“We Are Not Savages, We Are Not Animals”
At the Grammy Awards, the rapper, record producer, and singer Bad Bunny became the voice of resistance against Donald Trump. He is not the only one who vents his anger that evening.
On Sunday night, the Grammys were awarded for the 68th time in Los Angeles, the most important music prizes in the world, or at least in the United States, and it is not giving too much away to say that this year there was a lot going on. There were dramatic political speeches, but also a sermon furious in an almost Old Testament way; the rapper Tyler, the Creator had a gas station built onstage only to blow it up; one of the greatest songwriters of the present, Billie Eilish, received an award from the hands of one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Carole King; Justin Bieber fiddled around on a loop station wearing only boxer shorts; Sabrina Carpenter had an entire airport check-in hall built for the performance of her song “Manchild,” but she did not receive a Grammy for it. The most Grammys went to a singer from Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny.
Of course people had wondered beforehand whether and how the artists onstage, the presenters, the directors, and the speechwriters would respond to current political developments, and the answer, to say it upfront, is: they did, and they did so in an at once cheerful, clever, resolute way. Above all, it was an evening that bet on the reconciliatory power of music, and that tried to show that good pop is essentially the opposite of the political ideology that is currently preparing to take control of the USA and the world.
The awards ceremony begins with a joint performance by Rosé and Bruno Mars. Rosé has a New Zealand–South Korean family history, she lives in Seoul and, as her main job, belongs to the most famous K-pop ensemble of the present, Blackpink; Bruno Mars was born in Hawaii into a Filipino–Puerto Rican family, and in his music he combines Jamaican reggae and African-American hip-hop; right here, all advocates of ethnic purity ideas ought to have their heads explode. After that, the host of the show, Trevor Noah, strolls through the front rows of the audience and greets first of all—the queen! But it is of course not the wife of the self-proclaimed King of America, whose biopic is currently flopping so fabulously—it is the Queen of Hip-Hop, Queen Latifah. And around this queen sit so many stars that Trevor Noah gets quite breathless listing them: Pharrell Williams, Tyler, the Creator, Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, “there are so many stars here, I feel like I’m at Jeff Bezos’s wedding, but with way more Black people.”
Only Nicki Minaj isn’t there, Trevor Noah says: she couldn’t come because she is still at the White House, where she and Donald Trump have important things to discuss. He mimics Donald Trump’s hoarse voice: “Look what a huge butt I have,” which is of course meant to say: look how well you can crawl into it. Nicki Minaj is the most prominent defector in current hip-hop; she began her career as a feminist rapper and supporter of the queer community, but lately she has switched over to the MAGA camp. Last Wednesday she appeared at the “Trump Account Summit” and said there that she was “the biggest fan of the president.” The first time her name is mentioned by Trevor Noah, booing breaks out in the hall: in rejecting the one defector, the Grammy community comes together.
“I know it’s hard these days not to hate.” — Bad Bunny
The British neo-soul singer Olivia Dean receives the award for best new artist; she accepts the trophy in tears and says, “I am the granddaughter of an immigrant, I am a product of bravery, and I think these people deserve to be celebrated.” After she leaves the stage, Trevor Noah sits down in the audience next to Bad Bunny. He praises him for his music and especially for his social awareness and commitment. In the USA, at least on the North American continent, Bad Bunny has not performed lately, in protest against Donald Trump’s immigration policy and out of concern that Trump’s ICE militiamen could use his concerts to arrest and deport people from his audience.
In his homeland of Puerto Rico, by contrast, Bad Bunny has just played a series of 30 concerts, taking care that the local tourism industry benefits and that ticket prices remain affordable for the local population (which is why, as Trevor Noah does not mention, he also picked a fight with the monopolist Ticketmaster). If things get even worse in the USA—could Trevor Noah then emigrate to Puerto Rico to join him, he finally asks; whereupon Bad Bunny points out that Puerto Rico is unfortunately part of the USA.
After the next commercial break, Bad Bunny is up again right away; he is already the defining man of the evening. Onstage he accepts the award for best Música Urbana album and says, “Before I thank God, I want to say: ICE out. We are not savages, we are not animals. We are human beings, and we are Americans.” But he also urges the people under pressure not to be led into hate by that pressure. “I know it’s hard these days not to hate,” he says, but “hate only gets stronger through even more hate. The only thing stronger than hate is love. That’s why we have to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love. We don’t hate them. We love our fellow human beings and our family. And that’s exactly how it has to be: with love.”
For this, Bad Bunny receives the loudest applause of the evening so far. Of course, amid all that, he forgets, as promised at the beginning, to thank God as well. But the next award winner promptly makes up for it at length. This is the singer and rapper Jelly Roll, who is honored for his album Beautifully Broken. Jelly Roll was addicted to drugs and spent time in prison, but music, his wife, and the Bible helped him become a different person, as he says onstage. That’s why he has brought a Bible with him and holds it up for a short sermon; he thanks God and Jesus, and above all one thing matters to him: “Jesus is there for everyone. Jesus belongs to no political party and Jesus belongs to no record label—anyone can have a relationship with him!”
Carole King then presents the award for best songwriting to Billie Eilish, who is wearing an “ICE Out” pin and says, “No one is illegal on stolen land,” and Trevor Noah introduces the duo with the words: “The Grammy for Song of the Year is the Grammy everyone wants, just like Trump wants Greenland, since without Epstein’s island he needs a new one to vacation there with Bill Clinton.”
In the last third of the show, the dead of the past year are traditionally remembered. Bruce Springsteen, who is not present himself, has a tribute to Brian Wilson played in. An all-star band with culture vulture Post Malone on vocals, along with Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Andrew Watt plays, in memory of the great Ozzy Osbourne who died in July, the very great Black Sabbath piece “War Pigs.” It dates from 1970, so it is 56 years old, but it sounds as if it were written for this very moment: “Politicians hide themselves/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to the poor/…Wait till the day of judgment comes for them.”
A second all-star ensemble is formed around Ms. Lauryn Hill; it performs a medley in honor of the deceased soul greats D’Angelo and Roberta Flack, and at the very end Wyclef Jean even comes onstage, the guitarist with whom Lauryn Hill formed the Fugees now some 30 years ago and with whom she had been feuding for so long. He plays “Killing Me Softly” with her, the Roberta Flack song that made the Fugees famous back then, and that is already a very big and very moving sight. And if, in between, one might have lost faith in the consoling power of pop music, one regains it now for at least a moment. However, R&B SHOULD HAVE been highlighted in the mainstage as Durand Bernarr, Kehlani, and Leon Thomas took home the wins.
Record of the Year is awarded to the Luther Vandross homage “Luther” by Kendrick Lamar (who now has the most Grammy wins as a rapper) and SZA, another bow to a formative artist, performed by musicians who—with it, as Kendrick Lamar says in his acceptance speech—want to save his legacy, the legacy of Black music, for the present. The award for Album of the Year is finally presented by Harry Styles to Bad Bunny for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Bad Bunny is the man of the evening. The man of the hour.
He is the first to win this most important Grammy trophy with an album sung in Spanish. He gives his final acceptance speech in Spanish, with only a brief English insertion; he dedicates the award to all people who have left their homeland to follow their dream. In a week, Bad Bunny will perform at the Super Bowl halftime show; there too he will sing in Spanish, and he has already provoked the anger of the MAGA establishment in advance. So this memorable Grammy night can also be seen at the end as a prelude to that even bigger event; in any case, one now anticipates it with even greater suspense than before. When was the last time an artist held such an exposed role in such a historic moment? In this moment, leading up to Super Bowl LX this Sunday, Bad Bunny is the voice of an entire generation.