Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 7

The Sad State of Rock at the Grammys

It was a rough night for rock. Megadeth, the Grammy winner for Best Metal Performance, walked to the stage to the tune of “Master of the Puppets,” a song that’s actually by another band, Metallica. Before Metallica’s own performance, actress Laverne Cox introduced the band only as “Lady Gaga,” who was onstage, but in a supporting role. Finally, Metallica frontman James Hetfield kicked off the song by singing into an unplugged mic. The trinity of tiny humiliations served as an easy metaphor for the long demise of rock, a Viking funeral for the former king of American music.

A quick glance at the Best Rock Performance category shows how withered the genre has become. David Bowie's haunting 9-minute “Blackstar” took the prize with instrumentation that sounded more like anguished jazz than rock ‘n’ roll. Meanwhile, none of the other four nominees were traditional rock recordings. They included “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” off Beyoncé’s genre-spanning Lemonade; “Heathens,” a pop song that is mostly rapped, by Twenty One Pilots; a cover by Disturbed of “The Sound of Silence” that originally appeared on Conan, and a live performance of “Joe” by Alabama Shakes.

Just a generation ago rock dominated the music landscape. By the 1990 Grammys, the genre was so stuffed with popular artists that there were three separate awards for Best Rock Vocal Performance—for Duo or Group, Female Performer, and Male Performer—plus additional awards for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, Best Hard Rock Performance, and Best Metal Performance (in fact, Metallica won the latter for “One”).

How has rock become so depleted? You can start by blaming the year 1991.

Two years ago, a group of British researchers published a study that charted the evolution of music styles and timbres by looking at 17,000 songs between 1960 and 2010. They charted the rise of Motown in the 1960s, the brief reign of drum-machines in the 1980s, and the spate of weepy love ballads in the 1990s. Among their many findings was that the rock genre, so dominant throughout the 1970s and 1980s, took a sudden nosedive in the early 1990s. In fact, they determined that one year, 1991, marked “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts."

2017’s Metallica sounded a lot like 1990’s Metallica—even after they got the mics to work.

What happened in 1991? Between 1958 and 1990, Billboard had constructed its Hot 100, the list of the country’s most popular songs, with an honor system. They surveyed DJs and record store owners, whose testimonies were often influenced by the music labels. If the labels wanted to push AC/DC, they pushed AC/DC. If they changed their mind and wanted to push the next rock release, AC/DC would fall down the charts and the new band would take their place.

But in 1991, Billboard changed its chart methodology to measure point-of-sales record data and directly monitor radio air play. As I wrote in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, this had a direct impact on the sort of music that made its way to the charts and stayed there. The classic rock and hair-band genre withered in the 1990s while hip hop and country soared up the charts. In the next 25 years, hip hop, country, and pop music have carried on a sonic menage à trois, mixing genres promiscuously to produce the music that currently dominates the charts. There is hip-hop-inflected-pop (Justin Bieber), country-pop (Lady Gaga), and country-rap (Florida Georgia Line and Nelly).

The recent British paper on the last half century of music found that hip hop has reigned the Billboard charts longer than any other musical style. Why might that be? In the early 1990s, some cultural critics argued that rock was qualitatively superior, because rap songs were mere “bricolage.” But it’s precisely because hip hop’s nature is to absorb other musical styles that it has proved so durably elastic. Today’s most popular hip hop artists—like Beyoncé, Drake, Chance the Rapper, and Kanye West—sound very little like the styles that replaced rock in the pop music pantheon in the 1990s. They are more polyphonic, with more diverse inspirations and richer instrumentation and production. Meanwhile, 2017’s Metallica sounded a lot like 1990’s Metallica—even after they got the mics to work.

Is The Walking Dead’s Villain Killing the Show?

A strange thing happened after the gory, divisive, much discussed seventh season premiere of The Walking Dead last October: For the first time in the show’s wildly successful history, people stopped watching. Despite airing on the cable channel AMC, it had consistently been one of the most popular programs on television in the crucial 18-49 ratings demographic. And yet, its ratings slid by 40 percent over the course of last year, the producer Gale Anne Hurd admitted to scaling back the show’s violence after the negative fan reaction to the premiere, and the much hyped supervillain Negan (Jeffrey Dead Morgan) quickly proved to be a huge narrative drag on a show that doesn’t move quickly even at the best of times.

