Music’s winners (Lil Baby) and losers (John Lennon) for this godforsaken 2020, so far
WINNERS
Quick – who won at this year’s Grammy Awards? If 2020 has broken your brain like it’s broken ours, you might have trouble remembering that the Grammys even happened this year.
But music’s premier awards show really did go down in late January, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to banish artists from stages – and make everything that happened before that feel like ancient history.
Billie Eilish was the night’s big success story: only the second artist in history to sweep the four major categories and the youngest ever, at 18, to take the prizes for album and record of the year. (She’s 47 now.)
Recovering this lost knowledge the other day led us to wonder who else in music could be described as victors in this wretched year, when the only thing competing with COVID-19 for your attention is the scourge of systemic racism.
So with the first half of 2020 mercifully behind us, behold our rundown of the biggest winners – and losers – of the year so far.
Just a few months ago, the 25-year-old rapper from Atlanta was telling interviewers that he wasn’t especially interested in stardom. Now, his “My Turn” is 2020’s moststreamed album, with hundreds of millions of plays of tracks that layer his blurry yet melodic flow over throbbing trap beats. And whether or not he wants all those eyes on him, Lil Baby is taking advantage of his platform; in mid-June, he released “The Bigger Picture,” a startlingly frank account of why folks are marching in the streets: “I find it crazy the police will shoot you and know that you dead but still tell you to freeze.”
Right behind Lil Baby on this week’s Billboard 200 is Dylan, whose No. 2 showing with “Rough and Rowdy Ways” makes him the first artist to reach the chart’s top 40 at least once in every decade since the 1960s. But Dylan isn’t the only revered singer-songwriter out with his first set of original material in eight years; just as ecstatically reviewed was Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” which like Dylan’s album seems to have inadvertently captured the fevered emotional spirit of quarantine.
As half of Run the Jewels (alongside rapper and producer El-P), Killer Mike provided protesters with a welcome psychic boost on RTJ4, a furious hip-hop record that sublimates rage into joy. But in TV appearances and in an emotional news conference with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Mike has also been a steady source of wisdom about the racial injustice currently under examination.
A year after “Old Town Road,” the wildly popular video-sharing app has become music’s most reliable launching pad for new viral hits. The question for acts like Benee (“Supalonely”), Surfaces (“Sunday Best”) and StaySolidRocky (“Party Girl”) is whether they can create another hit on their own. Either way, TikTok’s valuation keeps growing.
The young Compton, California, rapper dominated Billboard’s singles chart for 11 straight weeks this winter with “The Box,” his squeaky hiphop hit that began its ascent on TikTok. Now, he’s back at No. 1 with his cameo on DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” which recently spawned a searing Black Lives Matter remix.
So her latest album, Lover, hasn’t devoured pop radio the way her older stuff did. By taking a vocal stand in the kind of political matters she once conspicuously avoided – Trump, Confederate monuments, Black Lives Matter – Swift is arguably setting herself up for a long career more like those of her idols than like anyone passing her on the Hot 100.
Deep-pocketed fans of the influential grunge band found reason to believe Nirvana still matters when Dave Grohl’s 13-year-old daughter, Violet, joined the group’s surviving members for a stirring rendition of “Heart-Shaped Box” at a high-priced benefit gig in Los Angeles in January. Everybody
else could believe it a few months later thanks to a live-streamed Nirvana tribute in which Post Malone ripped through 15 of the band’s songs with loving intensity.
After tasting disappointment when he failed to show as expected at November’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival – you’ll remember it as that time the all-powerful Drake was booed for appearing in Ocean’s place – the reclusive R&B star’s ultra-devoted followers were beyond ready for his long-awaited return at Coachella in April. Then the festival was postponed to October because of the pandemic before finally being called off altogether.
No classic totem of socially conscious pop has been as mishandled this year as “Imagine,” which didn’t exactly start from a place of unquestionable brilliance. Still, the late Beatle’s drippy ballad hardly deserved the abuse it experienced at the hands of Gal Gadot and her famous pals in a laughably out-of-touch (and brutally out-of-tune) rendition released in the early days of the pandemic.
Though his slinky love song “Intentions” has been hanging around the top 10 for months, Bieber’s Changes album didn’t quite deliver the full-on comeback he’d been hoping for; in early March, before the concert business shut down, he moved several scheduled stadium dates to smaller arenas reportedly as a result of low ticket sales. Then the dude somehow got roped into a revival of the so-called PizzaGate conspiracy theory when an Instagram video sparked wild speculation that he’d been a victim of child trafficking.
The rare misstep by an artist for whom controversy has always been a boon, Del Rey’s muddled Instagram musings about her position in the culture led to accusations of Karen-hood just months after the universal acclaim that greeted her woke-folk masterpiece “Norman F***ing Rockwell!”
(Los Angeles Times/TNS)