Wow -- on my second week in rehab I was scaling the drywall with toothpicks under my fingernails. But maybe if you put me in a closed studio packed full of record label plants and some stellar backing musicians (with an intro by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) then perhaps I could have delivered one of those super-extra special TV historical moments that Amy Winehouse provided last night at the Grammys, with the below double medley.
Her face at the end, a mask of screaming "fuck you" extrospective hypocrisy had me screaming "punk-ass goddess!!!"
Amy took the opposite tack from her tabloid-mate Britney, actually delivering a good performance rather than a fake-bad one, and it worked quite nicely. Plus, when she dedicated one of her awards to "Blake, my incarcerated" in her thick London drawl she put all the boring corporate rap street-cred wannabes at the ceremony to shame. (I still wish it had been Sharon Jones accepting those awards, though.)
Other nice performances: Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock got all Steve Reich on us in the midst of Gershwin's American Rhapsody; I liked the little fun Feist performance of 1-2-3-4, watching Tina Turner best Beyonce and the Time take some of the cyborg out of Rihanna was neat-o, and I love the regionalism of the gospel performances -- it's something that's lost in our streaming music world a little, that the same kind of music from different places in the country can sound different. Gospel seemed the new underground last night, even with Ms. Aretha jogging and scatting at the head of it all. And lord knows the real underground won't ever make it on the Grammys.
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