For years, any argument over The Walking Dead’s quality has been rendered almost moot by its enormous viewership. AMC had no real impetus to demand tweaks from a show that delivered such record-setting ratings (and yielded hit spin-offs Talking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead). But in its return on Sunday night, there was a palpable sense of panic to the episode—a promise to get things back on the right track after a year of sadistic misery. The problem is that new storytelling approach may well end up feeling just as dull and predictable.

After all, the sixth season of The Walking Dead unfolded with something concrete to look forward to: the appearance of Negan, a tyrant who rules over many of Virginia’s post-apocalyptic communities with his group The Saviors. The casting of Morgan was announced long before his first appearance, the post-show hype series Talking Dead stoked fan excitement for his arrival, and readers of the Walking Dead comic books knew how crucial he’d be to future plotlines. But while in comic-book form Negan is a classic supervillain—much discussed, rarely seen, and brutally memorable every time he shows up—on TV, he was an almighty dud.

It’s not so much that he didn’t wreak havoc (he did). But suddenly The Walking Dead became The Negan Show, a seemingly endless exploration of a man who uses terror to achieve all his goals. The entire first half of the seventh season was about the extent to which he dominated Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his band of zombie fighters, through murder, torment, and ongoing threats of death and destruction. It was gruesome and hard to watch, but more importantly, it was incredibly boring—an exercise in repetitive punishment designed to remind the viewer just how difficult it would be for Rick and company to resist.

Sunday’s midseason premiere, “Rock in the Road,” marked the beginning of said resistance. Sick of Negan’s ongoing campaign of death, Rick is finally assuming a leadership role again and starting to communicate with the surrounding communities that exist under Negan’s thumb to plot an organized insurgency. There are eight episodes in every half-season of The Walking Dead (starting in season three), and one imagines this rebellion will take about seven episodes to get going, building to a grand showdown for the spring finale. “Rock in the Road” mostly concerned itself with Rick asking King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), the bombastic leader of a town called The Kingdom, and Gregory (Xander Berkeley), the twitchy head of the farming Hilltop Colony, for help.

The build-up to Negan’s downfall will likely be easier to watch than the build-up to his arrival; there’s at least some nuance to the web of alliances he has to knit, and the different types of leaders he has to negotiate with. But it still has a dull air of inevitability, and the expected payoff may not be enough to turn ratings around. It’s very rare for a hit show to rebound after its viewership begins to slide—at a certain point, you’ve been on too long to attract enough new viewers to replace anyone who’s jumping ship, and there aren’t as many daring story tricks to pull. The promise of Negan was, in many ways, more exciting than the reveal—once he arrived and proved himself to be good at one thing (hitting people with a barbed-wire-covered baseball bat), his appeal quickly deflated.

The Walking Dead’s ratings are still sensational by the general yardstick of basic cable, so the show’s cancelation isn’t on the horizon yet. Attempts to find a proper successor for it have been mixed—the comic-book adaptation Preacher drew solid reviews but lackluster ratings, and the spinoffs Fear the Walking Dead and Better Call Saul (an attempt to draw out the Breaking Bad legacy) are not as popular as their forbears. AMC will continue to squeeze whatever they can out of their last genuine smash hit—and the comic book it’s based on continues to run, so it’s not like it lacks for material.

What The Walking Dead does lack for is excitement—not just from critics, but also from fans—and this half-season will be its chance to gain it back. The show can still execute a bizarre zombie-killing set-piece better than any, but its primary villains are always going to be regular people. As long as Negan is in place, The Walking Dead will feel like it’s keeping time, just to make his downfall seem all the more significant. In the show’s best season (the fifth), a new villain was introduced every three or four episodes and dispatched just as quickly, giving the show an appropriately apocalyptic sense of urgency. Under Negan’s yoke, that’s vanished; by the time it returns, it might be too late.

Homeland's Crisis of Conscience

In Sunday night’s episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) confronted a young American Muslim, Sekou (J. Mallory McCree), about a video he’d put online, violating the terms of the agreement she’d used to get him out of jail. Sekou had been set up by an FBI informant who encouraged his increasingly radical behavior, and Carrie was helping him, she explained, because “this whole country went stupid crazy after 9/11 and nobody knows that better than I do.”

