When presenter Miley Cyrus appeared onstage at Crypto.com Arena toward the end of the Grammys telecast Sunday, she told the audience she was there for two very important reasons.
“No. 1, look at this gown!”
Cyrus had changed during the course of the show from a black leather Saint Laurent halter dress to a floor-length gown by Maison Alaia, and she wanted to make sure the crowd took note.
No. 2, she said, was to present the award for record of the year, won by Kendrick Lamar.
In a normal Grammys, Cyrus’ playfulness wouldn’t be worthy of note. But this was not a normal Grammys.
Instead, the moment exposed just how uncomfortably the usual glamour of “music’s biggest night” — couture fashion, extravagant performances, trophies being handed out to celebrities — fit together with organizers’ pledge to make the recent L.A. fires the focus of the awards.
Those blazes, which less than a month ago killed 29 people, burned more than 50,000 acres and 16,000 structures and exposed millions of people to toxic ash and smoke, were omnipresent during the event, including acceptance speech shout-outs and the QR code on the telecast used to raise relief funds. Yet the Grammys’ handling of the city’s ongoing trauma felt more performative than profound: The fires became a prop and backdrop to the night’s honors, losing the human depth and unimaginable scale of the tragedy in the process.
From the outset — a rousing rendition of Randy Newman’s famous “I Love L.A.” performed by fire survivors Taylor and Griffin Goldsmiths’ rock band Dawes, alongside Sheryl Crow, Brad Paisley, John Legend, Brittany Howard and St. Vincent — the issue was not the intention (laudable), but the execution (awkward).
Images of the destruction wrought by the fire — and of people helping others amid the wreckage — streamed on giant screens on either side of the stage while the musicians played, beginning a night-long narrative of hope and uplift that papered over the raw horror of what happened and the “tragedy after the tragedy” still unfolding.
Maybe it’s naive to expect any different of a nationally televised awards show. But with many people still homeless, many others whose homes survived in or near the burn zones unable to return, and an increasing chorus of experts sounding the alarm about the toxic nature of urban-fire ash, it was the Grammys itself that seemed naive. Or worse: a pre-taped segment featuring video of victims returning to the footprints of their former domiciles without any kind of protective gear felt downright scary.
For the most part, though, the Grammys simply felt like a typical awards show with the drama of a fire tacked onto it. When a group of kids were brought onstage to accompany Stevie Wonder in a moving rendition of “We Are the World” during a lengthy tribute to the music legend Quincy Jones, it was only mentioned after the song that they had just lost their schools to the fires. When L.A. firefighters were brought onstage to speak about their work, it was amid the rush to hand out the night’s final prize, the telecast running past its allotted time slot.
The result was that the fires’ role in the proceedings felt perfunctory, not essential — the minimum acknowledgment required by good taste so the show could go on. And it left presenters and performers in a difficult position, where business as usual seemed out of place but earnest emotion could appear forced.
I love a good panty-launcher as much as the next music fan, but watching Charli XCX cover dancers with multicolored undies while performing her hit song “Guess,” I couldn’t help but think the Grammys proved once and for all that you can’t have your flying drawers and your fire benefit too.
Maybe the moment to celebrate the amazing work of the music industry — including Beyonce’s long-waited, hugely deserved win for album of the year —was not just yet. Maybe the show’s producers should have taken the show down to the studs and rebuilt it as a pure benefit concert, as opposed to an awards show/fundraiser hybrid. (By the end of the night, more than $7 million had been raised for fire relief — and that was just from the audience at home; the money coming from the big pockets in the arena had not yet been tallied.)
Perhaps, though, the lesson here is that there is no sweet spot after a tragedy like the one Los Angeles has just endured — no good time to mix the crass commercial boosterism and self-congratulatory posing of a traditional award show with the gritty, real-life experience of ongoing pain and suffering.
Only the great Diana Ross lent the proper gravity to the proceedings when she presented the award for song of the year. She said her heart was with the victims, “especially the children who might be frightened.”
She also said she had spent time thinking about striking the right balance “between celebration and sorrow.”
The Grammys might have done more of the same.
