The debate of whether or not the Grammys properly reflect popular music and culture feels like it’s been going on for our entire lives, but in truth it’s actually a much more recent conversation — because for a long, long time, they were so far off the mark that it wasn’t even worth debating. Take 1995, a period when alternative rock, crossover R&B and coastal hip-hop were defining the cutting edge, and the Grammys awarded Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged album with album of the year. Or a decade later, when Green Day, Usher and Kanye West were all nominated for game-changing blockbuster LPs, but top prize went to Ray Charles’ posthumous Genius Loves Company. For many decades, wins like these were arguably more rule than exception, and the Grammys reflected that with their performances, which drifted towards safer, adult-contemporary territory and rarely pushed the envelope or showcased the next generation.
If you wanted any of that during the late 20th or early 21st centuries, you’d have to go the MTV Video Music Awards. The VMAs were where the truly culture-shifting moments happened, where the pop, rock and hip-hop stars built their iconic legacies with performances, acceptance speeches and red carpet moments, where the music defining the era’s youth culture was ably represented by the artists on stage and in the audience. (At the VMAs, TLC were the big winners in 1995, while Green Day and Kanye reigned victorious in some of the biggest ’05 categories.) Occasionally, the show glanced towards history, but it was generally much more interested in the present and future, and in providing an alternative for plugged-in viewers who felt alienated by the perennially out-of-touch Grammys.
Which is what makes it so jarring to get to a place where the VMAs is now devoting a truly curious amount of stage time to lifetime-achievement-type performances from artists whose peaks are decades in the rearview, and often awarding its marquee moonpeople to big names with less-timely titles. Meanwhile, this Sunday’s (Feb. 1) Grammys evinced a show increasingly uninterested in either rewarding or handing the stage over to any artist whose commercial peak came during a year that started with a “1” — with its biggest winners lining up more and more frequently with the top of Billboard‘s annual Greatest Pop Star rankings, and creating the kind of vital moments with its performances and acceptance speeches that may still reverberate decades later.
It’s easy now to view last year’s well-received best new artist medley as something of an inflection point for the Grammys in this era. With the usual Spotify best new artist pre-Grammy showcase called off as a result of the California wildfires, the Grammys made the call to feature all eight nominees from the unusually strong 2025 BNA class as performers on its main broadcast, with five of them performing as part of a continuous medley. It was an unusually large amount of time for the Grammys to devote to such relatively unproven names, but the results were a near-best-case-scenario of those artists stepping up and seizing the moment — with Benson Boone backflipping his way into national recognizability, and Doechii leaping to star status almost immediately following her jaw-dropping breakthrough performance. Given the positive response, it made sense for the Grammys to continue moving away from the safer, sturdier veteran-artist performances that it had used to flesh out its lineups for most of the prior decades, particularly during the Ken Ehrlich era, and focus more on today’s and tomorrow’s hitmakers.
Which isn’t to say that there weren’t proven vets playing roles of prominence at the 2026 Grammys — just none who fit the Boomer or even Gen X molds of what we’ve long considered a legacy act to be. The legacy acts at this year’s Grammys weren’t traditional pop vocalists or classic rock bands, they were the Clipse, a long-venerated rap duo finally seizing a Grammy moment denied them during their ’00s heyday, or they were Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, long-proven top 40 A-listers who’ve remained so relevant that they even teamed up for the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit of last year. The only 20th century acts on the bill were reserved for tributes to late legends Ozzy Osbourne, D’Angelo and Roberta Flack — and even those mixed contemporary hitmakers like Post Malone and Leon Thomas in with the spare Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fugees. For a show in its final year on CBS, there were surprisingly few obvious concessions made to the Matlock or NCIS demographics.
Of course, as with most things in 2026, it helped to have Bad Bunny in the building. While, for the first time since 2017, Taylor Swift was not present either at the event or in the nominations this year — the Showgirl will certainly be heard from in 2027 — her absence was made less conspicuous by the all-consuming presence of El Conejo Malo, who proved such a magnetic force that host Trevor Noah kept saddling up to him throughout the evening to beg him to perform. Benito declined to do so — gotta wait for the Super Bowl next Sunday for that, though Noah did goad him into joining in on a few bars of “DtMF,” with the help of a pop-up band parading through the crowd. But he did take album of the year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a win that would’ve been near-unthinkable for such an uncompromising Spanish-language album just five years ago, but seems much less so after a half-decade of Bad Bunny’s relentless normalization of such achievements, and of the Grammys aggressively self-modernizing.