In its past five seasons, Homeland has positioned Carrie against myriad enemies: a radicalized American Marine, al-Qaeda, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, ISIS, double agents, the warnings on the backs of prescription-drug bottles. But in season six, for the first time, the Showtime series seems to be explicitly setting up the U.S. intelligence community itself as the bad guy, with the former CIA operative now a crusader for justice. It’s a marked shift in direction for a show built on dramatic terrorist plots against the U.S., and it perhaps reveals some of Homeland’s fatigue in trying to keep up with whiplash-inducing current events. While season five—which portrayed a shocking terrorist attack on a major European city and Russian agents working within the CIA—was almost uncomfortably prescient, season six appears to be undergoing something of a crisis of conscience.

In some ways, this makes Homeland impossibly relevant (it’s hard to think of a better time to consider civil-liberties abuses against Muslims in the U.S.). In others, it illustrates the impossibility of writing a television show that aspires to interpret real-world geopolitical events through a fictional lens. Season six is set in the weeks between election day in America and the inauguration of a new president, Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel), a groundbreaking female senator from New York. Notably absent from the narrative is a brash former reality-show star who campaigned on barring Muslim immigrants from the U.S. and arguably benefitted from a letter sent to Congress by the head of the FBI.

Also missing from the new season, at least thus far, is Russia, easily the most intriguing foreign power when it comes to the current administration. Last season on Homeland, Russia was revealed to have infiltrated the highest levels of U.S. intelligence by turning Allison Carr (Miranda Otto), the CIA station chief in Berlin, into a double agent. But the last three episodes of the new season have focused largely on Carrie’s attempts to free Sekou from an apparent FBI sting and President-Elect Keane’s intelligence briefings, in which the CIA’s Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) falsely informed her that Iran is working on a parallel nuclear program with North Korea, violating the terms of its 2015 deal with the U.S.

It was a surprisingly slow start that culminated in a characteristic twist at the end of the fourth episode when Sekou was blown up in Manhattan by a bomb in the van he was using to make deliveries. All the evidence suggests that it was either the FBI or the CIA planting the device to make Sekou into a scapegoat—either to justify dubious ongoing investigations into suspected radicals, or to frighten the president-elect sufficiently to deter her from pursuing reforms within the CIA. Either way, it’s a remarkable indictment of agencies that the show has generally portrayed in the past as heroic, if frequently misguided.

The impetus for the change in direction, Homeland’s showrunner, Alex Gansa, told CNN, was a degree of “soul-searching” in the aftermath of the ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015. The events unfolded the day before Homeland was due to film its season-five finale, which saw Carrie thwart a sarin-gas attack on the Berlin metro, and led Gansa to consider whether the show was telling its stories responsibly, or somehow sensationalizing horrific real-world events. In the past, too, the show has been criticized for being Islamophobic in its focus on Islamic terrorists, notably via graffiti featured in a season-five episode that read “Homeland is racist” in Arabic. “It was eye-opening,” is how Howard Gordon, Homeland’s co-creator, explained his subsequent reaction to The New York Times, in a discussion about whether American television could be fair to Muslims. “Part of it was just mischief, but part of it started a productive conversation that I think led to this year’s story.”

Perhaps predictably, the new season has led to criticism that the show is being politically correct, and losing much of its dramatic potential in the process. “In the unlikely event anybody has, within the first five minutes, not grasped the re-education mission of the series’ new season,” Dorothy Rabinovitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “the writers once given to obliqueness in the interest of mystery and style have Carrie hammering the messaging home.”

This being Homeland, it’s of course likely that everything could be upended by the season’s end, with the CIA’s reputation restored. But it’s intriguing to see a show grapple in real time with the consequences of its storylines, and to confront accusations of anti-Muslim bias in an environment in which such attitudes have been thrust front and center. Being accused of Islamaphobia, Gordon said, “started a dialogue—the dawning sense that there’s a responsibility not to just traffic in these not-helpful stereotypes.” But at the same time, he explained, “you have the conundrum [that] the show is about counterterrorism.”

Two Shades of #Resistance at the Grammys

Did it say “RESIST” or “PERSIST,” the sparkly armband Katy Perry wore onstage at The Grammys last night? It wasn’t quite clear in the moment; intentionally or not, her sloganeering arm mostly stayed away from the camera. Social-media users scrutinizing screen caps of Perry eventually deduced the word started with a “P”—likely a play on Elizabeth Warren nevertheless persisting, possibly a general reminder to keep on keepin’ on.

