The Grammys Recap 2020, Sell the Music Business & Its Awards

Harry Styles and his boa accept an award at the 2020 Grammys Sunday night.

The music industry’s annual showcase showed its anxiety, asking host Trevor Noah to hard-sell a lot of musical moments that spoke for themselves.

Sunday night at the Grammys, host Trevor Noah had the unenviable job of standing in for a full Staples Center audience. He had to sell excitement again and again, getting overheated for performances and Beyoncé’s historic 27th Grammy win, which tied her for the most Grammys won by a female artist (a record she would own outright 15 minutes later with another win). Noah’s task was a thankless one, and it wasn’t entirely necessary. Grammys telecasts have rarely had such uniformly good performances, including one by Brittany Howard, who sang Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with the power of an entire stadium of Liverpool supporters. BTS finally got to appear on the Grammys as something other than comedy relief and showed why they’re one of the biggest pop acts in the world, and Billie Eilish showed effortless star power while performing “Everything I Wanted” atop a car half-underwater. The little spring in her step at end of a song about contemplating suicide was more engaging than any of Harry Styles’ glam gestures just moments earlier.

To be fair, Styles’ performance of “Watermelon Sugar” in a feather boa and a leather jacket and pants would really have benefited from an audience to respond to the rock star presentation, and an audience would have made Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me” even more powerful. It still established her as someone who should be on the national radar, which is one of the things the Grammys does every year. If nothing else, the show recaps the national mainstream music discourse for a year and gives those who have only casually paid attention or paid attention to one corner of it an idea of who they ought to spend more time on. I don’t always agree—Haim songs dissipate the moment they hit my ear, and Black Pumas count on Eric Burton’s gospel-inflected voice to invest significance in songs that don’t carry much on their own. But both occupy the space that H.E.R. did a few years back on the verge of breaking through to a mass audience. 

The telecast recapped the artists and songs that were part of the national music conversation, starting with Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. performing “WAP” and Dua Lipa singing “Levitating” and “Don’t Start Now” from Future Nostalgia. The former was more successful than the latter, in part because Dua Lipa made the eccentric choice to go with a remixed version of “Don’t Start Now” and danced to it more than she sang. Since she dances as if she’s counting off the steps in her head, that didn’t present her or the song nominated for Record of the Year in its best light. Still, Trevor Noah loved loved loved it. 

As 2020 boiled down to three hours, Sunday’s Grammys telecast was an unqualified success. In case anyone missed it, we learned that disco was back from BTS, Dua Lipa and Doja Cat, and thankfully, we did so without the dreaded “Grammy Moment” concept. In the past, producers paired an established artist with a younger one with the premise that the popularity of the older artist would rub off on the younger one. Usually, those pairings simply revealed that the bookers didn’t realize how big the younger artists were, and the older artists got a flicker of relevance or showed their age in the process. Those Grammy Moments also often meant disfiguring someone’s music, stripping it down until it no longer really represented them, or—worse—adding strings for drama and sophistication to songs that were never intended to sound sophisticated. 

But Noah and the Grammys did have some selling to do because it has been a tough year for the Grammys, most recently with The Weeknd taking himself out of future consideration in protest of “Blinding Light” being shut out of the nominations entirely. That, on the heels of years when there were complaints about how women and people of color were overlooked, has kept alive questions about the legitimacy of the Grammys. To be fair, the Grammys aren’t alone in facing some existential questions? What does “Best” mean? The most sales? The most popular? The best executed? Different voters see the question in different ways, and since Grammy voters include engineers, producers, and people from outside the pop ecosystem, there’s a good chance that a lot of voters value the technical skill and musicality far more than those who make pop. Unfortunately, that problem is hard to solve without changing the nature of voting. 

Because of that, it’s hard to get invested in the the winners and losers of awards. I was happy to see that The New Orleans Nightcrawlers won for Best Regional Roots Album for Atmosphere, and that PJ Morton won the Best Gospel Album Grammy for Gospel According to PJ. Those were awarded at the ceremony before the telecast where most of the awards were given, and while many preferred the music-heavy presentation. I thought the show could have used a few more awards, which were announced so infrequently that the seemed like afterthoughts. 

I also could have used more awards because they gave the show some light moments that it needed. Phoebe Bridgers stayed on brand and wore a skeleton suit to the Grammys, albeit one with gems attached. The 2021 fashion trend was a matching face mask, and Harry Styles’ yellow houndstooth mask to match his jacket was brilliant. His boa staying with him after his performance, on the other hand, felt like a gimmick that became less interesting by the second (Much like his performance of “Watermelon Sugar”). Some matching face masks were less successful, like Billie Eilish’s, which when paired with her dress and bucket hat left only her eyes peaking out of a swath of pewter and black fabric. Taylor Swift’s floral mask complete with appliqués made it look as if she was being eaten by her garden—an even less predictable decision for her than making two albums during a pandemic with a guy from The National. 

But on a night when Trevor Noah worked so hard to make sure we saw and heard and loved and valued what The Grammys wanted us to embrace, I loved moments like that. Taylor Swift bouncing in her chair like her best friend in high school was just named president of the AV Club when Beyoncé won an award. I’ll take more of that.