The 2025 Grammys fell on Groundhog Day, which could have been a setup for an easy joke about the music awards show being trapped in a repetitive loop, every year making the same mistakes. But there was a twist. And as a result, last night’s event turned out to be more like the ending of the 1993 Bill Murray movie, in which the hero finally wakes up out of his long Sisyphean existential nightmare into a new day, and the cycle is broken.
Is that making too much of the fact that Beyoncé finally won the prize for Album of the Year, for her genre-bending Cowboy Carter, after a long series of her landmark releases being passed over for arguably lesser works by white artists? It might be. After all, Beyoncé was already the most nominated and awarded artist in Grammy history. And it wouldn’t be unreasonable to add that Cowboy Carter, while having a lot of high points, is the most overinflated and least consistent and transporting of her albums of the past dozen years. Many people have compared it to Martin Scorsese belatedly winning a Best Director Oscar in 2007 for The Departed, and not for any of his iconic movies of the 1970s and 1980s.
You could even add that Cowboy Carter dumbed itself down somewhat by using spoken-word interludes to lay out its thesis explicitly—as Beyoncé put it when accepting her award for Best Country Album, that “sometimes genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists”—in order to lead Grammy voters to her point by the hand.
But that doesn’t really matter. The most prestigious pop artist of the century being shut out the most prestigious of the recording academy’s awards became broadly symbolic around the time that Adele felt she had to apologize or even protest on the Grammys stage because her record had beaten Lemonade. Ever since, it has stood in for the Grammys’ seemingly stubborn resolve to downgrade the biggest developments in popular music in their moment—particularly Black music, and most of all Black music tied to the aesthetic and generational schism that remains around hip-hop—and to fall back instead on what was most familiar and comfortable to a voting body skewed heavily to older white men in the music industry.
That’s why all the other, mostly worthy album nominees were likely gritting their teeth hoping they didn’t win. Two of them, four-time album-prize winner Taylor Swift and one-time winner Billie Eilish, actually came away completely empty handed, despite their multiple nominations. (Swift, not known for liking to come second in any competition, could be seen after the announcement wielding her champagne glass like a broadsword, aggressively cheersing Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z and everyone else within reach.)
It’s also why Kendrick Lamar taking both Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Not Like Us” was just as meaningful as Beyoncé breaking her losing streak: It’s the first time a rap song has won either of those categories, aside from “This Is America” by Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) in 2019, which was more of a one-off novelty conceptual project from a multimedia celebrity. Normally hip-hop tends to be sequestered to its genre categories—again, see Beyoncé’s statement above.
“Not Like Us” is also an outlier in its way—the culminating salvo in the most prominent pop beef of 2024, packed with accusations of pedophilia against another top rap star, who’s since taken the two artists’ mutual label to court for promoting it. The better Lamar’s night got—he took home five Grammys, sweeping the categories he was nominated in—the worse Drake’s did. When a big part of the Grammy crowd sang along with the song’s meanest and catchiest barb, “it’s probably A minoooor,” I couldn’t help feeling, as a fellow Canadian, on the day that Donald Trump levied 25 percent tariffs against our country, that some salt was being ground into our collective wound. And I don’t normally feel defensive of Drake at all.
If this year’s Grammys had a downside in general, in fact, it was mostly in that matter of timing. It would have been easier to celebrate last night’s progress if whole other sectors of reality weren’t feeling this week like they were rapidly speeding backwards.
Very understandably, the awards show’s central focus this year was the havoc wreaked by the Los Angeles wildfires. Beyoncé’s album award was even presented to her by a contingent of L.A. firefighters. (“It’s gonna be a tough one,” the chief muttered just before the envelope was opened, as if he were also nervous about the symbolic stakes of the outcome.) The show was opened by an all-star band backing up local brother duo Dawes playing a version of Randy Newman’s improbable hometown anthem “I Love L.A.,” albeit with some of the spikier lyrics changed. Reassuringly, perhaps, the Grammys’ ability to drain irony and subtlety out of art remains intact.
But with rare exceptions, the fires had to do extra duty as a metaphor for “dark times” in general, covering a lot of other current problems in the United States and the world that weren’t being mentioned. Nobody said anything the whole broadcast about the fires’ relationship to climate change, for instance, at a time when the American government has announced its withdrawal from the Paris agreements. (Off the air, it fell to John Legend to say something backstage.)
