For maybe 45 minutes, it seemed like this year’s Grammys might be watchable, if not exactly exciting. The show frontloaded its most interesting performances, giving its stage to young and relevant musicians with right-now hits who might not necessarily fit old, established Grammy narratives. It’s not like Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish are insurgent forces; they’re all acts that the Grammys, at least in theory, seems built to honor. But the producers and the voters of this year’s Grammy Awards seemed bent on reminding us that the Grammys will simply always be the Grammys — that this is, in fact, your father’s Recording Academy.

It didn’t have to be this way. Two years ago, ancestral Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich finished up his 42-year run as the show’s producer. Last year, with pandemic restrictions in place, we got a fairly fun and unpredictable show, and the performances had some urgency and energy to them. This year, though? This year we got a full heaping scoop of ye olde Grammy bullshit.

It wasn’t just the awards, though Jon Batiste winning Album Of The Year is the most egregious Grammy what-the-fuck moment since Herbie Hancock won it for that Joni Mitchell covers album. The real problem is that this same line of thinking led to the booking of the performances. It’s a given that John Legend will always show up to perform at the Grammys, but this year, it became evident that we’ve got a full complement of new John Legends — artists who will appear on this show year in and year out, radiating middlebrow prestige and existing in some siloed-off tributary of the record industry, existing merely to show up at the Grammys every year. That’s Jon Batiste, and it’s also H.E.R., Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile. It’s Lady Gaga singing jazz standards. It’s this whole coterie that seems to be under no pressure to make music that’s relevant in any way. The Grammys belongs to them. It is their home.

It’s not that any of those artists are bad. They’re all talented, and they all have things to offer. But a three-and-a-half-hour broadcast dedicated mostly to artists like that is a grim proposition. Last night, that’s what we got. There were signs of life here and there, but this was our latest example of the Grammys being its old mummified self, and there is no reason to believe that this status quo will ever change. In keeping with a longstanding Stereogum tradition, let’s look at all of those performances, from the dirt worst to the pretty-good best. (Note: I’m not counting the throw-to-commercial performances on the rooftop. Those were never the focal point of anything.)

17. John Legend With Siuzanna Iglidan, Mika Newton, & Lyuba Yakimchuk

Grammy producers love an easy narrative, and the invasion of Ukraine is an easier narrative than most. But a manipulative heartstring-yanker of a performance will always ring hollow, no matter its context. John Legend doesn’t have anything to do with Ukraine; he’s just an all-purpose avatar of righteousness for a show like this one. Throwing him out there to sing gospel with Ukrainian musicians was some real ultimate Grammy bullshit. The song was nice enough, but the blast of sentimentality was off-putting on a deep, cellular level.

16. Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., & Rachel Zegler

As a society, we have evidently lost all ability to stage an effective in-memoriam awards-show montage. Stephen Sondheim is a giant in the history of musical theatre, but that doesn’t mean we need these Broadway types sending off Young Dolph and Dusty Hill with “Send In The Clowns.” Maybe that’s better than having a gospel choir dancing to “Spirit In The Sky,” like what happened at the Oscars, but it’s not a lot better.

15. Lady Gaga

Whenever Gaga sings try-hard theater-kid big-band jazz, I feel such an overpowering sense of vicarious humiliation. It’s just the worst feeling. The question isn’t even whether she’s good at it; I don’t feel qualified to judge that. It’s just how it makes me feel. Here, Gaga paid tribute to a dear friend who’s also a show-business legend in the twilight of his years, and that’s an inherently powerful gesture. It still made me want to crawl into a corner and never watch people singing songs on television again.

14. Carrie Underwood

You can’t just put a Carrie Underwood performance on at 11:15 on a Sunday night. It’s not fair to her, and it’s damn sure not fair to us. Underwood can obviously sing, and she had some fire in her performance, but it’s like the Grammys were trying to get people to turn the show off and go to bed.

13. Justin Bieber With Daniel Caesar & Giveon

Somebody in the Grammys production booth was like, “You know what would make this preposterous sensitive-piano rendition of ‘Peaches’ even better? A bunch of extended, randomly scattered bleeps! Just long stretches of silence that don’t seem to correspond to the actual words of the song in any meaningful way! So money, baby!”

12. Jon Batiste

My pet theory: The Grammy producers knew that Batiste was about to win his absurd Album Of The Year trophy, and that’s why they pulled out all the stops to make this guy look like he was Beyoncé. Well, he’s not Beyoncé. I can appreciate trying to inject some energy into this show’s turgid death-march finale, but this hurt my eyeballs and made me tired. Jon Batiste has Paul Shaffer’s old job; I wonder if Shaffer is mad that the Grammys never went out of their way to make him look like he was somehow important.

