The 66th annual Grammy Awards ceremony aired on Sunday, Feb. 4, live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles with Trevor Noah hosting the event for the fourth year in a row. The night saw many awards, performances and social media discourse.
The artist who took home the most wins was Phoebe Bridgers, winning four of her seven different nominations. Three of those wins were for supergroup Boygenius, and their latest album “the record” which won best alternative music album. Bridgers also won best rock song and best rock performance for the single “Not Strong Enough” and best pop duo/group performance for her collaboration on “Ghost in the Machine,” a song from SZA’s latest album “SOS.”
When accepting her award for best pop vocal album for “Midnights,” Taylor Swift took the opportunity to announce her new album “The Tortured Poets Department,” scheduled to be released on April 19. Her fans celebrated this announcement, but other social media users deemed it disrespectful to announce an album at a prestigious award ceremony, it seems as if she was taking away the spotlight from other smaller artists who could have had their moment to shine.
While many artists celebrated their wins, others did not receive the coveted gilded gramophone, including Lana Del Rey. Despite being nominated for five different categories, Del Rey did not go home with a single award and people on social platforms such as TikTok or X have shown their outrage over the singer not winning a single Grammy in her career even though her first nomination was over a decade ago. Travis Scott has also not gone home with any awards, so he took the chance during his performance to say “They slept on me 10 times” to call out the fact that the Academy has nominated him 10 different times, but never given him a win.
As usual for music awards, there were several performances by some of the nominees. SZA’s performance of “Snooze” and “Kill Bill” was inspired by the movie “Kill Bill” with lots of backup dancers and visuals that could easily make this the best performance of the night. For other performances, legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell performed on the Grammys stage for the very first time with “Both Sides Now,” a song that she wrote at the age of 21 and is performing yet again at the age of 80. The “In Memoriam” segment, similar to every year, honored many people who used to work in the music industry and passed away during the past year. This year, the performers for this segment were Stevie Wonder, Jon Batiste and Annie Lennox. Finally, to close the show, Billy Joel returned to the stage after 30 years of not performing with his new song “Turn the Lights Back on.”
Throughout the show, there were so many commercial breaks, and not much happened during the time the show came back on. They would present an award or do a performance and immediately go back to commercials. The target audience is those who enjoy music and want to see artists being recognized for their work, but a majority of the awards were presented during the pre-show and not the main ceremony so the show was just empty and filled with commercial breaks. I also think it was just boring, as once again, not much happened and the performances did not really get my attention. In fact, the Grammys have been losing popularity with the general public since the 2010s. This may be because not many big names are listed as performers, and instead, newer artists who have not yet cemented their legacy are the ones performing.
Overall, I do not think the 66th Grammy Awards Ceremony lived up to its name “the biggest night in music” because nothing really caught my attention. The show was just boring and filled with commercial breaks, and not as many people wanted to watch performances by new artists as compared to the early 2010s when people were excited to see celebrities.