“It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this pathetic dope of an M.C., and suing him for plenty$... Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!”
— President Trump to GRAMMYs host Trevor Noah
In many ways predictable, in others not so much, the 2026 GRAMMYs unfurled with an array of fuck-ICE sentiments, unfortunate mustaches, underwear-as-overgarments, well-done live musical segments, and structurally critical nipple rings. If you started your GRAMMYs game earlier than CBS did—in this, the network’s final presentation of the awards show after 54 years together—on YouTube, you lucked out, as this was the only way that you could fully appreciate the Recording Academy’s reach beyond network-TV popularity, such as awards for opera (big ups for Houston Grand Opera’s Intelligence from Jake Heggie), Africana (a long-deserved shout out to Fela Kuti), and album-art packaging (Joni Mitchell accepted her own award for Best Historical Album, poking fun at the original band almost hired by the label for Court and Spark).
If you’d forgotten that alt-rock and heavy metal even existed by the Recording Academy’s standards, not only did The Cure (finally) win their first-ever GRAMMY for their stately, spidery Songs of a Lost World, but Canadian heavy-metal outfit Spiritbox made an appearance during the pre-show, demonstrating vocalist Courtney LaPlante’s muscular scream and doubly bulked-up biceps. Not for nothing—I know that rock is all but verboten unless in tribute to a worthy emissary such as Ozzy Osbourne (more big ups for Post Malone and Andrew Watt), or if someone within the realm of pop like Bruno Mars decides to power up his guitars with Rosé for the show’s fired-up opening. However, from the absolute might of Spiritbox’s propulsive thrust, a pair of GRAMMY wins for Turnstile, and the crowd’s reaction to 2026's Best New Artists segment wherein KATSEYE did a brutal industrial take on “Gnarly,” rock once again clearly has a place within the currency of pop culture. Maybe 2027's GRAMMYs should consider rock for a full-blown return to prime time.
Which reminds me: jazz. Harvey Mason Jr., Recording Academy CEO, your dad is a jazz drumming legend, the guy who made the engine run for Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. WTF? Normally, I’d be annoyed at someone giving their home team any advantage, but at a time when this genre-jumbling, improvisatory music is at its most edgy in decades—to paraphrase the immortal words of Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing—can your jazz brethren get some love on the wall?
As for the actual broadcast ceremony, it was amazing to see a literally and figuratively stripped-down Justin Bieber give “Yukon” the weird spacious justice it deserves, and to check out Kelly Osborne’s Dusty Springfield wig; to see proudly loud Lola Young win a Best Pop Solo Performance GRAMMY for “Messy,” and accept the award, messily; to see Cher fuck up Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s award for “Luther” and still have it be halfway right, all with the rapper beating JAY-Z for most-awarded hip-hop icon; to see Bad Bunny make GRAMMYs history as its first Spanish-language Album of the Year winner while wearing one oddly bulked-up tuxedo; and to see Tyler, the Creator finally fully morph into a conceptualist staging genius beyond his own past work and into Bowie/Byrne-level brilliance. Oh, and mustaches: Bieber, Harry Styles, Bilal, Benson Boone. And face tattoos, which caused Trevor Noah to make light of Jelly Roll and Teddy Swims, simultaneously, by wondering aloud if they could open each other’s iPhone facial recognition with their similar ink.
And, finally, after decade upon decade of enlisting vocalists and instrumentalists who truly seemed as if they’d rather be anywhere else but maudlinly singing their way through the eulogy segment of the GRAMMYs, the broadcast definitely got it right with Reba McEntire, the Post Malone/Guns ’n’ Roses/RHCP Ozzy gambit, and a celebration of both D’Angelo and Roberta Flack led by the only artist to have ever channeled and championed both of those giants in her lifetime—Lauryn Hill—who made it all sound sultry and strange with the help of Chaka Khan, Bilal, Jon Batiste, and Wyclef Jean. I wish they would’ve done something as epically celebratory for Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, but you can’t have everything. At least they doubled back and reran the slides of David Johansen, Howard “Flo” Volman, and Jack DeJohnette, whose images were obscured during the broadcast’s scroll of names.
Beyond these tributes, the most crucial part of the GRAMMY evening was watching its nominees’ competitive spirit tied to the ghosts of Minneapolis and the fury of icing out ICE. While Bad Bunny made his anti-ICE point in a subtle and loving fashion, and Billie Eilish went for an instantly iconic “No one is illegal in a land that was stolen” speech, many in the GRAMMYs crowd voiced their rage about ICE’s agenda with tiny metallic pins. Hollywood loves a uniform medallion, and Be Good/ICE Out pins were stuck on the elders of pop and rock (Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Dave Grohl) and the new kids on the block (the Biebers, Olivia Rodrigo, Samara Joy) alike in solidarity with what should be this country’s pro-immigrant stance and anti-violence pleas.
Was 2026’s three-and-a-half-hour-plus GRAMMYs broadcast—to say nothing of its three-plus-hour YouTube live show, complete with a house band that happily sounded like a drunken high school marching ensemble doing “Tusk” and “Footloose”—worth a nearly eight-hour deep dive into 21st century televised live music monitoring? Yes. And we’ll see you here again for the 2027 edition.
