The Grammys make a clear statement: Sometimes feeling good is good enough
Ann Powers: I feel like I ran 10 laps around the entirety of popular music. Last night's Grammys telecast was fun and exhausting in its embrace of so many different styles and stars, with everyone going for extra dazzle and yet none really dominating. The balance between elaborate set pieces like Olivia Rodrigo's fully automotive take on "Driver's License" and more unfettered barn-burners like Silk Sonic's James Brown-ian "777" kept the show's pace lively. The show gave us a lot to talk about. Throughout the evening we had about 18 rewrites of the rock and roll myth, a mini-set from rap elder Nas, BTS jumping lasers, full body jazz hands from Lady Gaga and a psychedelic jaunt through the African diaspora with Jon Batiste. Sweeping the four categories in which they were nominated for their Silk Sonic project, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak dapped like no winner has dapped before.
It all came across as highly professional, yet convincingly energetic. The awards hardly mattered, it seemed, with no one artist standing out as the night's huge winner. But that felt okay. After some tough pandemic years, pop — or at least the version of pop that fits into the Grammys' definition — made an argument for its renewed health tonight by connecting with its own history and emphasizing pleasure even when the concepts ran high. Am I being too enthusiastic about what was essentially an excellent variety show?
It was a dizzying ride, with the dial turned way up on well-crafted enjoyment. I want to start with the final award of the event: Jon Batiste's win for album of the year, an outcome I knew is only the third or fourth time a jazz musician has won album of the year — after Stan Getz with João Gilberto (1965), Herbie Hancock with an all-star cast (2008) and maybe Norah Jones (2003), depending on where you draw the line. (She counts, in my book.) I know this feels especially meaningful to me given my interests, but it also speaks to something I've noticed over a few decades of Grammy watching. Batiste is the sort of artist to win over the Recording Academy: wildly proficient, ineffably charismatic, genre-transcendent and down for whatever. One of the four other awards he won yesterday was best music video, for "Freedom" — and his performance on the telecast of that song felt just as much like a blast from a confetti cannon.