The armband ambiguity sums up Perry’s apparent new focus on “purposeful pop” and the larger approach of many radio superstars toying with politics. The Hillary Clinton supporter’s new single, “Chained to the Rhythm,” sighs about capitalism and apathy in the abstract—“So comfortable, we’re living in a bubble, bubble / So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, trouble”—but the closest thing to an explicit current-events reference is Skip Marley calling to “break down the walls.” At the Grammys, Perry similarly came across as “political” without having a clear political message.

Aesthetically, Perry’s Grammys performance was actually pretty striking: Wearing a white pantsuit, she shimmied around a blank-facade house that looked like an unfinished computer rendering as gloomy clouds and lush rose petals flashed onto it. The scene seemed like a Sopranos-esque nightmare, with the white picket fence getting taller, dwarfing Perry; at one point, mirrored posts closed in around her eerily. In the end, the house came apart and an image of the Constitution’s preamble was projected behind her and Marley. “No hate!” Perry cried, holding Marley’s hand in the air.

Matt Sayles / Invision / AP

The exact interpretation requires some guesswork rooted in Perry’s history as a Democrat. Given her political leanings, she likely meant to hint that Donald Trump is trouncing the Constitution and that Americans needed to become more engaged. But any decent pundit could just as easily, say, spin the finale as an endorsement of Neil Gorsuch’s originalism. The only indisputable thing was its air of self-congratulations: Perry now wants to teach a civics course on the same sort of stage where she was once so oblivious as to style herself as a geisha.

It was hard to miss the contrast with the other big use of the phrase “We the People” at the Grammys, which came when A Tribe Called Quest demonstrated the power of political music that’s anything but coy. Q-Tip kicked things off by saying the group was there to represent everyone who wants better government representation; Busta Rhymes showed up midway through to announce, “I’m not feeling the political climate right now.” He then thanked “President Agent Orange” for his “unsuccessful attempt of the Muslim ban.” Bandmates smashed down a fake wall—get it?—before breaking into an intense rendition of “We the People,” an anthem released around election day. The chorus:

All you Black folks, you must go

All you Mexicans, you must go

And all you poor folks, you must go

Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways

Anderson .Paak provided ad-libs to that chorus last night (I heard a mention of Filipinos), and a group of unfamous people resembling the constituencies the song mentions—The People in all their diversity—filed onstage. As a verse by the departed Phife Dawg played, the performers put their fists up in the Black Power salute. Q-Tip finished with a message that, unlike the one seen earlier on a sparkly armband, couldn’t be misunderstood: “RESIST!” Not only was it a clear protest, it was one that explicitly included some of the people affected by it.

It would be easy, at least for those looking for visible signs of pop culture combatting Trumpism, to say that Tribe’s approach is universally the braver and better one. But political art can become pedantic very easily, and for any work of entertainment to credibly communicate a message there needs to be a sync-up of medium and message. A Tribe Called Quest has for decades served as a perfect delivery system for conscientious lyrics mixed in with playful party chants; for them, raising a fist and shouting “RESIST” is close to the core mission, and they have the experience and conviction to pull it off convincingly.

For Perry, it’s more awkward: Her brand is swirled up with mass-market appeal and the assumption that a Top 40 radio hit isn’t going to force an op-ed on you. Were she to go full agitator all of a sudden at the Grammys, she’d be hit with accusations of phoniness and hypocrisy. Other pop divas—Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Madonna—have worked out, over time, how to retain their core appeal while threading in sharp messages, though even for them there have been missteps. If Perry is no longer happy to mostly sing about blacking out on Friday nights and surviving after breakups, she will have to feel out her own new approach. For now, last night’s performance of a picket-fence prisoner’s liberation actually fit her in the moment: It was a portrait, however awkward, of an awakening.

Galentine's Day: How a Beloved Fiction Became a Beloved Tradition

It started as fiction. In a 2010 episode of Parks and Recreation, Leslie, creative and crafty and bursting with kindness for the people she loves, invented a way to do something American culture hadn’t traditionally been too good at doing: celebrating, in an official capacity, the joys of female friendship. Leslie set Galentine’s Day as a festival that would fall, each year, on February 13: Valentine’s Day-eve. And she decided that the festivities—though the real point of it all is simply to celebrate the platonic love that exists among ladyfriends—should take the form of the thing that has brought women together for decades: a long and boozy brunch.

