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Ladies’ Night at the Grammys Oliver Wiseman

Published

12 months ago

February 3, 2024

Photo illustration by The Free Press, images via Getty

It’s ladies’ night at the Grammys this year, with female solo acts like Billie Eilish, SZA, and Olivia Rodrigo duking it out in the heavyweight categories. And, of course, Taylor Swift. Will the Swift juggernaut keep on rolling? Surely!

Then there’s Barbie. The feminist doll–industrial complex is hoping it can squeeze a little more juice out of the movie that captured the zeitgeist last summer and refuses to let go. Songs from the soundtrack have eleven nominations in total, including two nominations in the Song of the Year category, “Dance the Night” by Dua Lipa and “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish.

What else is happening at the Grammys tomorrow? An eighty-year-old Joni Mitchell will perform at the show for the first time. (More on her in a second.)

Also performing, for the first time in years: Tracy Chapman. You may remember last year’s very silly kerfuffle over her hit “Fast Car,” when the (straight, white—Southern!—male) star Luke Combs topped the country chart with a cover version of the song. This made Chapman the first black woman to have a solo songwriting credit on a number one country hit. Good news! Progress! No, no. According to a Washington Post piece, the response to the song was “complicated” and “clouded by the fact that, as a Black queer woman, Chapman, 59, would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music.”

Evan Gardner explained why attempts to pit Combs and Chapman against each other were doomed from the start in a great piece on country music for us last year:

Even as his accent tells you that his is a different story than Chapman’s, the words remind you that it’s the same. The car he and Chapman sing of is equal parts sweet chariot and Ford F-150. They are both racing to the same place, and that place is freedom and self-realization, both beautiful and uncontainable.

That shared journey will be clear tomorrow night when, according to Variety, Combs and Chapman will sing “Fast Car” onstage together. We’re looking forward to that—and more.

Today, Free Pressers look ahead to music’s biggest night of the year. We have Evan on the best new artists, Julia Steinberg on Lana Del Rey, and Peter Savodnik with some recommendations for those who prefer their music centuries old.

But first, here’s Eli Lake on why Joni Mitchell’s too good for the Grammys. . .

Authenticity is in

Evan Gardner on the realness of the nominees for Best New Artist.

Merriam-Webster picked authentic as their word of the year for 2023. And our hunger for authentic musical artists has never been greater. Just look at the surprise success of complete outsider Oliver Anthony, whose country song “Rich Men North of Richmond” shot to the top of the charts out from of nowhere. Or look at the nominees for Best New Artist at the Grammys tomorrow night.

Where this category once rewarded whichever up-and-coming star had nailed the formula for a pop hit with the broadest possible appeal, this year, whoever wins, the title will go to someone with their own authentic music. The new artist nominees make music that is a collage of their own unique lives and sounds. Meet the front-runners:

Jelly Roll

For Jelly Roll (born Jason DeFord), a 39-year-old former drug dealer from Antioch, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville), who was in and out of detention centers for ten years and did his first stint at 14, music is primarily an emotional exercise: he channels a life of pain, drugs, and crime into his work. Hip-hop was the obvious way for Jelly Roll to tell his story. And that’s the kind of music he made until 2020, when he released “Save Me,” a stripped-down demo where he sings rather than raps. More recently, he tells his story with a different sound: country music.

Jelly Roll isn’t just making money off his past; he’s trying to make change happen, too. Earlier this month, he testified before Congress about the fentanyl crisis, saying “I brought my community down. I hurt people. . . . I am here now standing as a man that wants to be a part of the solution.” Tomorrow he’ll complete his journey from prison cell to red carpet with his first-ever nomination—for a sound that is all his own.

Noah Kahan

Twenty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s breakout single recounts “Stick Season” in his home state of Vermont. The song’s title is a reference to the time of year from October to early December that is post-foliage but pre-snowfall, and he tells his story over a warm, earthy track with hints of woodland banjo and a rustic rasp. It’s a deeply paranoid song about being stuck that doubles as a reluctant ode to his roots.

Ice Spice

Ice Spice (born Isis Gaston) is a 24-year-old former college volleyball player from Fordham, in the Bronx. She takes the sound of the streets (drill) and combines it with the pop songs of her adolescence. The result is an innovative genre critics have come to call “sexy drill.” Her songs burst with Bronx bombast that makes you move; they’re light, fun, and sticky—a piece of bubblegum you can’t help but munch. Proof that all you need for a good time is a bass and a boombox.

Fred Again

Fred Again (also known as Fred Gibson) is a 30-year-old London native whose dance music is an act of digital scrapbooking: his first three albums form a trilogy called Actual Life, an appropriately named collection of sounds drawn straight from his surroundings that sample everything from Instagram livestreams to videos in his camera roll to a conversation with a stadium worker following a show.

Also in the running are Gracie Abrams, Coco Jones, Victoria Monét, and The War and Treaty. You might not have heard of any of these names, and that’s precisely the point: this year’s show is an excellent opportunity to shine a light on musical innovation, whether it’s tucked away on a city block or in a country cabin.

Justice for Lana!

It’s an outrage Lana Del Rey hasn’t won a Grammy. Let’s fix that tomorrow night, writes Julia Steinberg.

On May 21, 2020, Lana Del Rey posted a message on Instagram titled “Question for the Culture.” In it, she asked:

Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc—can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money—or whatever I want—without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing abuse??????

