The good
Beyonce
Personal and archetypal, regal and seemingly intimate, a show of stardom and a show of solidarity, Beyonce’s Grammy spectacle reaffirmed her achievement on her visual album Lemonade.
There she was, fleshy and pregnant with twins, perfectly posed in studio-made images that soon melted into her presence onstage. And then there she was performing, glittering and crowned with a golden headdress.
Female dancers in white, also with golden tiaras, gathered around Beyonce as peers, supplicants, emanations or sharers of a ritual, letting Beyonce stay relatively still, befitting her pregnancy — though she sat in a chair that tilted back precariously, defying gravity, as she sang, ‘floating in the air.’
A Tribe Called Quest
A Tribe Called Quest wasn’t nominated for a Grammy this year — its excellent comeback album was released after the eligibility window closed — but its message was beyond timely for the political moment. The group’s performance of We the People — accompanied by Anderson Paak, Busta Rhymes and Consequence, with Phife Dawg contributing vocals from the heavens — was forceful and pointed, from Busta Rhymes consistently referring to President Trump as “President Agent Orange” to the dozens of people of all backgrounds the group brought onstage to stand with them as they needled a society — and a leader — seemingly preoccupied with exclusion, not inclusion.
Adele’s George Michael tribute
Adele was right to stop the show and insist on getting Take 2 for Fastlove, Pt. 1, the Grammys’ tribute to George Michael. The Grammys have been a technical nightmare for Adele two years in a row: last year with a problematic piano and this year with an embarrassing false start. Perhaps only Adele commands the music-business clout to stop and restart a song on live TV — letting loose a profanity that didn’t make it onto the air — but on Sunday she justified her perfectionism.
The bad
Lukas Graham and Kelsea
Ballerini’s Mash-Up
While the Grammys is known for jamming together seemingly incongruous collaborators — Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons, for instance, or Lady Gaga and Metallica this year — pairing Kelsea Ballerini, the young country singer, with Lukas Graham, the gentle Danish pop group, wasn’t actually so jarring in theory. Both write slick pop melodies and were just happy to be there. But the performance was arranged as a literal mash-up, with Ms. Ballerini inserting bits from her song Peter Pan within Lukas Graham’s big hit 7 Years. It made little sense. Peter Pan is a high-class kiss-off to an immature boy, while 7 Years is a weepy coming-of-age tale about making it in the music business.
The Bee Gees Tribute
There can be a thin line between campy and cheesy, but there’s no question where the Grammys’ tribute to the Bee Gees fell, and it wasn’t campy. Flashing lights and disco dancers on stage were a homage to Saturday Night Fever, the 1977 blockbuster that mainstreamed disco and gave the Bee Gees a clutch of hits. The movie’s star, John Travolta, had made an appearance earlier in the show. But songs that are lodged in pop’s collective memory weren’t a comfortable fit for Demi Lovato, who shrilled through Stayin’ Alive, or Tori Kelly, who tried to turn Tragedy into rock, or Andra Day, who overplayed “Night Fever.” (At times Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees was shown gamely singing along in the audience.)
The Fumbles
Grammy host James Corden opened the show with vaudevillian shambles: a stuck platform, an exaggerated series of fumbles down a staircase, and a performance executed with one shoe missing, ostensibly a sort of meta-commentary on his not-quite-steady footing as Grammys host. It was perhaps a strange way to open a show about flawless execution, but turned out to be mildly prophetic for a night that was pockmarked with missteps, from Adele’s live call for a restart during her George Michael tribute, to the way the orchestra played over her producer Greg Kurstin when they accepted the song of the year trophy (and misspelled his name earlier in the night, to boot), to the Metallica performance during which James Hetfield’s microphone was non-functional for the first half.
