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<\/strong><\/p>\nKendrick Lamar Heads 58th Annual Grammy Awards<\/strong><\/p>\n Owing to Presidents Day and the long weekend, the 58th Annual Grammy Awards<\/a> were held on Monday night from the Staples Center in Los Angeles in a change from the ceremony’s usual Sunday slot. Otherwise the Grammys remains firmly stuck in a mire of inert presentation, inane collaborative performances, and excessive and increasingly irrelevant categorisation, with this year’s iteration inevitably further spoiled by Lady Gaga’s typically overbearing tribute to David Bowie.<\/p>\n Kendrick Lamar went into the ceremony with eleven nominations, the second most in the history of the awards\u00a0after the twelve Michael Jackson received back in 1984 during the era of Thriller<\/em>. He came away with five wins, the most on the night, To Pimp a Butterfly<\/em>\u00a0losing out to Taylor Swift’s 1989<\/em> for Album of the Year, but Kendrick providing the only memorable performance of the show by way of a three-song medley, which he began shackled in chains and confined in a prison before coming to depict some of the shades and contours of Africa. Kendrick played\u00a0‘The Blacker the Berry’ and ‘Alright’ before debuting a new track, later stating across a Grammy<\/a> interview<\/a>\u00a0conducted with Andreas Hale:<\/p>\n ‘I got a chamber of material from the album that I was in love where sample clearances or something as simple as a deadline kept it off the album. But I think probably close to ten songs that I\u2019m in love with that I\u2019ll still play and still perform that didn\u2019t make the cut.’<\/em><\/p>\n Amid energetic\u00a0performances from The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, and Bonnie Raitt and a peculiar live advert-cum-music video by Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift used her Album of the Year victory speech to take what might be a well warranted\u00a0swipe at Kanye West<\/a>\u00a0over the lyrics to his The Life of Pablo\u00a0<\/em>track ‘Famous’,\u00a0provided this latest\u00a0stirring of sentiment isn’t simply a\u00a0hoax or publicity stunt<\/a>. Swift won three Grammys in total, in the process becoming the first female artist to win Album of the Year twice; Alabama Shakes also won three awards, including Best Alternative Music Album for Sound & Color<\/em>; Ed Sheeran emerged with two awards, seizing\u00a0Song of the Year for ‘Thinking Out Loud’; ‘Uptown Funk’ snatched\u00a0Record of the Year on behalf of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars; and Meghan Trainor was vaunted as\u00a0Best New Artist.<\/p>\n Still as the Grammys persists with an insipid LL Cool J at the helm, straddling uncomfortably the line of art with legs splayed between musty traditionalism and crisp commercialism, fewer people appear to be watching on<\/a>: 24.95 million viewed the ceremony on CBS this year, a drop of 9.4% from 2015 and the lowest figure since 2009.<\/p>\n