On Sunday, just hours after the news of Kobe Bryant’s tragic death, the 62nd Grammy Awards began at Staples Center, the building where Bryant forged his legacy. “We’re literally standing here, heartbroken in the house that Kobe built,” Alicia Keys, who was hosting, said in her opening monologue, a sombre tribute to Bryant and his family. Throughout the evening, Keys, in the tone of earthy maternalism that she’s offered for two consecutive years as Grammy host, returned to a single idea—the healing power of music in the face of tragedy. Music, she insisted, brings us together.
Music may be unifying, but the Grammys are not. Usually, the show supplies a document of generational rifts and institutional rot. On Sunday, however, it edged surprisingly close to cultural consensus, though not because of Bryant. The show was a full-bore coronation of Billie Eilish, the eighteen-year-old avant-pop star who’s become a commercial and cultural powerhouse, and who won Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. Eilish is the first artist to sweep the major categories since the singer-songwriter Christopher Cross, nearly forty years ago. She has been described as a genre-melting prodigy, a teen sensation, and the future of music. She is also, evidently, someone we can all agree on.
Agreement is likely a welcome sensation within the Recording Academy, which is at something of a crossroads. In 2018, in the face of critique about the dearth of female Grammy nominees and voters, then Academy President and C.E.O. Neil Portnow said after the awards telecast that women needed to “step up” in order to achieve parity, a comment that roiled artists and fans. Portnow left his post in 2019, but his replacement, Deborah Dugan, was placed on administrative leave earlier this month, after just five months on the job. (The Academy said that it is investigating “a formal allegation of misconduct by a senior female member of the Recording Academy team,” though Dugan denies any wrongdoing.) In response, Dugan made explosive claims in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint about the “rigged” Grammys voting system and the Academy’s “boys’ club’ mentality”; she also alleged that Portnow had been accused of raping a musician. (Portnow has vehemently denied these claims.)
This latest fracas comes amid a broader reckoning, in which the Academy, historically known for favoring white artists and the rock tradition, has made several gestures toward change. It’s begun to televise hip-hop categories and to broaden voting criteria to accommodate streaming releases. It’s also expanded the nominee pool for top categories and announced new initiatives to foster diversity. As a result of these gestures—and in lockstep with the steady global march toward monoculture—this year’s nominees were younger, more diverse, and more culturally relevant than ever before. The leading nominees included the Internet virtuoso-turned-viral-country-music-star Lil Nas X, Lizzo, and Eilish. The indie mainstays Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend snagged nominations in the Best Album category, but their presence felt spectral, as though they were the ghost of Grammys past. Women—one woman in particular—dominated the winners’ list.
And yet, in spite of the spiritual makeover, Sunday’s ceremony was curiously dull, in part because of a dearth of star power in last year’s album-release cycle. There were no new solo albums from Adele, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Frank Ocean, or Kendrick Lamar, leaving the field wide open for newcomers like Lizzo and Eilish. (Taylor Swift and Kanye West, two other ghost-like presences, did release albums but were largely overlooked by the Academy.) In the absence of marquee moments, the ceremony often vacillated between the flat and the awkward. At one point, Usher performed a tribute to Prince alongside FKA twigs, who was asked not to sing but to be a sort of glorified backup dancer. At another point, the Cuban-American pop singer Camila Cabello serenaded her father with the song “First Man,” adding perhaps more Freudian overtones to the show than was intended. The only moment of true invigoration came from the art-rap auteur Tyler, the Creator, who performed his hit “Earfquake” with Boyz II Men and Charlie Wilson, before being joined onstage by a legion of young black men in blond wigs. (They were dressed as his alter ego, Igor.) Thrashing with adrenaline, they briefly turned the evening into a pleasurable spectacle, and Tyler later took home the award for Best Rap Album.
Lizzo and Eilish, along with Lil Nas X, represent a new class of music royalty, and they shouldered outsized responsibility for the show’s appeal on Sunday. All three stars have been lauded for their innovation. Lizzo brings a brassy and inclusive energy to power pop; Lil Nas X erodes genre convention; Eilish deploys a Gothic sensibility and striking musical arrangements. But the Grammys also laid bare their conventionality. Lil Nas X performed a super-medley of his inescapable hit, “Old Town Road,” inviting an army of guest stars—Diplo, BTS, Mason Ramsey, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Nas—to join him in a heavy-handed genre mashup that the Grammy programmers might have cooked up themselves. Lizzo, who opened the show with “Truth Hurts” (a song that also won Best Pop Solo Performance), embraced the ceremony with such gamely showmanship that she already seemed like an Academy fixture. And Eilish, for her live performance, chose a stripped-down piano version of her single “When The Party’s Over,” exposing the song’s traditionalist bones. In theory, the Academy proved that it’s made strides in embracing new talent. The talent, for their part, seem to have met them halfway.
