63rd Annual Grammy Awards: Women, Blacks, Rappers, Elaborate Productions Dominate the Music Celebration

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 63rd annual Grammy Awards were telecast on CBS-TV from 5 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. – a nearly four-hour spectacle and the first time the Grammys had been staged under pandemic conditions. (In 2020 the awards season had conveniently ended before the lockdowns began.) It was a typically lumbering spectacle that reflected the changes in the music industry, albeit obliquely – with the rise of digital “streaming” as the main way most people consume music (which has, among other things, virtually annihilated most artists’ ability to make money from their recordings – host Trevor Noah joked bitterly during the evening that an artist’s total revenue from a hit stream ranges between $2 and $3, and earlier Mariah Carey had commented publicly that she was flattered that her song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was the top holiday song streamed in 2020 and she was flattered even though she made almost no money from it) the Album of the Year Grammy was given in the middle of the show (to Taylor Swift’s Folklore) and the Record of the Year for the best single was the big climactic award at the end. That one went to Billie Eilish, who’d cleaned up at last year’s Grammys, for a song called “Everything I Wanted” which, like all her other material, she co-wrote with her brother Finneas (though there was a video clip of the two of them in bed together which made me wonder if they’re heading into Siegmund and Sieglinde territory), and I can’t help thinking that Finneas O’Connell (her legal name is Billie Eilish O’Connell) is going to have the Richard Carpenter problem: cut off from a normal emotional or romantic life with anyone outside the family because he’s putting so much of his life’s energies working with his superstar sister.

Eilish, to her credit, made an acceptance speech which began with an apology to the Houston-based Black rapper Megan Thee Stallion, whom she thought should have won for her single “Savage.” I’ve commented on Megan Thee Stallion before – I’ve wondered why so obviously womanly (albeit a woman of size; when I first saw her I thought she looked like a Russ Meyer “vixen,” only Black; the large, curvaceous body and enormous tits fit the Meyer “type”) decided to name herself after a male horse, that if you’re going to misspell “The,” “Thee” is a far more appealing way to do it than “Tha,” and I love her videos and the way she moves to her songs but I’m not sure I’d just want to listen to them. Megan Thee Stallion did a three-song segment partnered by fellow Black singer/rapper Cardi B, whom I used to joke had a name that sounded like an exercise regimen. Now I’ve flipped that joke the other way and say when the TV commercials for the CardioMobile exercise device come on, “CardioMobile! I just loved her last record!” Indeed, the live performance Megan and Cardi did together last night did look like an exercise video, albeit an exercise video with sumptuous production values; they worked out (almost literally!) through Megan’s songs “Body” and “Savage” and Cardi’s song “Wap” (c’mon, girls, you’re allowed to give your songs names of more than one word!), and any moment I expected either or both of them to turn to the camera and say, “Girls, you can do this at home … ”

The show opened with Harry Styles doing a silly song called “Watermelon Sugar” dressed in the sort of costume David Bowie used to wear in his most gender-bending days – only Bowie was a major talent and Styles is a novelty act. The next song was actually one of the better ones all night: I didn’t catch the title, but the band was a rock trio called Haim whose members are all sisters – Este, Danielle and Alana Haim. I joked that they are what the Shaggs (the notoriously bad band of three sisters who were forced into the music business by their father, who bankrolled their first and only album, Philosophy of the World, in 1969) would have been if they’d had talent, and I just read an interview with them from the People magazine Web site that said they hadn’t received any Grammy attention since their Best New Artist nomination in 2015. Then the Austin-based multiracial rock band Black Pumas did their song “Colors” following a video tribute (all the Record of the Year nominees got video tributes) that revealed the Black co-leader of Black Pumas had as recently as 2016 been a busker in Santa Monica. Next up was “Rockstar” by Da Baby (an O.K. rap number – at least the rap pieces on last night’s show didn’t glorify crime or contain the “N”-word) and Bad Bunny with Jay Cortez doing a rap number in Spanish. The next act up was Dua Lipa, whom I would have guessed from the name was a Black woman rapper; instead she’s a white singer from a British family who spent much of her childhood in Kosovo (one wonders why – was her dad a diplomat who got assigned there?) and she sang what could have been one song or two, with titles I scrawled down as “You’re My Starlight” and “Don’t Start Caring.”