May 21, 2020, was my eighteenth birthday. It was also the day I read Lana’s treatise. I remember watching as the woman who wrote the soundtrack to my teenage life was crucified for speaking out against pop culture orthodoxy. Critics accused her of putting women of color down and turning against feminism, which Lana says has no room “for women who look and act like me—the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes.” I was outraged that the critics were reaffirming her point entirely: that a woman must conform to cookie-cutter feminism in order to be accepted.

There’s also a personal reason I was upset. A year earlier, during the start of my senior year of high school that was cut short due to Covid, Lana dropped her masterpiece: Norman Fucking Rockwell.

I would tell you to listen to NFR for yourself. And if you haven’t, you should. But nothing beats being a teenager in L.A., driving around Topanga with your boyfriend, yearning for the adult complexity Lana told me about. I had never been in love, let alone had my first kiss. I never knew what it meant to desire true freedom or to truly hate someone. But Lana told me what all of it would feel like. A line from “Cinnamon Girl”—Like if you hold me without hurting me / You’ll be the first who ever did—rings in my ears every time I get close to feeling romantic affection.

For years, Lana has given voice to a generation of young women caught between feminism and femininity. The greatest female artists of my generation agree. Many of my closest female friendships have come from bonding over Lana. And yet, Lana Del Rey has never won a Grammy.

Lana should have won Album of the Year for Norman Fucking Rockwell in 2020. After the backlash to “Question for the Culture,” Lana channeled her rage into two more albums, Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters, both released in 2021. They’re good, but not masterpieces.

And then, in 2023, came Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Lana’s ninth studio album. This Sunday, it’s up for Album of the Year. She’s also nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance, Best Alternative Music Album, Song of the Year (for “A&W,” an abbreviation of American Whore), and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance (for “Candy Necklace” with Jon Batiste).

“A&W” opens with the line I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine, a perfect example of the cryptic originality we lap up from Lana, whose private life is now as strange and fantastic as a teenage girl’s. She says her last relationship—allegedly, an engagement—ended because her house was too small. She’s addicted to vaping (when I saw her live in 2019, she paused her set to grab her vape), and she is friends with legendary folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez. She erected only one billboard promoting her latest album, in Tulsa, the hometown of her ex-boyfriend, celebrity cop Sean Larkin. “It’s personal,” she explained in a comment on Instagram.

Call Lana crazy. Many have. But I can confidently say that Lana, 38, is the voice of women her age and younger: generations who feel stuck, chastised for their sadness but even more for their rebellion. A Grammy would give legitimacy to her prophecy.

And finally, if Joni Mitchell or Jelly Roll or Lana or Fred Again aren’t your cup of tea, here’s Peter Savodnik with some selections for weekend listening that have really stood the test of time.

In general, I try to avoid listening to music composed by anyone still alive—just like I prefer books written by people long dead.

When I’m in a superlative mood, I listen to the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz at Oberlin.

Or, even better, Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concertos. (Avi Avital playing the concerto in C major is tops.)

But usually I’m not in a superlative mood, so I turn to Bach—often the organ sonatas. (Víkingur Ólafsson’s recording of the fourth sonata, on piano, is especially evocative.)

Or Mozart. My father spent countless nights practicing the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor on our Steinway grand. When I hear it, I always feel at home—wherever I’m supposed to be.

But yes, I’m aware, there’s some awards ceremony happening this weekend, and I suppose, if pressed, I’d vote for the football lady’s “Anti-Hero” for, you know, whatever. The music is fine, but really, it’s the Dostoyevskyan lyrics.

She’s laughing up at us from hell? Lovely!

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Exactly! (If only Ivan Karamazov were a pop star!)

Anyway, note to would-be pop stars: find your favorite Russian novelist, and prepare for greatness.

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press.

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WATCH: H.R. McMaster on Trump—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Michael Moynihan

Published

51 minutes ago

January 17, 2025

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Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.

But Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Trump, is an exception.

In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Last week, McMaster, 62, sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for a live Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press.

They also get into Trump’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0. —BW

Dynamics within the first Trump White House:

Michael Moynihan: It’s very clear in your book that you see your job as somebody who has to implement the president’s agenda. But it’s also clear that you see people around you who have their own agenda that they’re trying to foist upon the president.

H.R. McMaster: Absolutely. The first group are people who don’t want to give the president options. They want to manipulate decisions based on their own agenda, not the president’s agenda. Then there were the people in Donald Trump’s administration who defined the president as an emergency or a danger to the country or the world, who had to be contained. And so the problem with those groups of people is that nobody elected them.

MM: There are a couple of people in the book that say, We’re afraid that Donald Trump is dangerous, right?

HRM: Absolutely. It just made everything harder. But at least for my 30 months, we transcended it. We got things done anyway. But every element of that friction just wore us down a little bit—and the other tactics they employed undercut us.

Nobody was as surprised as Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election. So there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation in terms of who’s going to come into many of these positions. He didn’t have any kind of trust built up with a lot of the people. Now it’s going to be somewhat different. He’s had a lot more time to prepare deliberately for this, and he’s selected his people. It was easy to kneecap me, because I didn’t have a history with him. Now it’s going to be harder to do that with Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio. Although they will come under attack because there are still going to be different camps in the new administration based on different motivations.

The president is the most powerful person in the world, so people are going to try to ingratiate themselves to him and try to use him to advance their agenda. People know how to push his buttons. I’ve described my first meeting in the Oval Office as an environment of competitive sycophancy. It was unbelievable. Things were said like, “Your instincts are always so good, Mr. President” and “You’re so wise.” I was like, “My gosh, are these people serious?”

MM: Does he fall for that?

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

6 hours ago

January 17, 2025

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Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

9 hours ago

January 17, 2025

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In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/