to walk three times in her life,” Carlile said. She also claimed that Mitchell was the first singer who’d written songs nakedly and unashamedly about her personal life, and while that’s a bit of “first-itis” that made me suspicious almost immediately, I can’t for the life of me think of a prior example of a singer, especially a woman, who made up whole albums of songs about her personal trials and tribulations. At first I thought Joni Mitchell had almost completely lost her voice when she started “Both Sides Now” and didn’t come close to the melody she’d written all those decades ago, but I remembered Brandi Carlile’s comment about how she’d suffered 10 years ago – and it suddenly hit me that now she’s old enough to sing that song. In the late 1960’s “Both Sides Now” was actually a hit for Judy Collins, and Mitchell’s own version seemed to be tossed off as a sop to the fans – “Well, people know I wrote this, and they expect to hear me sing it, but I’m really not interested in it anymore.” Last night Mitchell sang its world-weary lyrics with a real sense of torture and pain that I suspect could only have come from having lived this long and suffered so much over the years. Almost anything after that would have been an anticlimax, and what actually followed was a three-song medley by one of the less offensive rappers out there, Travis Scott. The songs were from his current album, Utopia, and appeared to be called “Naïve,” “Drunk” and “Beat.”

Then there was a speech from Harvey Mason, Jr., current president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (his two immediate predecessors in that job were both fired for sexually harassing female employees) and a performance by Nigerian half-singer, half-rapper Burna Boy with Brandi and 21 Savage on a song whose title was, as near as I could make it out, “A Lo Cazona Mi.” Then Victoria Monét won for Best New Artist and Miley Cyrus won for Record (i.e., Single) of the Year for “Flowers,” and Billy Joel came out to perform what was hailed as his first new song in 30 years, “Turn the Lights Back On.” Joel’s exit from the world of songwriting had pretty much gone unnoticed – at least by me, especially since he continued to perform live playing his old songs. I found myself reminiscing about earlier composers, including Gioacchino Rossini and Jean Sibelius, who took decades-long sabbaticals from performing. (Sibelius didn’t write anything new for the last 25 years of his life and kept the world waiting for an Eighth Symphony which never materialized; Rossini wrote his last opera, William Tell, in his mid-30’s and in the three decades he had left only wrote religious works like the Stabat Mater and Petite Messe Solennelle and a handful of songs he called “Sins of My Old Age.”) My husband Charles said the new Billy Joel song sounded like an outtake from his late-1970’s album The Stranger (his best-seller), and after Taylor Swift predictably won Album of the Year for Midnights (earlier I’d joked that in the music industry 2023 had been “TAYLOR SWIFT … and everyone else,” and Charles read me a joke from X nè Twitter, “If Taylor Swift shot Donald Trump in the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, she’d still win Album of the Year”) – she broke the record previously shared by Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon (three apiece) with four Album of the Year Grammys – Joel closed out the show with a rousing rendition of one of his better oldies, “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy)” from his 1980 album Glass Houses. Overall the 66th annual Grammy Awards was a reflection of the music business as it stands one-quarter into the 21st century, with physical product of all kind having yielded to the pestilence of “streaming,” which has turned into yet another way the owners of the music business can more efficiently rip off the actual creators, and all too many of the top artists being toy diva-ettes churning out forgettable dance-pop ditties and sounding pretty interchangeable. Still, it’s heartwarming to see how totally female artists have taken over – seven of the eight Album of the Year nominees were by women – and Taylor Swift’s ERAS Tour has been the biggest live tour of all time!