ONE TWO THREE GO! Credit where credit is due: tonight's Grammy Awards was, perhaps, the most start-to-finish entertaining awards telecast I've ever seen.
I'm serious.
Taking its cue from what worked last year, this show was heavy on performances, light on actual awards-giving. So while I'm sure I could whine about the awarding of Record of the Year (i.e., best single) to Coldplay's "Clocks" ahead of "Hey Ya" and "Crazy In Love", there was so much good stuff going on that it didn't matter.
Where to begin? The very beginning is a very good place to start, with a young-as-always Prince leading Ms. Knowles through a medley of hits. If that's what Prince is going to be like in five years when he starts playing Vegas, I'll send in my $125 right now. And it kept getting better: Alicia Keys' emotional rendition of Burt Bacharach's "A House Is Not A Home" in tribute to Luther Vandross; the Black Eyed Peas' energetic antiwar hit "Where's The Love"; a gloriously messy and exuberant funk segment with Big Boi, Earth Wind & Fire (featuring Verdine "Sexual Chocolate!" White on bass), Robert Randolph and P-Funk, the Mothership; and, finally, Andre 3000 bringing the house down with a wild, party-up, get-down, yeah-Native-Americans-are-going-to-be-pissed-but-it-was-fun performance of "Hey Ya", which was, like, wow. Hip hop can work live, and Jen immediately replayed it on the TiVo. It was that good.
(Note to self: never watch an awards show without TiVo. Start a half-hour late, skip the commercials, skip boring speeches and unnecessary performances, end on time.)
This was great television, a fitting tribute to a great year in pop music. So if you want to mock Evanesence for joining Lauryn Hill, Paula Cole, Hootie and the Blowfish, Arrested Development, Marc Cohn and Jody Watley as Best New Artist winners, or anything else about the awards, well, you do it in the comments. I'm still buzzed from a good show.
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