68th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Fulwell Productions, Grammy Studios, CBS-TV, aired February 1, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) I watched the 68th annual Grammy Awards on CBS, hosted by Trevor Noah (the not-very-interesting Black South African Comedy Central brought to the U.S. as a replacement for Jon Stewart, who’s now returned). Noah began the show by announcing that this would be the last Grammy Awards show broadcast on CBS. He didn’t say what’s going to happen to it after that, though my fear is it’s going to end up on one of those abominable and expensive “streaming” services that have systematically destroyed all the media through which I prefer to experience entertainment. Noah also said it was the last time he would host it, which is fine by me. The show was the usual lumbering beast; it was slotted for three hours (5 to 8 p.m. Pacific Time so the East Coast media mavens can have it on so-called “prime time” in their part of the country, though at least starting it at 5 is better than tape-delaying the whole thing, which used to be the norm before the Internet) but actually ran three hours and 40 minutes. I just downloaded an article from Billboard magazine by Joe Lynch that gave the names of the performers and their songs better than I could decipher them easily from my notes (https://www.billboard.com/lists/grammys-performances-ranked-2026/tyler-the-creator-thought-i-was-dead-like-him-sugar-on-my-tongue/), though I noticed that my critical judgments didn’t always coincide with his. For example, he has a much greater tolerance for rap – or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it – than I do. The program started with a typically over-the-top opening song by Bruno Mars and a white baby dance diva-ette named Rosé doing their joint hit “APT.” Next up was Sabrina Carpenter doing a song called “Manchild” and cavorting around what looked like a replica of an old-fashioned propeller-driven airliner labeled “SCA,” as if she has an airline named for herself.

After that came the first on-camera awards presentation for Best Rap Album to the despicable Kendrick Lamar for an album called GNX. I’ve loathed Kendrick Lamar ever since an earlier Grammy telecast on which he did an extended, largely incomprehensible rap (the only words I made out with clarity were “insufficient funds”) which the Los Angeles Times reviewer the next day proclaimed the highlight of the show. I couldn’t have disagreed more; Lamar’s piece of shit came on right after the cast of Hamilton performed their show’s opening number, and just as I was starting to think based on the Hamilton excerpt that rap could be beautiful, moving, and express an artistic point, along came Kendrick Lamar to remind me of what garbage it usually is. Then Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music, and I went around for several days bitching, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to Kendrick Fucking Lamar.” I even found myself rooting for Tyler, The Creator last night in hopes that Lamar wouldn’t win for Best Rap Album, but not only did Lamar take home that prize, he also won Record of the Year for a song called “Luther” on which he was accompanied by the genuinely talented and musical neo-soul singer Sza (pronounced “Sizzah”). “Luther” sounded lyrical, though I suspect that wasn’t due to Lamar so much as to Sza and the origins of the track in a song by Luther Vandross (hence the title). Lamar said during his acceptance speech that the Vandross estate’s one condition for licensing the song to him was that his track contain no swear words (good for them!).

After the “Best Rap Album” award came a medley of all eight Best New Artist nominees doing abbreviated versions of their big songs: The Marías doing “No One Noticed” (a quite beautiful and lyrical ballad); Addison Rae singing “Fame Is a Gun”; KATSEYE (apparently their all-caps spelling is correct) doing “Gnarly” (appropriate since Charles and I were eating a pizza from Gnarly Girl for dinner); Leon Thomas singing “Mutt” (I wonder if he’s any relation to the 1960’s/1970’s jazz singer Leon Thomas, who sang on Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan”; according to Joe Lynch, he’s been around the business for 20 years even though he broke through recently enough he was eligible for a Best New Artist nomination); Alex Warren doing “Ordinary” while being lifted off the stage and suspended in mid-air on an elevated platform held up by wire cables (it reminded me of the 1943 film Presenting Lily Mars, with its big number showing Judy Garland singing on the stage floor while Tommy Dorsey’s entire band was suspended above her, and I feared for her safety in case the cables broke and the platform smashed her like a pancake); Lola Young doing a version of her song “Messy” backed only by her own piano; Olivia Dean (the ultimate Best New Artist winner) doing a nice bit of neo-Motown soul called “Man I Need”; and sombr (the all lower-case spelling is correct) singing “12 to 12.” Nobody noticed his vocal because I suspect everyone was oohing and aahing over his outfit, a jacket and pants made up entirely of glass (at least I think they were glass; I hope for his sake they were plastic!) mirrors. I joked to my husband Charles that this was a costume Mick Jagger and David Bowie had rejected as being in bad taste. Of all the Best New Artist nominees the one who most impressed me by far was Lola Young; while a later sound clip of “Messy” indicated that it’s a normal pop ballad in the modern style, for the show itself she reduced it to just her own voice and piano, in the manner of the late Laura Nyro or the still-living Carole King (who later appeared on the show as an awards presenter). I’d love to hear her do a whole album that way!

