Taylor Swift made history by
becoming first woman to win Album of the Year back to back as her 1989 took the
Album of the year award at the 58th Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in
Los Angeles on Monday night. Having opened the show with a version of her hit
Out of the Woods, the singer made a defiant acceptance speech which seemed to
allude to her argument with Kanye West earlier in the week. The singer however
left no stone unturned as she used the opportunity to address Kanye West “I
made that b*tch famous” line in one of the songs in his new album.
In her words, she said; “As the first woman to win Album of the Year
at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there. There are
going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take
credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”
This threw the Grammy
crowd into a frenzy and has remained one of the trending issues online.
Other famous women also
had a testing night. Adele struggled through a performance of All I
Ask which was bedeviled by technical difficulties in which her microphone cut
out and an extra guitar which some suggested was being played by Justin
Bieber’s band warming up on the other stage played over her song. The singer
also sounded slightly out of tune at times.
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| Lady Gaga tribute performance to David Bowie |
Meanwhile, Lady Gaga’s
tribute to David Bowie was a hectic mash-up of his most famous hits done in
full glam rock regalia. The musical director was Nile Rodgers, who produced
Bowie’s Let’s Dance album, but many thought Gaga had tried too hard, and even Bowie’s
son Duncan Jones appeared to offer veiled criticism, tweeting:
Kendrick Lamar won the
most awards. The 28-year-old rap artist scooped five prizes: best rap song,
best rap performance, best rap/sung collaboration, best music video and best
rap album. He galvanized the event with a politically charged performance of
The Blacker the Berry and Alright with a stage production that saw him coming
on stage in chains, and finished with a map of Africa with the word “Compton”
in the middle – his home city.
Lamar had received 11
nominations for this year’s Grammys, beating Eminem’s record as the rapper with
the most nominations in a single night, and coming in second only to Michael
Jackson for the most nominations ever. Taylor Swift and the Weekend
received seven nominations each. In other major categories, Meghan Trainor won
best new artist, while Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk won record of the year and
best pop duo/group performance.
After kicking off with the
performance by a be-catsuited Swift, the biggest night in music was emceed by
five-time host LL Cool J, who emphasized the diversity of the medium as a
guiding light for a divided America looking to “celebrate the awesome power of music”.
“With
all that divides us today, our shared love of music unites us – all of us,” LL Cool J said as he opened the awards
show-slash-concert. Highlighting the racial and stylistic diversity of the
nominees – a salient fact during an awards season that has come under
heavy fire for disproportionately celebrating the accomplishments of white
artists – LL Cool J emphasized achievements in rap and hip-hop, as well as a
performance by the cast of Broadway smash Hamilton, as a symbol of the
industry’s willingness to broadcast minority voices.“These
are the people who make this music’s biggest night,” LL Cool J said.
There were a few
odd-couple duet and group performances, most notably Sam Hunt and Carrie
Underwood and Andra Day and Ellie Goulding, as well as a massive sing-off
between John Legend, Demi Lovato, Luke Bryan, Meghan Trainor and Tyrese in
tribute to soul singer Lionel Richie, who then joined the group onstage to sing
a few bars from All Night Long.
That song’s title was an
accurate reflection of the feeling of the telecast, which was studded with a
seemingly endless series of decaffeinated performances. The night featured a
series of low-key performances by the Weekend, Justin Bieber, Sam Hunt and
Carrie Underwood. Little Big Town’s rendition of surprise hit Girl Crush –
hyped by Ryan Seacrest as “like you’ve never heard it before” – was a
dirge-like funeral march.
Nearly every performance
of the night’s first two hours was in the 60 beats-per-minute range. Hunt and
Underwood, for example, sat down for most of their number, while James Bay and
Tori Kelly slowed down their medley of songs to a dolorous shuffle. Adele chose All
I Ask, a slow romantic ballad, over her aggressively poppy Send My Love
(To Your New Lover).
There were moments of
levity, however. Soul singer Stevie Wonder, who is blind, taunted his fellow
presenters who couldn’t read the winner of best song the winner’s name had been
printed in Braille – and added: “We
need to make every single thing accessible to every person with a disability.”
An acappella performance of Earth, Wind & Fire’s That’s The Way of
the World was, counter-intuitively, a high-spirited celebration of the
life of late band founder Maurice White. As well as Lady Gaga’s
trippy, frenetic Bowie medley, there was a similarly frenzied performance by
the Hollywood Vampires, a super group featuring Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp,
left many in the audience and on social media fairly nonplussed.
A performance of from
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Hamilton, broadcast from the Richard Rogers Theater
in New York, was a refreshingly up-tempo celebration of the artistic, racial
and musical diversity that host LL Cool J had noted at the beginning of the
night. Hamilton later won the Grammy for best musical theater album with a
rapped acceptance speech by Miranda as well as a tweet quoting The Election of
1800 from Hillary Clinton
