Last night’s Grammy Awards ran more than 200 minutes long, and not nearly enough of them involved Beyoncé. After a slinking, dewy performance of “Drunk in Love,” where Jay-Z showed up to clarify “hello, I inspired this song” and saw his dubious guest verse end up as an admiring irrelevance, she retired to front row centre, content to bask in the Internet’s adoration. Imagine being obliged to follow Beyoncé while she regally sips wine several feet away, ignoring your dumb presenter banter about her intricately translucent dress (everybody on Twitter was thirsting like a cartoon skeleton). I don’t wish that fate even on Katy Perry. In the spirit of charity, maybe she should’ve rigged up the music videos with PowerPoint and sung the entire Beyoncé tracklist. We at least needed a few dozen more “surfborts.”
“Drunk in Love” is a song about the evidently considerable joys of a mature relationship, which made it unusual at this ceremony. The Grammys’ predilection for musicians who last tried anything new around 1988 remains unshakeable, but lately, as pop came to dominate the music industry, they’ve been randomly swinging to the other end of the actuarial tables. Because no actually existing human shares the jury members’ collective tastes and sense of history, this shift yielded both Taylor Swift’s Album of the Year trophy and A Tribute to Dubstep Featuring Dave Grohl.
The Grammys like to do things retroactively, whether laureling mediocre new albums by ‘60s survivors or acknowledging entire genres and movements long after they emerged. Thirty-five years after disco got demolished, dance music finally won Album of the Year again when two very rich French eccentrics decided to hire all their heroes. Random Access Memories is a conservative, fetishistic record, but at least Daft Punk treated the collaborators that obsessed them with respect, whether or not humility fits their shtick. Frank Ocean or Prince & The Revolution did not rate a primetime celebration for their portrayal of queer love, and we all know why. Perhaps in a decade or two, the Grammy producers will realize how gross it was to mark Lou Reed’s death with Jared Leto semi-seriously pretending to be Candy Darling, and lionize another annoying white guy for his brave message that trans women are women.
Last night, though, our current model texted Kendrick Lamar to attest he “robbed” him of Best Rap Album, and then posted the text on Instagram so everybody could note his bashfulness. Well, if Macklemore has such ostentatiously strong feelings about it, I’m happy to look up a good engraver.