11. J Balvin With María Becerra

From what I understand, the reggaeton heads of the world are now completely over J Balvin, and I didn’t see much from his rote performance or his new single to make anyone reconsider that. Balvin was on early, and I wonder who made the call to put a mid-backlash star on the show before the first commercial break. I liked the hand-jiving mummies, though.

10. Nas

I don’t wanna see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Nas rapping about his crypto money is a drag, but it’s better than him becoming a suit-and-tie oldies act — especially a suit-and-tie oldies act who doesn’t even perform the right oldies. Don’t tease me with “NY State Of Mind” if you’re not going to actually rap “NY State Of Mind.”

9. H.E.R. With Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Travis Barker, & Lenny Kravitz

Do we really need another H.E.R. awards-show performance? I feel like we’ve all got it by now. Maybe H.E.R. has reached her final form. Maybe she’ll just spend the rest of eternity playing awards shows with over-the-hill stars in an attempt to frame them as legends. But Lenny Kravitz? Zoë Kravitz is one of the most likable stars in Hollywood right now, but that doesn’t mean we suddenly have to treat her dad seriously.

8. Chris Stapleton

This guy can obviously sing like nobody’s business, but all those strings made “Cold” sound a whole lot like a Bond-movie theme. For a would-be roots-country savior, that’s a pretty weird look. (There are plenty of strings on the record, too, but they don’t sound like that.)

7. Silk Sonic

Anytime anyone stages a televised event in Las Vegas, there’s an overwhelming urge to go way too far with the “Vegas, baby, Vegas!” business. There was plenty of that in Silk Sonic’s “777” performance, which brought the party-time theatrics with a self-satisfied smirk. But they earned it, you know? Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak are in love with flash. When .Paak is drumming and rapping at the same time while wearing a pageboy wig, he’s in his element. He’s happy, and I’m happy for him.

6. Brothers Osborne

It was hard to process much of this performance at the end of endless, stultifying show and in the immediate aftermath of Jon Batiste’s baffling Album Of The Year win, but this country duo did manage to put in one of the night’s most spirited performances. It’s too bad nobody will remember it because everyone was too busy being like “Wait, what? Jon Batiste?”

5. Brandi Carlile

A couple of years ago, Brandi Carlile utterly annihilated everyone else at the Grammys. Almost nobody makes a reputation with an awards-show performance these days, but Carlile made herself a legend with that one. This performance was more of a victory lap, with none of the hungry intensity of that first one, but Carlile deserves the chance to coast on some of that well-earned goodwill. She might not have owned the show this year, but she wore a cool rhinestone jacket and hit big notes, and I can’t really ask for too much more than that. The Grammy-credibility category is not much fun, but if that’s going to be a career lane, then Brandi Carlile is at least more interesting and engaging than plenty of the people who tend to end up there.

4. Lil Nas X With Jack Harlow

Lil Nas X understands his job. In the space of one three-song Grammy-performance medley, he busted out three different costumes, all of which were black and glittery and futuristic. He was clearly lip-syncing, and he wasn’t even trying to hide it, which I find oddly endearing. LNX didn’t make out with backup dancers or split his pants open, so this was a little less memorable than his last few live-TV performances. But he’s easy to root for, and even his attention-grabbing theatrics didn’t come off as attention-grabbing theatrics. Also, Jack Harlow’s whole dorky swagger continues to work on me. I don’t necessarily want it to work on me, but the heart wants what it wants.

3. Billie Eilish With Finneas

The Taylor Hawkins shirt was a nice touch. So was the elaborate stage set.The fake rainstorm was fun, too. Mostly, though, it felt good to watch Billie Eilish and her brother rocking out together. Eilish’s music can be a bit boring and self-serious, especially lately, and her endless succession of awards-show performances can feel like one vast, mushy whole. It’s been a while since she looked like she was having fun, the way she did tonight. She should have fun more often.

2. Olivia Rodrigo

Last year, the Grammys happened when “Drivers License” was sitting at #1. Billie Eilish performed while standing atop a car, and it looked like she was biting Olivia Rodrigo’s style. On this year’s show, Rodrigo sang a version of “Drivers License” that sounded essentially just like the record. That song is old now, but this was a great little victory lap. Olivia brought a car onstage, too — a really nice car — and her whole suburban-street stage set looked great. But more than showmanship, Rodrigo summoned the wounded fire that “Drivers License” demands. By the time it ended, I couldn’t tell if she was legit crying or if that was just the glittery eye makeup.

1. BTS

If you’re the world’s biggest boy band, then you really need to bring the flash, and BTS went big with the flash. I maintain that “Butter” isn’t even a good song, but I was into this from the absurdly dramatic entrances right through to the inspired bit where they danced through laserbeams like the Night Fox in Ocean’s Twelve. BTS have mastered the art of making their wildly intricate choreography look casual and effortless, and the bit where they all played air guitar on their intertwined jackets was practically a magic trick. I am not a person who is predisposed to BTS’ particular form of dazzle, and yet they dazzled me. Credit is due.