Lots of artists did make statements about social issues. Best New Artist winner Chappell Roan—who also gave the night’s gayest, most rapturous, and most rodeo-clowns-go-to-Oz performance with “Pink Pony Club”—made a speech that was especially brave in that particular room, about the need for music labels to provide developing artists with healthcare benefits and a living wage, read with sweet awkwardness out of her white Moleskine-style notebook.
Lady Gaga spoke up for queer and trans people (as did Roan outside on the red carpet). Shakira dedicated her Best Latin Pop Album award to her “immigrant brothers and sisters in this country.” Stevie Wonder, recalling the USA for Africa campaign during the Quincy Jones tribute section, said “we definitely have to be able to celebrate each other’s cultures.” And breakout star of the night Doechii—only the third woman ever to win Best Rap Album, as she pointed out—told young Black women not to let themselves be stereotyped.
The most pointed speech came from Alicia Keys, accepting her Global Impact award (unfortunately named after Dr. Dre, with his alleged history of violence against women), who said, in part, “This is not the time to shut down the diversity of voices. … ‘DEI’ is not a threat, it’s a gift, and the more voices, the more powerful the sound.”
Not one of them, though, closed the circuit and made it explicit that they needed to make those statements because of what the Trump regime in Washington is currently doing to hurt those people and causes. In this moment, saying so out loud feels indispensable. In that gap, you could hear fear, whether of direct retribution or of annoying too many consumers. In that gap, you could hear how rare it’s become for music in general to speak to political issues in anything but the most individualized emotional senses, addressing representation and mental health but not power structures. And in that gap, it’s hard not to guess, you also heard pressure from the top of the Grammys, perhaps on the grounds of not distracting from the effort to raise money for fire victims—but at the expense of, to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin (honored by proxy yesterday via an award for Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2024 tribute album), the fires next time.
So I’m not sure anyone should say the Grammys have reformed enough, quite yet.
• Besides the L.A. fires, you’d have to say the other main theme of this year’s Grammys was tear-away outfits. I think the first was Sabrina Carpenter, faking us out with a sparkly tuxedo-skirt-combo while doing a kind of swingy “Puttin’ on the Ritz” version of “Espresso,” before ripping it away to reveal a baby-blue bustier and switching to the usual version of the song. But that was followed by tear-away moves by Doechii, Charli XCX, and, of all people, soulful crooner Benson Boone. Not to mention that overwrought suit on Teddy Swims that one just wished he would tear away.
• Boone, Doechii, Swims, Shaboozey, and Raye formed a daisy chain of performances by Best New Artist nominees that proved to be an evening highlight overall and should be a go-to for future Grammys. Doechii had the crowd on its feet immediately and probably had the most star-making moment of the night, seeming almost Beyoncé-like in the do-it-all power precision of her performance. But Boone’s backflip off a piano lid in his blue jumpsuit and general sincere-yet-silly mustachioed move-bustin’ rendered him an instant icon, for a straight Mormon dude, of a much more ideal version of bro culture than the one that usually prevails in 2025.
• If only because I didn’t imagine Lamar would, I was kind of pulling for Sabrina Carpenter to win either Song of the Year or Record of the Year—she did get Best Pop Vocal Album, rightfully. Unfortunately, after the bustier reveal, her medley of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” suffered musically some. I think she was pushing her limits dancing so much, even in choreography designed to wittily point up her limits as a dancer.
• The long-burst bubble of Brat Summer was reflected in Charli XCX winning only in dance-electronic categories. But her performance, beginning in a back alley and culminating in a noughties-esque indie-sleaze rave, with Charli and a few dozen of her closest friends in a pile of underwear on the Grammy stage, still testified why people love her. Billie Eilish, who’s on the remix of “Guess,” the second tune Charli performed, was singing along so feverishly that it was surprising she didn’t rush the stage.
• During the whole first half of the Quincy Jones tribute (well-executed on all ends, especially by 84-year-old Herbie Hancock on piano), we were all wondering how they would handle the sensitive issue of Michael Jackson—you can’t talk about Q’s legacy without him, but, well. So when Stevie Wonder credited Jackson for co-writing “We Are the World” in that part of the tribute, I thought that was how they’d gotten around it. A couple of minutes later, though, Janelle Monáe emerged in complete M.J. drag, moonwalking her way through “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” Superbly, of course. So I guess everybody just decided to hell with it. … In any case, the person really being reputation-washed in that segment was its host Will Smith, who remains blackballed from the Oscars but is apparently still the reigning Fresh Prince in Grammyland.
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