After the Best New Artist award, Justin Bieber came out wearing nothing but boxer shorts and socks to perform his song “Yukon,” which was actually one of the better pieces of the evening. He came out carrying an electric guitar (not an acoustic, as Joe Lynch reported) but it wasn’t plugged into anything and all the guitar chords, like his other accompaniment, came from a samples box he manipulated on stage. I’m guessing he performed (mostly) undressed to show off the stunning set of tattoos on his chest. Then came the award for Best Musíca Latina Album – or was it Best Musíca Urbana album – to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos (when Bad Bunny came on Stephen Colbert’s show to talk about the album – not, alas, to perform any of it – both Charles and I misheard the last word as “Hótos,” a derogatory Spanish slur for Gay people). Bad Bunny gave a speech denouncing Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but said our response should be rooted in love, not hate. This was actually an unusually political awards show for the start of the second year of President Trump 2.0, since most awards presenters and recipients have shied away from direct political comment for fear of retribution from the notoriously thin-skinned Trump and his minions. Not the Grammys, however; Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl halftime show this year, which led to a slew of half-baked Trump screeds on his “Truth Social” Web site denouncing the National Football League for doing something as unpatriotic as inviting Bad Bunny to appear. Trump has also announced that he won’t be attending the Super Bowl this year (though more likely that’s due to the likelihood that he’d be booed there the way he was at the World Series), and it’s amazing that Trump is treating Bad Bunny as an “alien” when Bad Bunny comes from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth territory of the United States. (That puts Puerto Ricans in a curious Kafka-esque bind: they can’t vote in U.S. elections in Puerto Rico, but if they move to an actual U.S. state, they can.)

After Jelly Roll won for Best Contemporary Country Album with Beautifully Broken (like Merle Haggard, Jelly Roll – true name: Jason Bradley DeFord – is an ex-convict and has made a great deal of that in his marketing strategy; he devoted virtually his entire acceptance speech to thanking God and Jesus for turning his life around), Lady Gaga did a stunning performance of “Abracadabra” dressed in a typically spectacular outfit featuring a wicker headdress through whose grill she sang. Then she won Best Pop Vocal Album for Mayhem. I’ve always liked Lady Gaga since, unlike most dance-music artists, she actually writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and endings. She doesn’t just bark a few words over a dance beat and call it a “song.” While I still like her even better as a standards singer (memo to Gaga: don’t let the death of Tony Bennett stop you from recording those sorts of songs!), she’s still one of my favorite current performers. After that Bruno Mars, who’d appeared in the opening number, returned to sing his current Billboard No. 1 hit, “I Just Might.” Every time I’ve seen Bruno Mars before this I’ve got the impression that he’s been auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson. Now that the Michael Jackson biopic has been made and is scheduled for release April 24 with someone else playing him (an actual blood Jackson: Jaafar, son of Jermaine and nephew of Michael). Mars definitely needs another act. Lola Young won for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Messy” (though as I mentioned above, the sound clip from that song with full band backing was hardly as haunting as the voice-and-piano version she’d performed earlier) and Carole King came out to present the Song of the Year award. Both she and the eventual winners, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell for “Wildflower,” were wearing “ICE OUT” buttons.

Then there were an O.K. rap number (and for me to call a rap number “O.K.” is high praise indeed given my usual detestation of the form): Tyler, The Creator with a medley of “Like Him,” “Thought I was Dead,” and “Sugar on My Tongue.” Between the latter two songs he drove a prop red car on stage (which reminded me of the red Jaguar a Metropolitan Opera director and the management recently fought over in a modern-dress production of Bizet’s Carmen; the management thought the mechanism to move the car around on stage was too expensive and cut it, and the director and set designer withdrew their names from the credits in protest; you can read the whole story at https://apnews.com/article/met-opera-carmen-dispute-cracknell-levine-fb2d40ec878eaac756a8c00930fb4d73) and crashed it into a gas pump. After another preposterously named award – the “Dr. Dre Human Impact Award” to Pharrell Williams (surprisingly he wasn’t wearing a strange hat, but the person who presented it to him, rapper Q-Tip, was), the show segued into a seemingly interminable “In Memoriam” segment. It began with brief tributes to Brian Wilson (by Bruce Springsteen despite the opposite poles of their music, both geographically and stylistically) and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead (by John Mayer). Then it segued into two ultra-extended musical sections, one paying tribute to Ozzy Osbourne (and the nicest thing I can say about his death in 2025 was that it didn’t happen well before that; I’ll never forget the scene in the documentary The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years in which the film’s producer attempted to interview Osbourne while he was pouring himself a glass of orange juice, only he was so stoned he was missing the glass completely and pouring orange juice all over his floor) and one a joint tribute to producer D’Angelo and singer Roberta Flack.

The Osbourne tribute featured Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith, and singer Post Malone doing Osbourne’s song “War Pigs,” while the D’Angelo/Flack number presented Lauryn Hill (in her first Grammy appearance since 1999) and an assortment of mostly African-American performers opening with the Hill/D’Angelo song “Nothing Lasts Forever” and closing with an incandescent reading of Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Between the awards for Record (single) and Album of the Year, the Grammy producers squeezed in another song, this time a rap number by Clipse (brothers Gene “Malice” and Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton), the Voices of Fire choir, and Pharrell Williams doing some actual singing on a number called “So Far Ahead.” Then the Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos. I wonder if the Los Angeles Times writer who did that article about Kendrick Lamar which pissed me off so much was gratified to see that a rap album finally won, but I didn’t mind so much because Bad Bunny’s style is the so-called “Nuyorican” variant of reggaetón, which uses elements of rap but with a genuinely infectious and creatively deployed Latin rhythm instead of the strict marching cadence of most rap (which is where the term “hip-hop” came from; when I heard that the term “hip-hop” derived from the rhythm of military drill, that gave me one more reason to hate it). Overall the Grammy Awards were a good temperature-taking of the current pop music scene (which is one reason I still like to watch it even though my musical tastes run far more to the past than the future these days), and if Lola Young makes a CD featuring just her voice and piano, I’ll gladly buy it.