It was released on June 12, 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. "The Bigger Picture" is a protest song by American rapper Lil Baby.Both men’s widows accepted their awards on their behalf. Prine, the folk singer who died of Covid-19 last year at age 73, won two awards for his song “I Remember Everything.” Chick Corea, the jazz keyboardist who died of cancer last month at 79, also won two. The Grammys also highlighted the struggles of independent venues by having staff from four music spots - the Apollo Theater in New York, Station Inn in Nashville and the Troubadour and Hotel Café in Los Angeles - present four awards. Sarah Jarosz, who won best Americana album for “World on the Ground,” spoke to reporters on a Zoom call about making “lots of videos from here, in my living room, over the last year.” To survive, musicians have sold what assets they could, doubled down on creating content and toured via live streams from their homes. Some musicians, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Stevie Nicks, reaped huge rewards by selling their song catalogs for sums in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars - figures that seemed impossible just a decade ago, when the music business was widely seen as a ruined ship, sinking in a sea of digital piracy. The awards also capped a tumultuous year in the music industry, with musicians losing the vital lifeline of touring but the business that surrounds them riding the popularity of streaming to new financial heights on the stock market and in private deals. The Weeknd himself (Abel Tesfaye) told The New York Times last week that he would boycott future Grammys in protest of those committees. Paak debuted their new project, Silk Sonic, like 1970s “Soul Train” crooners in three-piece suits and wide lapels.
The Latin superstar Bad Bunny sang “Dákiti” with purple and blue lights dancing off his chain-link vest, and the dance-pop queen Dua Lipa - the best new artist winner two years ago - led her hit “Don’t Start Now” surrounded by dancers in silvery face masks.īruno Mars and Anderson. Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B performed their ribald hit “W.A.P.” - “Wet, wet, wet,” they sang, one of the many censored versions of a song that is defiantly raunchy. Swift sang a medley of songs from her twin pandemic albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” looking like a woodland heroine from a Maxfield Parrish print. They were the kind of interactions that music fans used to see every night, but have been starved for since March 12, 2020, when virtually all live music shut down. The sisters of Haim and the rock-soul duo Black Pumas held their instruments, waiting their own turns. A shirtless Styles, in a leather jacket and feathery boa, opened the night as Eilish nodded along admiringly. The most noticeable change was the performance configuration, in which performers faced each other but kept at a distance.
“Tonight is going to be the biggest outdoor event this year besides the storming of the Capitol,” the night’s host, Trevor Noah, announced at the start of the show, televised by CBS.
And the event, normally a mega-production inside the Staples Center, had to be adjusted for safety. Originally planned for January, it was delayed by six weeks because of rising coronavirus numbers in Los Angeles. The Grammys are usually the music world’s big moment each year for glitz and self-congratulation, with flashy performances and the minting of new pop royalty.īut this year the show itself was buffeted by the pandemic. At other points, the theme was togetherness amid the pandemic, with an undercurrent of anxiety for things to get back to normal - especially in music.Īccepting best country album, for “Wildcard” - a category in which all the contestants were women - Miranda Lambert thanked the Grammys “for putting us together and letting us at least kind of be together and say hi,” and then called out to her band and crew: “I miss the hell out of y’all.”ĭua Lipa won best pop vocal album for “Future Nostalgia,” and Harry Styles’s “Watermelon Sugar” took best pop solo performance.
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