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The Rise of the Micro-Holiday

As Leslie explained it: “Every February 13, my ladyfriends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies. It’s like Lilith Fair, minus the angst. Plus frittatas.”

Galentine’s Day was, in its initial conception, the character of Leslie Knope, fictional woman, realized in micro-holiday form: insistently earnest, aggressively generous, finding deeply canny methods of ensuring that every social occasion will involve the consuming of waffles.

But Galentine’s Day soon became popular among real-life women, too. The festival, after all, filled a need. It found a market. Like Friendsgiving before it, which was similarly coddled in the crucible of the sitcom, Galentine’s Day acknowledged a broad truth about American life as it’s lived in the early 21st century: Friendships, increasingly, are playing an organizing role in society. Long conceived as side dishes to the main feast—marriage, kids, the nuclear family above all—friendships, more and more, are helping to define people’s sense of themselves in the world. During a time of emergent adulthood and geographic mobility, friendships are lending stability—and meaning—to people’s, and especially young people’s, lives. The deepest friendships are operating not to replace the family unit, certainly, but to complement it.

With Galentine’s Day, Leslie Knope, fan of waffles and Ben Wyatt and Ann Perkins (though definitely not in that order), took all that cultural context and distilled it down into a holiday that, like Friendsgiving and Slapsgiving and Festivus before it, resonated far beyond its fictional world.

During a time of emergent adulthood and geographic mobility, friendships are helping to lend stability—and meaning—to people’s lives.

It caught on so well that, today, Galentine’s Day is a fairly standard celebration. No longer simply a micro-holiday, in the blink-and-you-miss-it manner of National Pizza Day or International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Leslie Knope’s lark is widely recognized and celebrated in places that are decidedly far from Pawnee, Indiana. Craft breweries have Galentine’s Day parties featuring crafts, beers, and—in a sweet hat-tip to the originator of the holiday—waffles. St. Martin’s press has a new book out for the occasion, BE MY GALENTINE: Celebrating Badass Female Friendship. Mashable recently listed “13 perfect Galentine’s Day gifts for your forever friends.” NPR offered a series of tips about how one might throw one’s own Galentine’s Day party. (The final piece of advice: “While eating waffles and drinking fizzy cocktails, celebrate the women in your life, Knope-style, by sharing with each one in attendance why you treasure her friendship.”)

Galentine’s Day has indeed become so well established that, last week, it earned itself that ultimate mark of cultural affirmation: a think piece, attempting to condemn its entire existence, in the New York Post. (“Ironically,” the story scoffed, “Feb. 13 has long been considered ‘Mistress Day,’ when unfaithful men take out their side chicks, leaving Feb. 14 for wives and girlfriends. Hope no one has any scheduling conflicts.”)

Perhaps the best measure of Galentine’s Day’s staying power, though? The fact that it is being used—as every great American holiday will be, in the end—to sell stuff. The most common criticism of Valentine’s Day, of course, is that it’s a Hallmark holiday. The day conflates romantic love with the plasticine detritus of that affection: expensive flowers, cheekily presented chocolates, chintzy stuffed animals.

So, too, Galentine’s Day, which has been, at this point, thoroughly Hallmarked. #GalentinesDay hashtags have been rampant on Twitter and Instagram in the days preceding February 13, directing people to lady-themed goods on websites and in stores. The site surfandsunshine has a blog post listing 9 Gift Ideas for Galentine’s Day; items for sale include a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug, a Marie Curie doll, and—hey, Galentines, it’s not too late to buy me my present—a tote bag that dispenses wine.

We have #fallen for this NEW Preppy Patch Tunic

How Did the Oroville Dam Crisis Get So Dire?

Maybe the Oroville Dam was cursed from the start.

In December 1964, three years into the massive barrier’s construction, a huge flood struck the northwest, killing dozens. The dam was nearly overtopped, which could have led to its failure even before it was completed. Instead, the partially completed dam helped prevent a larger disaster by reducing the flow of the Feather River. Less than a year later, two trains working on the site collided head-on in a tunnel near the dam, killing four men in a fiery crash and damaging the tunnel, slowing down work on the project.

