At the best of times, the Grammy Awards are garish displays of self-celebration by props Auto-tuned and surgically perfected, who we pretend put out good music. During a pandemic that killed half a million Americans and even more livelihoods, the Grammys have become the sort of trashy travesties that once invited thrown tomatoes from the masses. Luckily for our national sanity, and as a rare sign of our collective good sense, everyone ignored them.
Seriously. What the industry touts as “Music’s Biggest Night” earned just 8.8 million viewers, down 53% from last year. That’s not quite as good as what the average episode of Grey’s Anatomy gets these days (we’re now on season 17) and slightly better than the viewerships of ABC’s The Conners and The Rookie. To translate into political speak, Tucker Carlson was averaging more than 5 million viewers leading up to the 2020 election.
Despite locking plebeians inside cramped homes for a year, the government gave our patrician class the right to don Versace and crowd an indoor venue. Perhaps if the Recording Academy did choose to nominate some of the rare pieces of excellent music from the last year (the late Mac Miller’s last album and the latest by Grimes and Run the Jewels come to mind), people would have at least had a popular interest in tuning in. But good music was snubbed.
Instead, we were treated to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing the obscene opuscule “Wet A– P—-.” It was less offensive for its vulgarity, which is about as edgy as an insurance commercial these days, and arguably half as titillating, and more for the suggestion that choreography performed by Weight Watchers “before” pictures counts as sex appeal. Harry Styles performed in a boa, which looked more lazy than edgy, and poor Billie Eilish, the only artist we really wanted to perform, was shamed into apologizing to Megan Thee Stallion for beating her for record of the year.
In theory, a pandemic keeping everyone in their homes would prove an incentive to watch the Grammys, but when better songs and sexier stars are a click of a button away, why watch? For their part, the celebutantes did take a rather “let them eat cake” attitude. Megan Thee Stallion hosted her afterparty at The Highlight Room, while Madonna hosted hers at Delilah. Both restaurants, like much of Los Angeles’s restaurant industry, remain closed to the public.
