We’ll never know how close we were to Twitter imploding last Sunday night.
The 2014 Grammys were about the state of hip hop as personified by Kendrick Lamar in one corner (real hip hop for real hip hop heads) and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in the other (they don’t look or sound hip hop!). But on the same night as WWE’s Royal Rumble, it was Pharrell and his hat (aided by Daft Punk and Niles Rodgers) who ran out as the surprise 30th wrestler and threw Lamar and Macklemore over the top rope to win the evening.
Usurped on the awards front (and on the live performance front by Beyoncé), the night was anticlimactic for Lamar and Macklemore, fans of Lamar and Macklemore, and fans of the narrative of Lamar vs. Macklemore. In fact, the show featured more Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Willie Nelson, and Paul McCartney than it did our new age, social media kings. In short, it was the Grammys as usual.
With that said, Kendrick Lamar’s performing with Imagine Dragons did sound terrible on paper. But to paraphrase Chris Berman, the Grammys are not performed on paper. As with the best collaborations, it revealed something new about each artist involved. Imagine Dragons matched Lamar’s intensity on the performance, and Twitter gave them the ultimate compliment: grudging respect. Lamar showed a different level of musicianship behind his songwriting, in addition to his ability to adjust and perform in front of any type of crowd (the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup from a few years ago was good too – maybe we’ll see more of these in the future?).
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ live performance, which featured Queen Latifah and Madonna, was a microcosm of Macklemore’s rise – it’s was about what happened in addition to the music as much as the music itself. Their performance of “Same Love” could never just be a dope beat and lyrics. With “Record of the Year” at stake, there had to be something more. It had to end with 33 couples getting married, as if that good deed would be enough to clear Macklemore’s conscious (see next section).
Lastly, I want to mention Kacey Musgraves, who followed up the Kendrick Lamar/Imagine Dragons light show with her minimal, heartfelt song about truly finding yourself in the face of society expectations. The championship game was over, the gym was clearing out, and Musgraves just wanted to get some shots up.
And with that, Twitter was satiated for another day.
Forrest Through the Trees
The Grammys itself didn’t generate a lot of controversy. It was Macklemore’s text sent to Kendrick Lamar apologizing for winning Best Rap Album that received the most backlash and touched a cultural nerve. Actually, let me take that back. It was Macklemore’s text sent to Kendrick Lamar apologizing for winning Best Rap Album, that he posted on his Instagram account, that received the most backlash and touched a cultural nerve (we covered what Instagram pictures represent here).
The apology text revealed several layers of pop culture opinion that snowballed from harmless to catastrophic the deeper the rabbit hole went.
The apology displayed Macklemore’s self consciousness in the larger hip hop ecosystem, or as Jon Caramanica points out, it showed “the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate”. The accusation of “appropriation” was leveled at Macklemore throughout his rise. Yet consider that 2013 was the first time in 55 years that no black artist topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts – not Kendrick Lamar, not Jay-Z, not Kanye West, not Beyoncé. White artists topped the R&B charts 44 out of 52 weeks, although that is mostly due to a rule change that placed Psy on top of the rap charts for three weeks in 2012. Still, somehow, somewhere, black artists got replaced on the Billboards, and in popular music (by white artists? By changing tastes? By the myth of post-racial America? All of the above? None of the above?).
So we were right – the story behind the story of this year’s Grammys was about the face of hip hop. But nowhere near as simple as two artists going head to head, the Grammys were a reflection about what future music will look like. The seeds were planted, well, who knows – they were planted along the way, and we were too busy aiming for a thousand retweets to notice the thousand cuts of the 2013 pop music scene. And it’ll take more than apologies and award show concessions to dig out of it. That is, if people care enough to notice the difference.