Then there was a number by Taylor Swift, who was doing either one song or two (or maybe three – the titles, or approximations thereof, I scrawled down were “I Know You,” “I Could See,” and “The More You Say, the Less I Know”) in a bizarre setting that was supposed to look like a rustic cabin, with some guys around dressed in rural work attire while she wore a flowing dark robe-like dress that looked like she bought it at Stevie Nicks’ garage sale. After that came Bruno Mars – whose enduring popularity utterly astonishes me given that he’s a limp performer, albeit with a nice voice – performing with a musical partner named Anderson Paak as an alleged “group” called Silk Sonic. I’ve previously accused Mars of coming off in all his public performances and videos like he’s auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson; as one-half of Silk Sonic he’s ripping off a different style of Motown music – the soft-soul sounds of groups like the O’Jays and the Spinners from the early 1970’s. At this point the “In Memoriam” segment came on honoring people in the music business who died in 2020 – of which we were told by host Trevor Noah that there were actually more than 800, due largely to COVID-19, and the full list would be available on the Grammys’ Web site. I had particularly felt the loss of two long-lived jazz greats this year, pianist McCoy Tyner (the last surviving member of the John Coltrane Quartet) and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; Tyner was mentioned on the program but Konitz wasn’t.

Three of the last year’s deceased were honored with special performances of their songs: Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak paid tribute to Little Richard with “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” – it’s a tribute to the greatness of Richard’s rock ’n’ roll onslaughts that they survived the mauling they got from these well-meaning but unenergetic performers (the closest anyone in that number came to evoking Richard’s spirit was the large Black man who was playing piano for them). Lionel Richie came out to do Kenny Rogers’ song “Lady,” and at first I joked, “Ah, a boring Black guy doing a tribute to a dead boring white guy” – but somehow the emotion got to Richie and he turned in the most emotionally riveting performance I’ve ever heard from him. The last “In Memoriam” tribute turned out to be the best performance of the evening – proof that you don’t need all that production, all that dancing, all that glitz, to make enduring and moving music. All you need is the voice and guitar of Brandi Carlile, paying tribute to the late John Prine (one of those frustrating cult artists, like Laura Nyro and Randy Newman, who wrote great songs that became hits for other people without being able to grab the brass ring of superstardom themselves) with a song called “I Remember Everything.”

The “In Memoriam” segment concluded with Brittany Howard, a performer I ordinarily like – indeed she’d be my choice for a biopic of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (she’s Black, she’s heavy-set, she both sings and plays guitar … she’s also Lesbian, but so what? Tharpe was rumored to have had a long-term affair with her accompanist, pianist and second vocalist Marie Knight) – pressed into service for a run-through of an outrageously inappropriate song for her, the Rodgers and Hammerstein piece of bathos, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” (Recalling the song’s origins in the musical Carousel, my husband Charles joked, “Did a carnival barker just die somewhere?”) After that came a three-artist tribute to the women of country music – including Mickey Guyton, who’s being hailed as the first Black woman to become a country star even though her signature song, “Black Like Me,” is great as music but dubious as country. It’s an inspiring Black gospel-soul anthem and the only thing “country” about it is a pedal steel guitar buried way down, but still audible, in the mix. So why is Mickey Guyton being marketed as “country” when from the sound of this record her managers and record company would seem better advised to pitch her as the next Aretha Franklin? Then Miranda Lambert came on for “Bluebird in My Heart,” and after that one of my favorite modern singers, Maren Morris, did a song called “When the Bones Are Good” comparing a happy love relationship to a soundly built house. After I heard Morris do her first hit, “My Church,” at a country music awards show, I immediately fell in love with her – and I still think she has a great voice (and I’d still love to see her star in a biopic of Janis Joplin!) even though she’s gone more pop lately, both in her material and her appearance. Instead of the Joplinesque dark mane she used to wear, her hair last night was impeccably sculpted and platinum blonde.

