The Grammy Awards broadcast, live on CBS from the Staples Center in Los Angeles, cautiously waited until after 11 p.m. to present its segment by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, a rapper-and-producer team from Seattle. As they performed their song supporting same-sex marriage,
“Same Love,” 33 couples, gay and straight, got married; perhaps the
worrisome content was not the marriages but an antigay epithet amid the
rhymes. It had been a good night for the duo, which was named best new
artist and won three rap categories (only the Grammys don’t call it
hip-hop). They were joined onstage by Madonna, singing “Open Your
Heart”; by Queen Latifah presiding over the vows; and by the song’s
chorus singer, Mary Lambert.
That
performance was on the positive-message side of what has long been an
arena concert punctuated by the occasional award presentation. The show
handed out 10 awards amid nearly two dozen performances; the other 72
awards were presented earlier in the day at the Nokia Theater in Los
Angeles. The broadcast had its own theme: wild mood swings between
righteous idealism and lust. It also, as usual, featured collaborations
both sensible and bizarre.
Video|2:00
2014 Grammy Awards: Big Winners
Times reporter Jon Pareles discusses the 56th annual Grammy Awards ceremony.
On the virtuous side was the teenage New Zealand songwriter Lorde,
who gave a goth-tinged rendition of “Royals,” a song about resisting
the materialism promoted by pop culture; it was named song of the year
and best pop solo performance. Kacey Musgraves, whose “Merry Go ’Round”
was named best country song and whose “Same Trailer Different Park” was
named best country album, performed her “Follow Your Arrow,” a song
encouraging self-determination and tolerance.
Pink
sang “Try,” an exhortation to keep striving, while performing an
aerialist routine, before returning to the stage to belt “Just Give Me a
Reason,” a reconciliation duet, with Nate Ruess of the band Fun. A
cross-generational collaboration of the piano-pounding songwriters
Carole King and Sara Bareilles meshed two self-esteem anthems, Ms.
King’s “Beautiful” and Ms. Bareilles’s “Brave.” And the country singer
Hunter Hayes introduced his new single, “Invisible,” an anti-bullying
hymn.
But
to counter all that probity, the broadcast started with a
strobe-lighted, spread-legged infusion of raunch: Beyoncé and Jay Z
performing “Drunk in Love,” which kept the network’s censors busy
silencing cusswords but letting through the song’s amorous double- and
single-entendres. Daft Punk, the French dance-music duo that spent the
broadcast incognito, as usual, in helmets, performed “Get Lucky,” about
staying up all night to “get some.” It was named record of the year;
they did not speak as they accepted the award.
Daft
Punk’s performance was one of the night’s more coherent collaborations.
The group enlisted studio musicians, including the guitarist Nile
Rodgers from the disco-era hitmakers Chic, to make “Random Access
Memories,” which was named album of the year and best dance/electronica
album. Mr. Rodgers rejoined them, as did the song’s vocalist, Pharrell
Williams — winner of producer of the year, nonclassical — to perform
“Get Lucky” with Stevie Wonder sitting in and snippets from Chic and Mr.
Wonder that meshed with the song’s disco nostalgia; the celebrity
musicians got up and danced.
Fifty
years after the Beatles arrived in the United States, Paul McCartney
was backed once again by Ringo Starr on drums — and a second drummer —
in “Queenie Eye,” a song from his 2013 album, “New.” Blake Shelton
joined three more venerable country singers — Willie Nelson, Kris
Kristofferson and Merle Haggard — for a country oldies medley. Billie
Joe Armstrong, from Green Day, and the country singer Miranda Lambert
were also compatible performing a hearty tribute to Phil Everly, “When
Will I Be Loved”; Mr. Armstrong and Norah Jones released a duet album of
Everly Brothers songs in 2013.
A
collaboration that seemed more absurd in prospect — Metallica with the
classical pianist Lang Lang, performing “One,” Metallica’s song about a
badly wounded soldier — ended up mingling power-ballad bombast with
two-fisted Romantic piano bombast. But the show also included a
preposterous attempt to merge Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive” (best rock
performance) with the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s “good kid, m.A.A.d city”
that was largely a shouting match; Mr. Lamar, more cutting and
quicker-tongued, prevailed. Robin Thicke was tossed together with
Chicago, whose versions of their old hits had gone slack. Singing his
come-on “Blurred Lines” with them, Mr. Thicke sounded like a lounge
singer in training.
The
show’s finale was another coalition of musicians: Queens of the Stone
Age; Dave Grohl from Nirvana and the Foo Fighters; Nine Inch Nails; and
Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist. It wasn’t entirely
improbable; Mr. Buckingham sat in on last year’s Nine Inch Nails album,
“Hesitation Marks,” and other musicians had worked together in various
combinations. And by that point, all they needed to be was loud; the
show had run over time, and viewers never saw the final blast.
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