What we Learnt From the Grammys 2014

We'll get to the controversy and shit-munchers in a moment, but fuck me do The Grammys know how to put on a show. As a British kid who grew up with dreary Earls Court Brits performances from Natasha Bedingfield and Hear'Say, The Grammys feel like jumping over the Berlin wall from East Germany and landing straight in Disneyland. They had the debut performance from Daft Punk, who were joined by Pharrell, Nile Rodgers and Stevie Wonder to play a medley of "Get Lucky", "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", "Around The World", "Le Freak" and "Another Star". The debut performance of "Drunk In Love" with Beyoncé and Jay Z. They even made Dave Grohl bearable by the company of Trent Reznor, Josh Homme and Lindsey Buckingham. What a night.

Last week, the Brits confirmed Ellie Goulding.

Of the four rap categories at the Grammys, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis took home three awards, with the fourth going to "Holy Grail" which is basically a Justin Timberlake song with a Jay Z featured verse. They beat out Kendrick, Drake, A$AP and Kanye, all of whom went home without any awards. Macklemore also beat Kendrick in the prestigous Best New Artist category.

I guess it would have been a bit disappointing if Macklemore had got a shock victory in a couple of these categories, but what's depressing was the crushing inevitability of his best rap album win. People had been saying for weeks it was a done deal. Even Macklemore didn't believe he should have won and after the awards posted a screengrab of a text message he sent to Kendrick.

It's nice of Macklemore to send that text. Shame he froze on stage. Probably got lost in the moment. Same as he said he got "lost in the moment" at the American Music Awards and wouldn't let Mary Lambert get to the podium when they won for "Same Love". Guess that guy just forgets himself as soon as someone points a camera at him. (Also, does Macklemore really have 1133 unread messages? He should never have got in that group convo with Juicy J and Carrie Underwood).

Leading up to the awards, the rap committee at the Grammys tried to bar Macklemore from the Best Album category all together. They disqualified The Heist, only reversing their decision after the full Grammy committee voted in a “landslide decision” to restore the nominations.

So when the rap experts on the panel, and the artist that won the award, all think that the Grammys got it wrong, what will it take for them to get it right? I don't think it's especially racism, just people who don't like hip-hop voting for the thing that sounds least like hip-hop. At the Oscars, voters tend to abstain from categories they don't know anything about - such as sound editing - and let the couple of specialists in the academy decide on those awards. Maybe it's time the country music committee took a back seat on the rap album award.

I could go on but I'm gotta let my boy Big Quint take it from here:

Because Red has the same first consonant as Random Access Memories you can see the look on Taylor's face for the second she thinks she's won, and then the quick transformation to gracious loser when she realises she's lost.

UPDATE: Someone's made a GIF obviously

I guess this was America's Rihanna and Klaxons moment. Imagine Dragons - who, with their synthy-guitar pop and song titles like "Radioactive", are basically a shit new rave band - made the tactical decision to sing as little as possible, mostly providing backing for Kendrick to go off on some deranged freestyle. Things weren't quite as knuckleheaded as his "Control" verse, but he's still gunning other rappers, or as he put it: "tater tots on my shotgun, now I gotta pop one at the stars, sky's the limit, I gotta finish as the first rapper on Mars."

Look at that smiley face, he's got the cheeky grin of someone who just shat on a pillow.

Plenty has already been written about the unease from large swathes of the LGBT community about a straight guy nominating himself to write the gay struggle anthem, and including in that anthem a whole verse insisting how straight he is. The crassness of Macklemore's politics was underlined last night when, in the middle eight of "Same Love", Queen Latifah popped out and married a bunch of gay couples standing in the crowd. The couples had screen time of around 0.9 seconds before Madonna popped out. BECAUSE GAYS LOVE MADONNA, RIGHT GAYS?

Of course LBGT people in America face a daily struggle for equal rights, but by using gay marriage as a push-button, look-how-political-I'm-being, "moment" to make a splash in your Grammys performance after public opinion has already swung in favour of gay marriage does nothing to help the cause. If this performance was dropped at the 1986 Grammys it would have been incredible, but this is 2014 and Macklemore needs to stop milking it.

Daft Punk performed for the first time in a bajillion years. This was a big deal and to prove it, they’d even brought Stevie Wonder along to sing four lines, who then proceeded to fumble his way through them like a version of your granddad singing karaoke while half asleep on a chair at a wedding reception. He saved it later by singing better than all of Pharrell's unborn grandchildren combined though.

At the time of writing, Pharrell's hat has 13,688 followers on Twitter, which, coincidentally, is the same amount that Robin Thicke lost per second during his performance with Chicago.