On Sunday, March 14th the Grammys took over social media with their 63rd Annual award show. It started at 3pm EST with a Pre Show Ceremony, followed by the red carpet at 6pm EST and the actual award show from 8-11:30pm. Although everything was live streamed, the actual show was in person for those who were in Los Angeles and able to attend.
Prior to the show, many artists such as The Weeknd, Zayn Malik, The 1975, Selena Gomez, Halsey and many more were all vocal about their opinion on the Grammys and their nomination snubs. A few days before the show, Zayn took to twitter to express his feelings toward the Grammys:
My tweet was not personal or about eligibility but was about the need for inclusion and the lack of transparency of the nomination process and the space that creates and allows favoritism, racism, and netwokring politics to influence the voting process
— zayn (@zaynmalik) March 10, 2021
And you probably heard already that The Weeknd boycotted any future awards going forth.
Now for a little recap of the Grammys, it definitely was a little different this year regarding Covid. During the YouTube Pre-Ceremony, nominees were gathered in a huge Zoom call and brought forth if and when they won. To say the least, the audio and video quality was so bad and distorted. And to top it all off, the rating for the Grammys was the lowest it has ever been with a total of 8.8 million viewers.
At this point, you’ve probably heard people referring to the Grammys as the Scammys but you might not know where it derived from. Army (BTS’ fandom name) came up with this name after BTS lost to Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga’s “Rain On Me” for the award of “Best Pop/Duo Group.” It was nice seeing two females win this category, however this loss just proved how rigged, racist and non-transparent the Grammys are and how they only used BTS for the overall views (which is why the ratings were so low since Army dipped right after they lost and rejoined at the end to see them perform). And to touch upon, Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga are not even a duo or a group and were not there to accept the award even though they were watching.
I could go on and on about everything that went wrong about the pre-show ceremony but this blog would be too long. So to sum it up, the whole pre show ceremony was just a way to squeeze in all the BIPOC artists nominated and was a livestream where the Grammy presenters made fun of BIPOC names, made insensitive jokes, made fun of feminists and continued to show xenophobia.
Furthermore, during the actual show Trevor Noah’s comments and hosting skills were not it and brought up a lot of hate on Twitter due to his lame jokes.
Despite all the negative aspects of the show, the Grammys were able to showcase a few great wins and performances. Firstly, Beyoncé won her 28th Grammy award which made her the only female artist with that many awards. Seeing her being a female, part of the BIPOC community and so successful in this industry is so refreshing to see and she is a great role model to look up to.
Secondly, Harry Styles. He opened up the main show with a spectacular performance of his song “Watermelon Sugar” and his outfit sparked up a conversation on social media. You can watch the performance here:
And it wouldn’t be a complete blog without talking about the end of the show performance by BTS. After a 3.5 hour long award show, they finally ended the night with a performance of Dynamite. You can watch the performance here:
That’s all I have to say!
Stay safe and stay groovy.
