{"id":2263552,"date":"2026-02-02T20:55:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T20:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2263552"},"modified":"2026-02-02T20:55:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T20:55:13","slug":"grammys-2026-the-show-makes-history-but-meets-the-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/grammys-2026-the-show-makes-history-but-meets-the-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Grammys 2026: The show makes history but meets the moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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History was made in more than one way at Sunday night\u2019s 68th Grammy Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bad Bunny\u2019s \u201cDeb\u00ed Tirar M\u00e1s Fotos\u201d won album of the year \u2014 the first Spanish-language LP to take the Recording Academy\u2019s highest honor. Kendrick Lamar and SZA\u2019s \u201cLuther\u201d was named record of the year, making Lamar the winningest rapper in Grammy history (and just the fourth artist to go back-to-back for the record prize). Then there were Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O\u2019Connell, who took song of the year with \u201cWildflower\u201d; they\u2019re now the only songwriters with three wins in that prestigious category.<\/p>\n

To go by demographics, the ceremony clearly embodied the diversity gains the academy has been saying proudly are happening among its 15,000 voting members. But if new kinds of faces are becoming Grammy darlings, the music they\u2019re being recognized for still upholds many of the academy\u2019s old values. A night for making history was also a night for reveling in it.<\/p>\n

Take \u201cLuther,\u201d a soulful hip-hop slow jam built on a prominent sample of Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn\u2019s 1982 rendition of a love song Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recorded in the late 1960s \u2014 an intricate piece of lineage-making meant to bridge multiple generations.<\/p>\n

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<\/picture>\n
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Olivia Dean performs.<\/p>\n

(Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

\u201cFirst and foremost, let\u2019s give a shout-out to the late, great Luther Vandross,\u201d the producer Sounwave said as he, Lamar, SZA and the song\u2019s other creators accepted their award at Crypto.com Arena. (Before they made it onstage, Cher misread the card identifying \u201cLuther\u201d as record of the year and said that Vandross himself had won.) Lamar added, \u201cThis is what music is about,\u201d and expressed his gratitude for being allowed \u201cthe privilege\u201d to use Vandross\u2019 music as long as he and SZA promised the singer\u2019s estate not to curse on their record.<\/p>\n

You can hear a similar reverence for those who came before in Olivia Dean, the 26-year-old British singer named best new artist on the strength of her hit \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d LP, which looks back to the gleaming pop-soul of Diana Ross and Whitney Houston.<\/p>\n

Even Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper and singer who became a superstar at the bleeding edge of reggaeton and Latin trap, achieved his Grammy breakthrough with something of a throwback move: \u201cDeb\u00ed Tirar M\u00e1s Fotos\u201d is an exactingly arranged tribute to his native island, with elements of Puerto Rican folk styles such as bomba and plena and more hand-played instrumentation than he utilized for 2022\u2019s sleek \u201cUn Verano Sin Ti,\u201d which scored a Grammy nomination for album of the year but lost to \u201cHarry\u2019s House\u201d by Harry Styles (who, as it happens, presented the album prize Sunday).<\/p>\n

Part of Bad Bunny\u2019s success this year can be attributed to the fact that he\u2019s a far bigger celebrity than he was three years ago; indeed, his Grammy triumph impressively sets up the halftime performance he\u2019ll give this coming weekend at Super Bowl LX. But not unlike Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s rootsy \u201cCowboy Carter,\u201d which finally brought her a win<\/a> for album of the year in 2025 after a number of outrage-inducing defeats, \u201cDeb\u00ed Tirar M\u00e1s Fotos\u201d is also primo Grammy bait: a work steeped in tradition from a natural innovator.<\/p>\n

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\"SZA <\/picture>\n
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SZA backstage.<\/p>\n

(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

For years, the Grammys\u2019 rearview gaze used to bum me out \u2014 and, to be honest, as lovely as Eilish\u2019s \u201cWildflower\u201d is, her song of the year win with the tender acoustic ballad felt like a failure of imagination among voters I wish had recognized the hurtling exuberance of \u201cGolden,\u201d from Netflix\u2019s \u201cKPop Demon Hunters<\/a>.\u201d (\u201cGolden\u201d did take the prize for song written for visual media, which made it the first K-pop tune to win a Grammy.)<\/p>\n

Yet something about Sunday\u2019s ceremony made it hard to get too worked up about all the historicizing. Perhaps it was how plainly yet passionately many artists used their time onstage to speak about the issues pressing on us right now. \u201cBefore I say thanks to God, I\u2019m gonna say: ICE out,\u201d Bad Bunny told the crowd as he accepted an award for m\u00fasica urbana album. \u201cWe\u2019re not savage, we\u2019re not animals, we\u2019re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Lady <\/picture>\n
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Lady Gaga on the red carpet.<\/p>\n

(Christina House\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Eilish said, \u201cNo one is illegal on stolen land.\u201d Dean pointed out that she\u2019s the granddaughter of an immigrant and that \u201cthose people deserve to be celebrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was also moved by how personal so much of the music felt \u2014 a cry of imperfection like Lola Young\u2019s \u201cMessy,\u201d for instance, which she performed by herself on piano and which won pop solo performance in an upset over the likes of Lady Gaga and Sabrina Carpenter. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m gonna say because I don\u2019t have any speech prepared,\u201d she yelled into the microphone as she received her trophy. \u201cObviously, I don\u2019t \u2014 it\u2019s messy, do you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

Weirdly for a show with yesterday so heavily on its mind, a tribute to the late R&B trailblazers Roberta Flack<\/a> and D\u2019Angelo<\/a> was a disappointment, with Lauryn Hill as bandleader moving way too quickly (in way too short an allotted time) through songs that require real space to unfurl.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Justin Bieber had for the evening\u2019s most striking performance: a slow and radically stripped-down rendition of his song \u201cYukon\u201d that he sang wearing only boxer shorts and socks, accompanying himself with a scratchy electric guitar riff he fed through a looping station.<\/p>\n

\u201cYukon\u201d is from Bieber\u2019s impressive \u201cSwag<\/a>\u201d album, which he released last year after a lengthy stretch in the pop-star wilderness; it\u2019s an LP, kind of like \u201cMessy,\u201d about learning to forgive yourself for your flaws, and here he sang \u201cYukon\u201d like a guy who\u2019d figured out \u2014 maybe a guy figuring out \u2014 how to build a life outside the punishing expectations of celebrity. The music had the past in it, of course, but didn\u2019t feel constrained by it.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Justin <\/picture>\n
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Justin Bieber performs.<\/p>\n

(Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History was made in more than one way at Sunday night\u2019s 68th Grammy Awards. Bad Bunny\u2019s \u201cDeb\u00ed Tirar M\u00e1s Fotos\u201d won album of the year \u2014 the first Spanish-language LP to take the Recording Academy\u2019s highest honor. Kendrick Lamar and SZA\u2019s \u201cLuther\u201d was named record of the year, making Lamar the winningest rapper in Grammy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2263553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2263552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Grammys-2026-The-show-makes-history-but-meets-the-moment.com2F542F4b2F6d431b0947829170eb824ac2-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2263552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263554,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263552\/revisions\/2263554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2263553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2263552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2263552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2263552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}