Serious Delirium

Thoughts and prayers for the 2025 GRAMMYs

I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. — Carl Jung

This music that loves death because it’s paid for in sacrifice, breeds more of it, assists the reaper in collecting bodies and souls, chokes on the smoke and ash of their forced decomposition, mourns it in the classic formation, hostile to real feeling, repeats, and with that you have a popular song, with a hook and a story that you can sing along to even if you can’t really sing on key: All my friends are dead, or, what was I made for. We’ve become a macabre people, and whether collaborating to exile one freak (Drake) in the service of the more powerful others from which his disgrace will deflect (Lucien Grange, Dre, everyone who has handed out NDAs with party invitations), or giving out pittance to the reigning diva who sings spaghetti westerns so pretty we don’t know if she’s confessing to actual crimes she’s witnessed or just occupying the song that persuasively, no inventory of truth or fiction, just vibes, until our celebratory modes are petty and laced with greed and frivolity. This doesn’t have to be bad, that we’re hypocrites in the service of fitting in with others’ death drives, it just happens to be bad in these cases where the dreams we sell one another depend on the validation of insane people with ulterior sometimes lethal motives and a need to be seen as good, heroic, redeemers. You’re supposed to kill your heroes, and as you do you discover where they were blocking the Gods, the real saviors. Instead we keep looking over our shoulders coaching false prophets in the art of regaining our approval through better or more sincere spectacle—a terrible pattern of molten reputations hanging on because we have more faith in our distractions than our ability to supersede them. Because, not knowing real embodied fun, we mistake watching simulations of it for experiencing it ourselves.

The Grammys should have ended the night Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy party continued at Los Angeles’s Beverly Hilton while Whitney Houston’s dead body was wheeled away at the same hotel. Clive, who had “discovered” her, and signed her to Arista when she was nineteen, now played host as the whole industry danced on her fresh corpse almost thirty years later. The sickly but refusing to die traditions of the entertainment caste need this kind of cruel juxtaposition to resuscitate them year after year, they subsist on tragedy and crisis. Her death made the show more relevant as the annual funeral for martyrs to that world that it is. This year, another pitch perfect elegiac mode, for Quincy Jones, for Drake’s dominance of hip-hop, for Ka, for late Capitalism as it shifts to technocracy, for snubbing Beyoncé— (she finally won Album of the Year and decried genre as a tool that keeps us small and in check)—consensus has it that the show was swell. As phantom swollen as the eyes on David Lynch’s depictions battered women, the horrors of Hollywood wellness. Kendrick Lamar’s 5 Grammys for “Not Like Us” were a subtle triumph for Los Angeles after the fires, and there were tributes to firefighters, and musicians whose houses have recently burned down. The offness of all of this now, is that we cannot afford the comfort of a thriving fake-deep popular culture that still upholds the dying neoliberal order, at least not without simultaneously birthing a ruthless underground that makes it safer to ignore these trifles of extreme temptation and invent truly subversive sounds and contexts, not new anthems but new blueprints for new nations.

With the haze of smoke and pollution still thick over the L.A. basin, these figures, even Ye, who was in surprise attendance with his nude wife descending a felt bloodline of carpet and cameras, are simply redundant shock doctrinaire attempts at regaining former levels of relevance. Maybe a Katrina telethon moment would have helped the evening seem less eerily constricted by lighthearted grief and quiet vengeance, but the political statements have become artists statements as empty as walking around naked on a leash for attention. Traditions that need to end but carry on a few beats too long breed cultural massacre and new avant-gardes, some of them equally dadaistic and out-of-touch, because the culture is no longer sacred even to itself. Throw it Away, Abbey Lincoln version. This scene is passé, the gowns are stabbing the hearts of women right on stage. The show was good because it was desperate to be good. Doechii’s win was beautiful and deserved, one of the night’s brightest moments, she the safest new star to adore; she would shine with or without this artifice, but even her presence highlights why this stiff format of dinner and a show and trophy is obsolete. The strength of her live performance was its ability to portend synchronized collective doom for its cultish audience, its mimicking of a cult of the future that pretended to be what it isn’t to gain favor and had to rely on automation and technology to uphold that false body-image—catfish. Today’s popular culture is elite catfishing, at its most refined. It would be fine if this was the final episode of the Grammys, a mildly manic but mostly depressive episode of coming down or glitching toward humility, toward the final Super Bowl of the final weeks, then days, of empire. It would be fine if we had nothing left to like, or be infatuated with, and had to learn to love again.