He wasn’t the only such winner on the night. For a decade, Kendrick Lamar was perhaps the most unanimously acclaimed and beloved in artist in hip-hop, but still couldn’t break out of the rap categories at the Grammys; now he’s won record of the year two years in a row, this time alongside SZA for “Luther.” (A confused Cher’s proclamation of “Luther Vandross” as the award’s winner will likely go down as one of this year’s eternal moments.) Best pop solo performance usually goes to the biggest artist and/or biggest song — each previous winner this decade had topped either the Hot 100 or the Global 200 — but on Sunday, four of the biggest names in top 40 were left clapping for newcomer Lola Young, whose alt-leaning, frayed-at-the-edges “Messy” was the broadcast’s biggest surprise winner. And even in the rock categories, given out before the telecast and usually awarded to the longest-tenured radio bands, the cult-favorite post-hardcore act Turnstile — who never had a major hit on the airwaves before 2025, but climbed to the second line on this year’s Coachella poster — took home two trophies.
And once again, the performers reflected the shift as well. For the second time in two Grammy tries, Tyler, The Creator gave the night’s most electric performance, with a blending of Chromakopia‘s “Thought I Was Dead” and Don’t Tap the Glass‘ “Sugar on My Tongue” that ended up like an ’80s Michael Jackson video directed by David Lynch. Sabrina Carpenter again proved herself the most reliable artist among current pop stars in cleverly recontextualizing her already-trademark hits with one-off concept performances — this time setting “Manchild” in an airport baggage claim, hardly an obvious thematic match for the song (except for the “baggage” double meaning), but one she sold through one gloriously choreographed mini-setpiece after another. And Gaga and Bruno both stayed out of just-play-the-hits territory by grunging up the arrangements of their respective performances of “Abracadabra” and “APT.” (with ROSÉ), giving those ubiquitous pop singles a newfound edge and vitality.
And yes: The best new artist medley was back, and with an even more pronounced spotlight this time out. While 2025’s medley still carried the air of spontaneity to it, 2026 was clearly the product of grand design, with Addison Rae and KATSEYE kicking things off outside the building, and then the remaining five artists weaving their way through various main-room stages with a choreography nearly as complex and considered as any of the individual performances. (The Marias, like Khruangbin last year, were apparently deemed too vibey for the proper medley and instead were used more as bumper music coming out of the commercial break.) Neither the collective medley nor any of the individual performers quite packed the kinetic energy of last year’s unexpected triumph — but the considerable talent on display, and performances ranging from Rae’s and KATSEYE’s music video-like staging to Olivia Dean and Sombr’s old-school showmanship, showed this class as plenty promising in its own right. It’s certainly worth keeping the best new artist medley around, and making a full tradition out of it.
Even more important to the vitality of this year’s ceremonies than either than the performers or the winners were the speeches. A year after the 2025 Grammys — held in the wake of both the wildfires and President Trump’s second election to office — caught many of our pop A-listers in the mood for statement-making ICE’s violent occupation of several major American cities and the president’s wildly unchecked immigration crackdown proved similarly inspirational in 2026. Bad Bunny and song of the year winner Billie Eilish both delivered unequivocally anti-ICE messages in their speeches — as did Kehlani in her pre-telecast best R&B song acceptance — while best new artist Dean talked about being the granddaughter of an immigrant and best country duo/group performance winner Shaboozey (“Amen” with Jelly Roll) also preached pre-broadcast about immigrants building the country. Coming just weeks after a Golden Globes when few seemed interested in speaking up for causes beyond themselves and their work, the words from pop’s elite on Sunday night were loud and resounding.
The shift towards the new and now for the Grammys was hardly without fault — country, as central a genre as any to contemporary popular music, was almost totally missing from the performances, as was any predominantly non-English music. And no doubt there were plenty of viewers who prefer a little more reliable stability to their Music’s Biggest Night, and were wincing their way through some of the more bombastic, heavily choreographed and perhaps partially lip-synched performances, wondering what the hell the Grammys had been reduced to. But for the first time in decades, the question of the Grammys reflecting popular music and culture need not have been asked, and this time for the opposite reason as 20-30 years ago: Yes, they obviously did, and rather impressively so. And it’s hard to imagine the Grammys going back in the other direction — or the VMAs reclaiming that turf — anytime soon.
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