Lady Antebellum has taken four Grammy Awards for their desperate late-night call for companionship, Lady Gaga left the meat dress in the fridge and also has won multiple trophies, while Eminem, his mentor Dr. Dre and Rihanna delivered an incendiary group performance during the 53rd Grammy Awards ceremony Sunday from Staples Center in Los Angeles.
“I had this dream when I was really young that I could be whoever I wanted to be,” Gaga said when she accepted the Grammy for pop vocal album–after being bleeped upon shouting a profanity when she stepped up to the microphone. Before the show started, she also won the female pop vocal performance award for her single “Bad Romance.”
Lady Antebellum’s desperate closing time phone call hit “Need You Now” was named overall song of the year, one of several Grammys the song and album of the same name scored for the group. “What an amazing year,” said group member Dave Heywood, one of the song’s co-writer, referring to it as “a song that has turned our world upside down.” The album of the same name also took the country album, country song duo-group country vocal performance trophies.
Esperanza Spalding was named best new artist, an upset for the 26-year jazz singer and bassist over multiplatinum acts Bieber and Drake, as well as critically accliamed British rock and soul performers Mumford and Sons and Florence & the Machine.
“Wow,” Spalding said. “Thank you to the academy for even nominating me in the category.”
Cee Lo Green, audaciously showing up on CBS-TV outfitted like the NBC peacock, also was silenced briefly on the telecast while singing his hit single with the unprintable title, “…. You,” accompanied by the Henson puppets and Gwyneth Paltrow.
This year’s show brought out the biggest guns in pop music of the previous year–Eminem, Lady Antebellum, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Drake, Bieber and much of the cast of “Glee”–with one significant exception: Taylor Swift, who just launched a tour overseas, was performing in Osaka, Japan.
The show also featured the first Grammy night performance by Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger, and a rare appearance by Bob Dylan, who was backed by younger roots music acts–the Avett Brothers and England’s Mumford and Sons–for his gravelly voiced, hootenanny-like rendition of “Maggie’s Farm.”
Aretha Franklin, the tribute of a show-opening salute featuring Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride, Yolanda Adams and Florence Welch of Florence & the Machine, also was in absentia. But she delivered a videotaped message thanking well-wishers during her recent hospitalization for surgery for a still-undisclosed illness.
Following that segment, one audience member was overheard saying “Thank God she remembered the words,” referencing her gaffe during “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl.
Eminem led the night with 10 nominations largely pegged to his “Recovery” album and reflecting the intensely collaborative nature of the rap and R&B fields, a process that’s helped performers in those genres rack up multiple nominations in recent years. It also contributes to Bruno Mars’ seven, Jay-Z’s and Lady Gaga’s six each. From other fields, only country trio Lady Antebellum tallied six or more nominations.
The music industry traditionally counts on the Grammy Awards show to pump adrenaline into ever-sliding sales. That’s especially true this year, when in the first six weeks of 2011, three sales lows have been set for the album claiming the No. 1 spot on the national sales chart.
It’s one of the few occasions when a relatively broad spectrum of music–rap and country to jazz and indie rock–gets national exposure on the same network TV show.
Train’s “Hey Soul Sister (Live)” took the first Grammy of the telecast for pop duo or group vocal. “Thanks, Justin Bieber, for not being a duo or group,” lead singer Pat Monahan said in accepting the Grammy. British rock group Muse took rock album category, for its collection “The Resistance,” over recent works by Neil Young, Jeff Beck, Pearl Jam and Tom Petty.
Eminem’s “Recovery” was the odds-on favorite for album of the year going into Sunday’s ceremony. His album delivered a potent comeback for the Detroit rapper, even though reviews were mixed. It finished 2010 as the top-selling album of the year, with more than 3.4 million copies, demonstrating Eminem’s continued might in the retail arena. His single “Not Afraid” took the rap solo performance Grammy.
In fact, rap album sales actually increased by 3% in 2010, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the only musical genre that posted a gain. And that was largely due to Eminem’s “Recovery.” If you take his numbers out of the picture, sales in the genre would have been 10% lower than in 2009.
Country music was the only other genre that didn’t experience a two-figure sales drop from a year earlier, with total sales of 43.7 million albums, down 5% from the 46.1 million country albums sold in 2009. Those results also reflected the success of blockbuster hits from Lady Antebellum, which collected the country album Grammy, and Swift. Country was the fourth most popular genre in 2010, behind rock (103.7 million albums), R&B (57.9 million) and alternative (53.7 million), according to Nielsen SoundScan’s year-end genre analysis.
Major wins would crown a triumphant year for Eminem that has quickly extended into 2011, with two key commercial appearances in the midst of the Super Bowl.
His pairing with Rihanna for the hit single, “Love the Way You Lie,” also was widely considered a front runner to take the record of the year award in a field that also includes Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ paean to the Big Apple, “New York State of Mind,” B.o.B. featuring Bruno Mars’ “Nothin’ On You,” Cee Lo Green’s controversial ” ? You” and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now.” Before the telecast began, Eminem’s single “Not Afraid” took the rap solo performance Grammy, but “Love The Way You Lie” lost in rap-sung collaboration to the Jay-Z-Keys recording.
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