Grammy Awards Are a Mix of Genres and Generations

The Grammys might be a final music-business establishment perplexing to be all things to all listeners. The awards themselves micro-sliced a year’s available strain into 108 categories this year, with many of a winners named in a Webcast only before a categorical show. Then a telecast scrambled to lift together a genres and generations — infrequently harmoniously, infrequently in collision.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has figured out that a awards and speeches, with their responsible appreciate yous to managers and labels, are a lifeless part. So this year’s uncover let video-era youngsters theatre large prolongation numbers and brought on large 1960s names — Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Barbra Streisand — to explain chronological continuity.

Bruno Mars, whose suavely retro pop-RB is good wakeful of a Motown roots, sang his “Grenade” in black and white with finger-snapping backup singers, afterwards took over a drum pack while Janelle Monáe illuminated adult a stage. Singing a some-more complicated despondency of her “Cold War,” she crowd-surfed among a black-tie audience.

There was a wall of video abandon as Rihanna sang a year’s many emotionally tender strike — her partnership with Eminem, “Love a Way You Lie” — before a perpetually tormented-looking Eminem took over a theatre to vehemently rhyme “I Need a Doctor,” bringing out a subject, a writer Dr. Dre, to join him. Rihanna returned later, wearing vital red fringe, to play a bump-and-grind seductress with Drake in “What’s My Name,” with tangible abandon nearby.

Lady Gaga climbed out of an egg, and her dancers eventually nude from unisex golden ethereal tops down to underwear as she sang her new, synthesizer-pumped, really Madonna-revivalist “Born This Way.” (Lady Gaga’s outfit for usurpation her best cocktail outspoken manuscript endowment was a comic-book heroine’s leather exoskeleton, with thigh-high boots and farfetched breasts and buttocks.)

Yet Lady Gaga was monochromatic compared with Cee Lo Green, behaving “Forget You” — a expurgated chronicle of his viral video strike — in a enormous feathered outfit with rhinestones capping his head, like Elton John personification Big Bird, surrounded by Jim Henson’s Muppet-style puppets. (Mr. Green common a strain with a karaoke-grade vocals and forced poses of Gwyneth Paltrow.)

Katy Perry had her possess rhinestones — even on her microphone — as she sang “Not Like a Movies” on a swing, carried high as a prolonged sight unfolded from her dress, a less-than-original effect. The teenage cocktail heartthrob Justin Bieber — surprisingly beaten for best new artist by a deft jazz bassist and thespian Esperanza Spalding — common a robotic group-dance series with his coach Usher, who can’t assistance creation Mr. Bieber demeanour and sound like a twerp.

Strobe lights were operative overtime for self-contained stone bands. The British rockers Muse called for a series opposite mass media with “Uprising,” amid video screens and a leather-clad dancer gang. More strobes had a blinding ill outcome for Arcade Fire; fluorescent bicyclists didn’t assistance either. No matter: Arcade Fire took home manuscript of a year. And after a award, Arcade Fire’s bandleader, Win Butler, announced, “We’re gonna go play another strain ’cause we like music,” and plunged into “Ready to Start,” with a lyrics “Businessmen, they splash my blood.”

Country performers were some-more decorous, singing ballads. Miranda Lambert sang “The House That Built Me” after dedicating it to “all a good artists that have come before us, who have set a theatre for where we are now.” Lady Antebellum strong on peace singing, not posing, though a tact was rewarded by a recording academy’s voters. Its romantic, harmless “Need You Now” trumped Eminem and Mr. Green for record of a year and strain of a year.

The Grammys know they’re not a MTV Video Music Awards; they don’t wish to divide people over 30. Or over 50. So Mr. Dylan, froggy though grinning, assimilated Mumford Sons (a best new artist nominee) and a Avett Brothers for a hootenanny chronicle of “Maggie’s Farm.” Ms. Streisand emoted by “Evergreen.” Five singers paid reverence to Aretha Franklin as a uncover began: 3 of them (Jennifer Hudson, Yolanda Adams and Christina Aguilera) with sharpening gospel flourishes, and dual — a nation thespian Martina McBride and a English rocker Florence Welch (a best new artist hopeful with her rope Florence a Machine) — diversion though awkward. Ms. Franklin seemed on video, thanking people for get-well cards and vowing to attend a Grammys subsequent year.

That left Mr. Jagger. He was there to compensate his possess tribute: to a essence thespian Solomon Burke, who died final year and was one of Mr. Jagger’s vital influences when a Rolling Stones began. Lean and bony in a teal brocade tuxedo, corroborated by a essence rope in suits, Mr. Jagger sang Mr. Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” with sass and affection, rooster-strutting all over a outrageous theatre and pulling around his guitarist. No choreography — only a stone star jumping around. Some of a youngsters could take some tips.