Music’s winners and losers for 2020, so far
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 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 age 18, to take the prizes for album and record of the year.
Recovering this lost knowledge the other day led us to wonder who else in music could be described as victors this year.
So with the first half of 2020 mercifully behind us, behold our rundown of the biggest winners — and losers — of the year so far.
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.
Like the Grammys, Super Bowl LIV — where this Puerto Rican rapper and singer made a surprise appearance during the halftime performance by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez — seems like it took place a century ago. Since then, though, Bad Bunny has released two full albums, including one he finished in lockdown, while his hit “Yo Perreo Sola” has become a kind of isolation anthem. Its indelible chorus translated to English? “I twerk alone.”
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.
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, 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.
In a year with no clubs and no festivals, you might’ve assumed dance music would go into hibernation. Instead, we’ve gotten vivid, clever dance-pop LPs from Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware and Lady Gaga — each a happysad soundtrack for the Studio 54 of your mind.
Has anyone taken a more circuitous path to success in 2020? Long a familiar presence in several distinct internet demimondes, this singer and rapper scored a No. 1 smash in May with “Say So,” an irresistibly breezy pop jam that showed off Doja Cat’s instinct for smoothing just the right amount of eccentricity from her music.
A let’s-call-itcomplicated victory, “Say So’s” trip to the top spot refocused attention on Doja Cat’s producer, Dr. Luke, for whom the song was his first No. 1 since being accused of rape in 2014 as part of a still-active legal battle between him and Kesha. And it was followed quickly by the surfacing online of footage showing Doja Cat participating in alt-right chat rooms — activity for which she quickly apologized.
After tasting disappointment when he failed to show as expected at November’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, 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 before finally being called off altogether.
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 socalled PizzaGate conspiracy theory when an Instagram video sparked wild speculation that he’d been a victim of child trafficking.