The next performers were Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, and after them came Post Malone (inevitably I joked, “Actually, I like Pre Malone better”), wearing a bunch of face tattoos (though I suspect they’re henna since the clips of him pre-show didn’t show them) and singing a song called “Hollywood Bleeding” that came off as the last redoubt of the 1960’s rock style in a music scene in which virtually everything that’s selling is dance-pop, rap or a combination of the two. Then came a nice politically themed rap by L’il Baby called “The Bigger Picture” (though one wonders why both L’il Baby and Da Baby have picked such infantilizing stage names) and “Say So” by Doja Cat, which she performed in a costume that made it look like she’s auditioning to be the next Catwoman and did on an otherwise darkened stage filled with lasers and strobes as well as similarly clad backup dancers barely discernible in the murk. It’s indicative of the problem with acts like this that the song itself was unmemorable and I had to go to the Grammys’ Web site to re-watch the performance and remind myself of what the song was about. I must once again confess a lingering distrust of performers who fill their shows with extravagant stage effects and production values – unless they do it as well as Madonna or the late Michael Jackson did (those two performers really revolutionized audience expectations of what a pop concert should look like and how it should be produced).

jkvh qI can’t shake the suspicion that they’re doing these elaborate shows to take the audience’s attention away from how empty the music really is – which is why the most moving performance on this show for me was Brandi Carlile sitting on a chair with a guitar and no other musicians, no dancers, no flashy lights, no production values, singing her heart out on a John Prine song as a tribute to his passing. The show petered out with the Record of the Year award to Billie Eilish, Beyoncé singing “Black Parade” (a nice socially conscious song with her visuals toned down from the ridiculous Busby Berkeley meets Leni Riefenstahl excesses of the ones for her album Lemonade – the album Adele thought should have won Album of the Year the year she won for 25; she said so that year much the way Billie Eilish did for Megan Thee Stallion this year) and Roddy Ricch did a new song called “Heartless” and an old hit called “The Box” as the program limped to its conclusion.

One of the big awards went to H.E.R., who accepted but was not invited to perform (I love H.E.R., I have her first CD and I’d own her second if there were one – she chose to release her second album only as a download or a stream), and I was upset that Phoebe Bridgers lost for Best New Artist (though how she can be described as a “new” artist when she’s already had two CD’s released is something of a mystery), but no one was going to beat Megan Thee Stallion for that category this year (especially since Best New Artist often is a consolation prize for an electrifying newcomer who gets shut out of the main categories in favor of familiar faces – though since Eilish was the hotshot newcomer just last year and won Best New Artist as well as Album of the Year, it’s not exactly like they gave the award to an oldster!). Much to-do was made that Beyoncé has won a total of 27 Grammys – breaking the record for a solo female artist of 25 (they didn’t say whose just as inrecord she broke, but this morning’s Los Angeles Times reported that it was neo-bluegrass star Allison Krauss) – though Georg Solti, named in the Times article as an “Hungarian composer” (he was a conductor, not a composer), remains the all-time Grammy winner at 31 awards.

The Times coverage emphasized the sheer number of women and Black performers – including people like Beyoncé and Megan who are both (and I hadn’t realized that Beyoncé actually performed on Megan’s “Savage” – I’d assumed Megan had just sampled her, but they shared the award for it and both accepted it together), reflecting my perception for years now that the main source of creativity in music today is women artists. It was also a tribute – if you can call it that – to the extent to which rap has become so integrated into the music of today that rappers are inflecting in different pitches and making their work more like singing, while singers are doing double-time choruses and spitting out their words just as rapidly (and, often, just as incomprehensibly) as rappers.