It was all too tame for a show whose belle of the ball was the Woodstock-era folk legend Joni Mitchell.
Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The Grammys are straining to be a different beast in this decade under Recording Academy president Harvey Mason Jr., who took over from his disgraced predecessor in 2021. Acclaim now gets spread around a wider and somewhat more careful group of nominees; categories are on the move and trying harder to recognize not just the evolving faces of Stateside pop, rock, rap, and R&B but musical hotbeds around the world. In the 2020s, last night’s ceremony aside, women are picking up more and more wins in categories like Best Melodic Rap Performance and Best Rock Song, where they used to go a few consecutive years without so much as a nod. The show is no longer as aggressively annoying.

What Mason, with his gentle speeches about finding a moment’s peace in music, can’t entirely control is the political context and tone for the Grammys. The way talent engages with or avoids current events outside the arena is a story writing itself one acceptance speech at a time. This year has already seen enough strife to spark a wave of protest songs from the likes of Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen, who both released odes to the bravery of Minneapolis, whose occupation by ICE and CBP is notching a body count. The rash of violence and abductions were the subject of a spate of ICE Out protests over the weekend in downtown Los Angeles, where the Grammys took place this year. And the question of whether we still live in a democracy has loomed over the winter. Meanwhile, the White House shitposts to get a rise out of pop stars online and the president announced, mid-show, the abrupt closure of the Kennedy Center for promised “renovations.” Would the Grammys, which kept The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah on retainer as host the whole decade, take a stand?

It’s a bit Is this TV show my friend? to hope for fearless invective in prime time in spite of the lateness of the political hour in America. “These people are trained and paid to perform, not to teach,” diehards and detractors alike will tell you when you look too hard for the latter. Reprisal for insulting the administration on national television can be steep and expensive. But ambient pressure to in some way grapple with mass deportation locally and nationally, to use the Grammys platform to try to manifest a better world than the current one, seeped into the pre- and main show nevertheless. “ICE Out” pins dotted the audience and list of presenters; speeches, particularly in the afternoon YouTube program where the majority of awards are handed out, could be world-weary. A history-making Best Children’s Music Album win for the delightful daddy-daughter duo FYÜTCH and Aura V — the latter of whom is the youngest Grammy winner ever, at 8 — turned into a fiery rebuke against the mistreatment of youth, globally: “Any time we vote against feeding, protecting, clothing, educating our kids, we are condemning our collective future,” FYÜTCH said.

At night, it was Noah’s sixth and final Grammys gig and the show’s last stand on CBS and Paramount+, which has ties to the Trump administration thanks to an Ellison owning the network. The ingredients for a broadcast that could brashly outline the regime connections in the building were in play, but any elephant in the room that was tacitly acknowledged was also rarely explicitly named and shamed. It was all too tame for a show whose belle of the ball was the Woodstock-era folk legend Joni Mitchell. The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis have drawn comparisons to the 1970 Kent State massacre, which spilled out into pop music. Their deaths did not come up in a Crypto.com Arena full of singer-songwriters who mostly kept things on the sunny side.

Banter off-stage hewed clearer and more concise than what was said on television; Kehlani offered a curt “Fuck ICE” on the red carpet and at the earlier ceremony, where R&B and most rap trophies remain naggingly siloed, while accepting her first of two Grammys. But megastars Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny didn’t mince words at the big event: “Before I say thanks to God,” the latter said as he won Best Música Urbana Album, “I’m gonna say ICE out.” His Album of the Year win dovetailed with the night’s theme of honoring the cultural contributions of people who are being hassled by customs and immigration agents — to the extent that it felt like the Academy was pitching a word in as a silent majority, facilitating the beautiful moment of the singer addressing his home turf of Puerto Rico in Spanish. Pulling it together upon winning Song of the Year, Eilish declared that “No one is illegal on stolen land” to fierce applause; the CBS censor caught her saying “fuck ICE.” This was as frothy as artists got in the prime-time portion of the show. The mood that settled in elsewhere was sweeter and less prickly, typified by the loving advocacy of soulful Best New Artist winner Olivia Dean, who took time to celebrate the bravery of sojourners like her own family, who made it to the U.K. by way of Jamaica and Guyana.

Trevor Noah could have roasted the scandal-embroiled network and streamer overhead while on the way out but opted not to.
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Dean’s sentiment resonated with speeches by heavy hitters across genres and faith traditions throughout the day. At the earlier show, Best Country Group/Duo Performance winner Shaboozey made it known that he comes from a “family of immigrants.” Best Contemporary Christian Album winner Israel Houghton closed with an appeal for unified hope: “We are citizens of a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” “Jesus is not owned by one political party,” Best Contemporary Country Album winner Jelly Roll shouted during his requisite awards-show sermon on the main stage. “We’re not governed by the government,” SZA said as her and Kendrick Lamar’s “luther” pulled Record of the Year. “We’re governed by God.” (She fleshed the sentiment out in an interview after the show: “And, you know, it’s always fuck ICE.”)

You were just as likely not to get this kind of gentle call for widespread societal redirection, though. Lamar didn’t go for it in either of his speeches; his “luther” guest feature’s announcement almost seemed to be accounting for that. Lady Gaga’s 2017 Super Bowl halftime show famously delivered a pithy “This Land Is Your Land” and a prideful “Born This Way.” Here, she used her Best Vocal Album victory to tell women in earshot not to second-guess their own ideas. Across the board, last year’s trans-rights pleas took a back seat, as if the show were only capable of mobilizing toward so many causes at one time. AI-rights nightmares for musicians, a rapidly advancing concern in an industry miffed enough about the matter to pass around open letters, were mentioned maybe once in the preshow, by the drummer Nate Smith. It’s not the job of any individual or program in entertainment to offer a spate of acceptable politics. But having “Music’s Biggest Night” in a city very recently tear-gassed seemed like a ripe occasion for people who love and rep it to raise some ruckus.

This careful Grammys was overseen by a host who could have roasted the scandal-embroiled network and streamer overhead while on the way out but opted not to. Instead, he made his way ever so slowly to the rhetoric that seems poised to have a life in the news after the show. But you needed to already have a handle on the stories Noah was riffing about to get some of the jokes. His bit about the president and Nicki Minaj comparing asses is the kind of line you used to be able to sneak into a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It lacked the specificity of his crowdwork, giving no hint to what Minaj and Trump could’ve spoken of that might make it a no-brainer that she didn’t attend, as Noah suggests. She responded to the industrywide guffaw at her expense by claiming on X that he’s hiding a secret boyfriend from us.

His prize for the slow drip until a big end-of-the-night dig — “Song of the Year: That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense. Because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton” — arrived in the wee hours. “It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C., and suing him for plenty$,” the president posted on Truth Social. For a broadcast now poised for brooking the maelstrom of a Kimmel-esque bout of courthouse clapback, everyone may as well have talked more and colder shit.

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