Oh, wait – you think the Grammy is supposed to go to the year’s best album? That’s sweet. Stay gold, Ponyboy.
This has literally never been the way the Grammys worked and never will be, so stop chewing that sock pretending it’s a cookie. Of course Bruno Mars beat Kendrick Lamar. Everybody knew he would. The Grammys are comedy gold, and giving Album of the Year to Bruno instead of Kendrick will go down in history as one of their all-time most hilarious gaffes. But it’s part of the grand Grammy tradition. Album of the Year never goes to the year’s best album. It always goes to some other album – usually a damn good one – so people act outraged for a few days, then nobody ever remembers again who won. That’s how the Grammys roll.
Bruno’s shocker win capped off an extremely weird Grammy ceremony – the kind of night where you keep bracing yourself for those seven ominous words, “Please welcome back to the stage: Sting!” Lorde was there, but she didn’t get invited to perform solo, unlike all the male Album of the Year nominees. So she sat in the audience, wearing a Jenny Holzer poem sewn on the back of her dress.Meanwhile, the Grammys seemed eager to bring on literally any music performance that wasn’t Lorde. Sting and Shaggy skanking through “Englishman in New York”? Patti LuPone belting an Evita ballad? By the time Bruno Mars came up to accept Album of the Year, looking as confused as everyone else, it was already in the history books as one of the most bizarre Grammy nights ever.
Most years, you watch the ceremony for the live music and ignore the actual awards. But that just wasn’t possible this year, because the winners were so out of whack. Jay-Z and SZA got shut out; Kendrick lost all the non-rap categories. It reminded me of the Grammy ceremony in 1992 – the year punk broke, when the air was full of grunge and gangsta rap – except all the big awards went to Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable,” a duet with her dead father, on a song that was already 40 years old. Irving Gordon, the old-timer who wrote “Unforgettable,” had a funny line when he won that night. “It’s nice to have a middle-aged song do something,” Gordon said. “It’s also nice to have a song accepted that you don’t get a hernia when you sing it.”
(Excerpt) Read More at: RollingStone.com