Grammys 2018: winners, news, and biggest moments

At Sunday’s 61st annual Grammy Awards, Cardi B became the first female artist ever to win the Grammy for Rap Album of the Year, for Invasion of Privacy. Accepting her award, she burst into tears and then thanked her daughter — whom she became pregnant with while working on the album — for pushing her to finish shooting the accompanying videos before she started to show.

It was a perfect Cardi B moment. She was at the top of her field, breaking down barriers and making history — and she was taking the opportunity to talk about the intensely hard work it took for her to get there.

“Coming up: a powerful Grammys moment from Kesha that speaks to our times!” the announcer chirped. A couple hours deep into the ceremony, this performance had been promoted all night as The One to Watch — but this tease was the closest the Grammys came to explaining why.

Even if the performance of Kesha’s “Praying” was indeed worth the wait, this moment wasn’t just remarkable for having a wide swath of women singers — from Cyndi Lauper to Camila Cabello — take the stage before burning it down with righteous fury as Kesha’s rasping howl ripped through the arena.

Oh, Grammys: You are so needlessly long; you are so needlessly filled with Sting. But the thing that always keeps us sticking through the whole show every year, grudgingly waiting to be electrified on our couches, are the live performances. Every year, the punishingly long telecast contains at least a few numbers that make the whole night worth sitting through.

But if you’re not ready for that kind of commitment, you could always wait until the next morning and hope that someone else rounds up the Grammys performances worth talking about. That’s where Vox comes in: We watched all four hours of the 2018 Grammys so you don’t have to (seriously, there was quite a lot of Sting and no one knows why; no offense to Mr. Sting), and we’ve pulled out the ones that are worth your time.

For an event that gathered the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Kesha, Bruno Mars, Elton John, Pink, Cardi B, Patti LuPone, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and (a bizarrely ubiquitous) Sting, the 2018 Grammys sure were boring.

To be fair, all of the above — plus wide-eyed host James Corden — tried their best to give the awards ceremony the level of star power and powerhouse performances that the Grammys are typically known for. (Kesha, in particular, managed to pull off one of the night’s only truly memorable moments with a barn-burning rendition of “Praying,” a song devoted to leaving an abuser in the past and setting out for a brighter future.)

The 2018 Grammys, the 60th installment of the music industry’s flagship awards show, were handed out on Sunday night. And the night belonged to Bruno Mars.

Heading into the awards, Mars and Jay-Z led the nominations. But Mars ultimately swept the three biggest honors of the night, taking home Album of the Year and Record of the Year for 24k Magic and winning Song of the Year for “That’s What I Like.”

On a night that featured the biggest stars in music, it was Hillary Clinton who got one of the loudest reactions of the night. Clinton appeared at the end of a pre-taped skit in which various musicians read excerpts from Michael Wolff’s best-seller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, purportedly auditioning for the audiobook most likely to take home Best Spoken Word Album at next year’s Grammys.

“One reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s,” Clinton reads from the book, smirking, “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”

With the final performance on the Grammys stage Sunday night, Logic had a few things to say about diversity and immigration.

As his performance of “1-800-273-8255,” his Grammy-nominated song on suicide prevention, featuring singers Alessia Cara and Khalid, came to a close, the rapper spoke about a variety of topics including suicide prevention, #MeToo, and Hollywood’s Time’s Up initiative.

Kesha didn’t come to the Grammys to play.

Two hours into the 2018 Grammys, the singer took the stage flanked by an all-star lineup of female singers — including Cyndi Lauper, Camila Cabello, and Julia Michaels — to sing her scorched-earth ballad “Praying.” And Kesha, whose 2017 album Rainbow was one of the most searing and noteworthy of the year, let her voice fly through Madison Square Garden with visceral, righteous fury.

The latest development in the push to express strength among women and solidarity in the wake of the #MeToo movement comes in the form of a classic symbol: a white rose.

White has long been associated with the fight for women’s equality, going back to the days of the suffragettes. Now attendees of the 2018 Grammy Awards are mobilizing to wear white roses to the ceremony as a way of recognizing the ongoing cultural reckoning with sexual harassment and abuse occurring across several industries, including entertainment.

The 60th Grammy Awards are nigh, and lo, they are not messing around. The 2018 awards ceremony — which will be held January 28 at 7:30 pm EST and air live on CBS — is pulling out all the stops. (Though, okay, it’s also going straight back to the James Corden well, enlisting the Late Late Show host to emcee the evening for the second year in a row.)

The notoriously long and spectacle-driven awards show will feature performances from nominees like SZA, Kesha, Childish Gambino, Cardi B, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and, of course, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, the masterminds behind “Despacito,” 2017’s biggest hit and most inescapable earworm. (Justin Bieber, nominated for pitching in on the “Despacito” remix, will reportedly skip the ceremony.)

One of the only things that’s consistent about the Grammys is that Grammy voters will always find a way — no matter the award — to upset people.

It’s almost like the awards were specifically designed in a laboratory to participate in the ridiculous Grammys voting process; these are folks who regularly select winners such as Herbie Hancock and Steely Dan while ignoring forces of nature like Amy Winehouse or Beyoncé.