Adele in general. The whole night’s obvious runaway winner, she stepped up and delivered a fiery rendition of “Rolling In The Deep” that showed that her throat surgery worked out just fine. And she also won every televised award she was up for, finishing up with a tearfully emotional Album Of The Year win where she babbled in an impenetrably thick British accent and got boogers on her sleeve. She was always going to win everything tonight, but she looked appropriately regal and human doing it, so that’s a win.
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Barely 24 hours before this year's Grammy Awards ceremony began, Whitney Houston, a woman who'd once seemed like a cyborg engineered to win as many Grammys as possible, was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room. Houston was exactly the sort of artist who the Grammys are built to honor -- enormously talented, ridiculously popular, showy in a way that people in the cheap seats could hear just fine, willing to completely ignore any youth-culture musical trends. She was Grammy royalty before her demons brought her down, and the show should've bent itself into pretzels to honor her legacy. It should've opened with Mariah Carey or Adele or Dolly Parton or maybe even Beyoncé belting out "I Will Always Love You," and it should've thrown tons of clips of her in, every time it went to commercial. That didn't happen.Instead, we got a fairly obligatory Houston tribute at the end of the dead-people segment, and we got host LL Cool J intoning a quick prayer before hollowly attempting to whip up some crowd excitement. The whole thing felt tone-deaf and perspective-free in the same way that Clive Davis's annual pre-Grammy party was. (Houston was in town for that party, thrown by the man who signed her, and staying in the same hotel where the party was. That party went ahead as planned, with all the usual celebrities showing up to mug for cameras, while Houston's corpse lay three floors up and her teenage daughter freaked out in the lobby. It's the sort of Rome's-burning display that makes the music business look like the most clueless and heartless business on earth.) Rather than adjusting things to account for sad reality, this was an average, perfunctory Grammy ceremony and that can be a boring thing indeed.
So: A perfectly adequate Bruce Springsteen opening performance that mostly rankled because it went in the place of something that could've been more powerful. A whole lot of senior-citizen performers doing their best to seem fresh and vital. A few headline-grab performances. A runaway winner. Academy president Neil Portnow's painful annual plea that we all stop downloading music. Rough stuff. But there were a few moments that made the entire three-and-a-half-hour marathon worthwhile. Click the gallery to read about some of them, and check our Comment Party post for the list of winners and videos of the performances.
Jennifer Hudson's Whitney Houston tribute. The show should've done more to honor her, and Hudson isn't a performer on the level that Houston was. (Our friend Rich Juzwiak called her tribute "a crayon paying tribute to a rainbow." But none of these things are Hudson's fault, and she gave it everything she had, bringing a gospelly howl and a ton of emotional gravitas. Plus, at least they did something.That Chipotle ad. A canny bit of planning from the evil geniuses at Chipotle: Following up Coldplay's endless, uninspired Rihanna collab with a weirdly moving computer-animated ad set to Willie Nelson's simple, plainspoken rendition of "The Scientist," one of Coldplay's best songs. So: A goddam burrito place managed to work up a Grammy moment better than almost anything the Grammys provided.The Glen Campbell tribute. The pop-country all-star, now in the midst of retiring from music and dealing with his Alzheimer's, effectively ended his career with a sharp, swaggering "Rhinestone Cowboy." Rather than the gloopily emotive segment it could've been, this was a final moment of professional badassery, which means it was way more inspired.Nicki Minaj's insane performance. The song itself was a godawful mess, but the drama-class absurdity of her performance reached the giddy theatrical heights of that time Bone Thugs did "Crossroads" at the VMAs. Nice to know that somebody was up there having fun and doing what she felt like doing.The Deadmau5/Foo Fighters pile-up. The Foos performed something like 42 times last night and generally remained on-camera just about forever. But their best moment came after Dave Grohl's long-live-the-rock acceptance speech, when they let this blinky-eyed goon throw bass-drops all over "Rope." And, I mean, Deadmau5, wow. For sheer giddy televised ridiculousness, only Nicki Minaj came close last night.Bon Iver's itchy, prickly acceptance speech. Justin Vernon had said that he wouldn't perform, and he made good on that promise. But his shuffling, uncomfortable acceptance speech, in which he expressed something resembling genuine gratitude while calling the entire enterprise into question, was a minute or so of riveting TV. Also, great Kathleen Edwards reaction shots.The brief euphoric feeling that Chris Brown might fall and break his face. Make no mistake: It was a terrible idea for the show to invite this guy back, especially for multiple performances, three years after he spent the night before the show beating the living hell out of Rihanna. Grammys exec producer Ken Ehrlich made things way, way worse in an interview by saying that the Grammys "were kind of the victim of what happened." Brown spent his first performance dancing frenetically on a staircase-mountain thing covered in laser-light projections, and it seemed for a minute like there might be some karmic retribution involving a disfiguring fall. But no, he stuck every landing, alas.Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift sitting next to each other in the audience. Adorable!The compromised return of the Beach Boys. So they had to share a stage with Maroon 5 and Foster The People, and Brian Wilson looked gently terrified, but this was still one of rock history's greatest bands, performing together for the first time in forever and sounding pretty good on arguably their greatest song. That's worth something.
