I’m watching it right now. A lot of really good performances. Love Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran
busdriver’s impressions of the Beyonce performance were so interesting to me. I absolutely disagree, but I did find it interesting. And as I wrote in another forum, the reason people loved that album is because it was more than just pretty music. Through her art, she is trying to get people to talk and think, and I think that her performance accomplished that quite successfully.
I was thinking about the comments to this thread. 2 female performers - both excellent, top notch voices with widespread critical acclaim - getting negative comments here for various reasons.
Twenty One Pilots takes off their pants and accepts their award in their underwear. Everyone here thinks it’s great. (As they should. It is great. It’s just clothing. No shame in the human form. ) There were also some male performers who were kind of meh.
I wonder what the response would have been if female performers had taken their clothes off while walking on stage and accepted an award in their underwear?
We need to start giving females the same slack we give guys in our society. We, collectively, are so hypercritical of females.
I’m never bothered by Beyonce’s revealing costuming–she always has her body on display, it’s just part of her shtick. I’m sure she’s well aware that even though her voice is fine, without her face and figure she would never have become a star, so she has to make sure the audience always gets its fill of both. I wasn’t watching this year’s Grammys because my old-farthood means I have less interest in the performers every year, but I did check in just as Beyonce’s extravaganza began. I guffawed at how pompous and self-aggrandizing it was and quickly turned it off. (I also hate it when celebrities put their kids on display, so was put off by that aspect of the performance.)
So I just watched the entire performance, my first view was probably no more than 30 seconds, the first part, where she is wearing very little. Which was enough to think, Ah, it’s the usual Beyonce stuff. But viewing the performance all of the way through, since it was so long, it was easy to forget the first part, and she certainly wasn’t her usual self, no booty dance this time. But we did start laughing pretty hard at the Mother Earth, Goddess performance, or whatever it was supposed to be.
Oh, come on. People can have their opinions about individuals without being declared as sexist. I found the 21 Pilots thing kind of weird, though a little funny. However, a more apt comparison would be if they did an entire performance wearing nothing but rheir underwear.
“However, a more apt comparison would be if they did an entire performance wearing nothing but their underwear”
If they did, do you think there is a high probability you’d be describing them as looking like sleazes or porn stars? Those are pretty loaded descriptors.
@MommaJ wrote
I need to preface my reply with the fact that except for the Single Ladies song, I’m not a fan on Beyonce.
However, I think it is SO WRONG to say that the only thing that makes someone a star is the quality of their voice. I would even argue that the voice isn’t even the biggest component of what makes a star, a star.
There is the intangible “it” quality which Beyonce obviously has a plethora of. Much like Madonna, she’s created an empire based solely on her brand, and her voice is only a small component of that.
In my feminist art class, we spent an entire hour dissecting and evaluating the very deliberate and particularly staged pregnancy announcement photos. No aspect of what she was choosing to show and not show was an accident, and her choices of materials, lighting, and staging made fairly profound statements about gender, race, and motherhood.
THAT is why she is Queen Bey, and THAT is why she has an army of devoted followers.
Yes. I’m just not into watching that kind of thing, as a matter of taste.
I’ve gotten stuck going to strip bars many years ago in the military. I found it so degrading to the women. Some of these star’s performances look like the same thing, but with better choreography. Went to a burlesque performance with a group of people (didn’t know what it was going to be), and there are all these ladies in skimpy outfits, wearing nothing but tassels on their boobs, twirling them around. Everyone is clapping and cheering, oh how lovely. Seriously? I felt sorry for the women, it was demeaning. I guess I’m just an old time feminist and haven’t evolved with the times.
Adele and Beyonce are such an interesting pair. @MotherOfDragons is right that quality of voice is hardly the only thing that makes someone a star (especially a female someone), but Adele comes pretty close to being the exception that proves that rule. All she really has ever had to offer is the quality of her vocal performance and the quality of her poetic voice as a lyricist and tunemaker (and I think she gets oodles of help on the tunes part from the usual suspect hit engineers). She has a lovely personality, but it’s no different or more vibrant than the personalities of millions of women around the world. She doesn’t look quite old enough to be her own mother, but she dresses that way. (Given my children’s age and my office, I know and meet lots of 28 year-olds. None of them looks like that.) Even her heartbreak seems channeled from another era.
Beyonce, in contrast, is perpetually ahead of wherever the curve happens to be at the moment. She’s always a visitor from the near future. Everything about her is performance art, often magnificent performance art. She has sculpted herself, and others have sculpted her, into a complete star who dominates every medium, every aspect of stardom. (Except, um, songwriting. “Single Ladies” notwithstanding, until Lemonade that was a notable weakness, the only one, and it hardly matters.) As far as I can tell, for our children’s generation, Beyonce has the unquestioned authority that The Beatles had for us.
Anyway, that was a good part of the reason why the Grammys worked this year. Adele vs. Beyonce was such an excellent story, and they are so different that you didn’t even really have to choose sides – in many ways Adele’s victory somehow confirmed rather than diminished Beyonce’s stature. Beyonce could present herself unironically as a goddess, provoke millions of muffled guffaws, and . . . it still worked. And was moving. She’s beyond criticism. And Adele was moving screwing up, and then doing a better job of showing how boring George Michael would have been if he had been Adele.
