To the Music Industry in Crisis

On the 2026 Grammys; on letting the dead bury the dead

Watching the 2026 Grammys was not unlike watching one of the many pseudo-intellectual race-horror films of the post Get Out era, except the victims of this script were already dead and the gore came in the form of “tribute.” As the Bible instructs, let the dead bury the dead, and for a few televised hours, they obliged, beside themselves with actualized scripture in an event so half-hearted and stiff, sincerity would have been upheaval. It didn’t help that the night before, two prominent rappers were named in the Epstein files. It doesn’t help that these files drop like the apocryphal headlines of 1990s tabloids and flail in the abyss of dialectical suspicions until they are wiped from the algorithm by intervening PR stunts or deeper, more coherent cataclysms. The evil of the Epstein saga is not as readily translatable into social currency by sustained unequivocal outrage, so it’s easier to dismiss, both more and less banal than the death squads, etc competing for mass attention. And it’s one thing to believe the usual suspects are guilty, but whenever an alleged cultural hero is implicated, we’re asked to consider the possibility that the testimony and documents are rigged or embellished. I find myself considering the opposite and wondering what remains redacted. Is it anti-black to name the names of black men who may or may not be part of the cabal of elite sex offenders and pedophiles enmeshed in a decades’ or centuries’ long sexual blackmail ring that involves child and human trafficking? Should we only call out people whose music we don’t enjoy or who it’s safe to despise without implicating ourselves? Should we spare those who have helped cultivate our own tastes? What does their potentially depraved past and sanctimonious present say about you as a satisfied consumer of their art?

The show must go on. Spectators yearn for any excuse to be giddy at the altar of industry, even the deceivers will be deceived. The best new artist nominees are a gaudy cast of one-hit-wonders buoyed by TikTok virality, who would have been booed ferociously at the Apollo’s Amateur Night and escorted off stage by the Sandman, but there’s no Sandman assigned to the Grammys, just this flat affected lightskinned anchor named Trevor, full of limp charm, who makes me a little ashamed of my own high yellow for how he trades his unassailability for ratings. The winner of best new artist, similarly credentialed, is the one who had to win, singer of whimpering but respectable pop anthems about maudlin love or approximations of it, polyester music for the synthetic spirit of our time wherein too much substance is actually offensive, too confrontational in the face a peacefully hibernating population that rouses every four to six years to pantomime concern for itself and beg for more sedative music or the kind of crisis that feels like home. Sweet violence, violet-eyed lyrics to stream at voter registration drives.

I’d tuned in hoping the dead would be raised incorruptible, another promise from the gospel, in the form of Lauryn Hill’s tribute to D’Angelo and Roberta Flack. The promise was dangled and withheld for most of the broadcast, to keep cynics and defectors like me stuck in its purgatory. When it finally arrived, it was with a tender entry, during which Lauryn delivered a solo version of “Nothing Even Matters,” the duet with D’Angelo from her debut album, which descended into a chaotic variety show in which Hill called out the name of every soul-adjacent attendee who took to the stage to give us thirty or so seconds of pseudo D’Angelo cosplay. Singer Bilal’s interpretation of “How Does it Feel” came closest to channeling the spirit of Michael Archer and it did so by allowing the agony that everyone else on stage repressed and mangled with excessive showmanship, to come forth and bleed out into the notes. “How Does it Feel,” is a spiritual, proof of song’s ability to be a shock absorber for the pain body without explicitly yielding to pleasure; it edges, and that edging becomes self-contained hedonism. It’s not maudlin or respectable, it’s grimy and difficult and worth the strain and stamina it demands of both singer and listener. Outside of it, the honorific interlude is monotone and tacky with performers spilling out and crowding in every direction in effort to create a medley of D’Angelo’s catalog that is just too rushed and frenetic to land with any real reverence for his legacy of attentiveness to live arrangements. Thirty years are crammed into a star-studded but mostly vapid vaudeville, a glitching juke box, before segueing into Hill’s version of “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Flack’s version of the ballad is so haunting, it supersedes what we’re hearing and becomes the theme for the horror that the night has been. Since when is a black woman allowed her unabashed melancholy, allowed to show you and bring you along as it sneaks up on her only to be displaced by an equally stealthy euphoria. What I want most is to hear D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, or Roberta Flack again for the first time, and to be reborn of their sound or baptized in it. What I get instead is the unfulfilled desire that demands I invent a dimensionally larger world in which none of them ever died or grew depleted under the spotlight and the failed tribute is indication of faked or unfinished deaths.

In light of the sinister level of mediocrity possessing mainstream music, as documented by the show, I can’t rule out the possibility that we’re part of an inversion spell wherein the so-called dead are more animated than the disembodied corpses we mistake for the living and the songs are failing because our rituals and ceremonies have turned into commercials so unconvincing you forget they’re trying to sell you the myth of their enduring beauty. It was the kind of horror flick in which the survivors are the unlucky ones, the ruins and reapers trapped in their contracts and decomposing in front of us like museum artifacts while the disappeared are redeemed.

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1. Outliers:

Cher’s blunt radiance

Joni Mitchell has a radiance and cheer about her that belies rumors and spans time

Bad Bunny’s tears and vitriol seemed sincere and he has real charisma, a near miracle

Qtip too