(And, by the way, what was up with giving that kind of attention to George Michael? Prince, sure, but can anyone defend putting Michael higher than fifth or sixth on the list, by importance, of popular musicians who died in 2016? I don’t think he even makes it to tenth for me.)
Wow, some very interesting discourse here. Good thread.
OK, can I just go there? I think so much of the blowback on Beyonce and her lack of wins in the mainstream categories (in other words, not “urban” or R&B) is plain old racism. I think that a lot of the people who don’t like her performances (Grammys, Super Bowl) simply are uncomfortable with its msg.
I never can remember the rules around posting links, but I’ve been reading a lot of think pieces on her performance. This breaks it down as succinctly for me as any of them.
"Here’s the hard part when it comes to popular music. Pop is fun — it helps people relax and temporarily abandon their inhibitions, to express hidden parts of themselves and to open themselves up to others, including others fundamentally different from themselves. The music industry relies on the fantasy that pop is welcoming to all — to anyone who’s willing to buy a record (now a download or a streaming service subscription) or a concert ticket. Yet this is, in fact, a dream that’s often contradicted by reality — by the separate tracks that once banished artists of color to the ‘race records’ division at record labels, and which persist in less explicit ways today; by the policies that have restricted the access of artists of color to certain venues, because their audiences are allegedly dangerous or disruptive; by the unspoken prejudices that elevate white artists working within black styles to star status while their inspirations remain ghettoized. Artists of color asserting themselves take the fun dream apart. They must. Otherwise the sickness persists because it’s inconvenient and frightening to acknowledge the symptoms.
“For white people, to acknowledge institutional racism is to recognize our place in it and to become prepared to move from that comfortable spot. Yet the little voice of assumed exceptionalism often convinces us that we can stay there and fight the good fight.”
Here’s the whole article: http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/02/14/515024057/the-problem-with-the-grammys-is-not-a-problem-we-can-fix?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170214
Do y’all know that performers aren’t even submitting their work for consideration by the Grammys? They realize that the voting body is seriously out of touch with the zeitgeist and why should they let the Grammys benefit from their work when it’s not going to be given a fair shake?
I appreciate this conversation.
Can we insulate ourselves from charges of racism if we say that Lady Gaga is usually even trashier than Beyoncé?
Can we all agree that Ed Sheeran isn’t selling his sexuality?
And finally:
This is so unfair. They usually (I am told) wear shoes.
I don’t consider what Beyonce wore in her number on the Grammys as trashy. I consider it a “costume” as part of her performance art. That particular performance was even more of a theatrical piece than simply getting up and singing a song on stage. It doesn’t mean the artist would walk down the street in the same attire.
22 Grammys and 62 Grammy nominations. Racism? 
Perhaps some people are uncomfortable with the message of stripping down, shaking your booty and selling sex. That’s certainly not racist, unless you’re saying white women don’t do that. I am completely unimpressed with Miley Cyrus’s antics and Brittney Spears, also.
busdriver, of those wins only three aren’t “urban,” R&B, or rap. (Well, and there’s one for Best Surround Sound Album, but I don’t even know what that means). I’m saying that she gets pegged. To put it bluntly, she’s successful in her “place” but not in the broader context of music. Look, I love Adele and Taylor Swift. I mean really love their music. But I get the reaction that some are having to Beyonce not being awarded Best Album – not Best Urban Contemporary Album, which she won, but straight up BEST ALBUM. And I think bewilderment at her performance is an extension of that. I think there’s a lot of little-r racism where she is concerned that people may not even be aware of. I don’t love everything she does, but it’s important and is certainly more ambitious than another album full of love/not in love songs.
And thanks for not being offended, @busdriver11. I’m not calling you a racist. I’m trying to explain how some minorities, myself included, and others are feeling.
From what I’ve read, the issue many have with the Grammys is the demographics of those who vote. If I’m not mistaken, the Oscars changed the criteria for voting in response to the “Oscars so white” movement, and many expect similar changes for the Grammys in response to this year’s controversy. However, I do think the fact that Adele’s album far outstripped Lemonade in terms of sales was a key element in this year’s award. After all, the whole Grammy effort may purport to be about rewarding art, but it’s actually about $$$$$$ for the recording industry. In any case, despite the fact that almost all the big recording stars show up for ceremony, I don’t think the award means a hill of beans to artists like Beyonce of Adele, who will be rolling in dough and touring forever regardless of what the Grammy voters have to say–so at the end of the day, who really cares?
The sales argument would carry more weight if Beck hadn’t beaten out Beyonce in 2015. She had one of the top-selling albums that year and Beck … not so much. But the argument that year was it was about art and not sales. So this time it’s sales and not art? Hmmmm.
And, again, I’m not directing this at you, MommaJ. Just wondering out loud …
But, yeah, the voters are absolutely out of touch and is why relevant artists are starting to boycott. I’m OK with that.
No, not offended, youdon’tsay, I’m hard to offend. Plus, I’m not racist and am secure in that. However I am, apparently, a prude.
I’m not crazy about Adele either, maybe that’s a rare thing, as most everyone seems to love her. Her songs all tend to sound kind of similar and whiny to me. Fantastic voice, nice lady, but I think she should have spent her time on stage talking about all the people behind her who were involved in making the album. Not talking about Beyonce.
Carlos Santana had some interesting comments today on the Adele/Beyoncé thing