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American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga

The dam, which sits south of Chico and north of Sacramento, was eventually completed in 1968, creating the nation’s tallest dam. It forms the head of California’s massive, byzantine State Water Project (SWP). The SWP moves water from Northern California south toward Los Angeles, an average of 3 million acre-feet per year. A drop of water that starts at Lake Oroville, above the dam, takes 10 days to move all the way to the end of the system, south of Los Angeles.

At least in theory. Controlling a system that large is never simple, and the delicate flow of the State Water Project is under threat now, and on Sunday, authorities ordered 188,000 people near the dam to evacuate. “This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill,” the Butte County Sheriff’s Office blared in its order. Officials say the dam itself is structurally sound, but the spillways designed to take pressure off the dam in the case of high water levels are both damaged. Dramatic videos show water pouring out of the lake and over the spillways.

There’s some bitter irony to the problem of too much water menacing the Golden State. California has suffered through a long and severe drought, at times driving Governor Jerry Brown to institute stringent—critics say draconian—water controls. This winter has seen much more snow and rain, which is good news for the parched state, but bad news for the Oroville Dam, where huge amounts of water are collecting. The lake rose 50 feet in a matter of days. Earlier in February, as operators let water over a concrete spillway to reduce the pressure, a crater appeared in the spillway. Faced with too much water in the lake, they continued to use the spillway anyway, and the damage got worse. On Friday, the crater was 45 feet deep, 300 feet wide, and 500 feet long.

There’s a backup for the concrete spillway, an auxiliary spillway that had never been used. It’s really just a hillside sloping down from the reservoir, covered in brush and trees. As the situation became more dire last week, crews starting clearing the slope for its first baptism. Managers hoped pressing the auxiliary spillway into service would give them time to patch up the concrete spillway over what’s expected to be a drier season. (That could be easier said than done: Snowpack upstream is 150 percent of normal for this time of year, meaning there’s going to be more melt headed downstream than normal.)

A crater in the middle of the primary spillway at the Oroville Dam (California Department of Water Resources via Reuters)

Initially, that seemed to do the trick: The water level in Lake Oroville was dropping, and the danger seemed to be abating. On Sunday, however, officials noticed the auxiliary spillway was starting to erode—at the same time that huge amounts of water continued to flow into the lake. The fear is that if the spillway gives out, a wall of water could push down out of Lake Oroville and toward lower ground. Workers are trying to shore up the emergency spillway with bags of rocks, including dropping them from helicopters. If it gives way, the Feather River would flood downstream, and might wash out other levees farther down the river. Meanwhile, debris from erosion also forced the  state Department of Water Resources, the dam’s operator, to shut down its power plant, which could have helped to release some additional water. And there’s rain forecast for later this week.

How did the situation get so dire? One part of that is the seesaw state of the drought, with the weather moving from dry to saturated in a matter of months. (While droughts are a normal part of the globe’s climate, scientists say human-caused climate change has exacerbated them, increasing the severity of California’s drought by as much as 20 percent.)

Dam operators can’t control the weather, but they can try to prepare for unexpected events like the sudden inundation of Lake Oroville with consistent maintenance. One question in this case is whether the Oroville Dam has been adequately maintained.

In 2005, a trio of environmental groups filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, saying the emergency spillway was unsafe, The Mercury News reports. Their worry proved prophetic: The groups said in the event of heavy rain and flooding, the hillside would wash out and produce flooding downstream. They asked that the auxiliary spillway be paved with concrete, like the primary one. But the federal government rejected the request after consulting with the state and local agencies involved in the water system, which said they did not believe the upgrades were needed.

As for the primary spillway, the state did some repair work around the area of the collapse in 2013, CBS Sacramento reports. The last state inspection was in July 2015, but workers did not closely inspect the concrete, the Redding Record Searchlight notes, instead eyeing it from a distance and concluding it was safe. Officials say repairs should cost $100 million to $200 million, once it’s dry enough to begin them.

The Oroville Dam may be the most urgent case in the country at this moment—it’s not often that nearly 200,000 people are forced to evacuate—but it’s hardly alone. In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers conducted its most recent quadrennial survey of the nation’s infrastructure, and it gave the U.S. a ‘D’ for maintenance of dams.

“Thousands of our nation’s dams are in need of rehabilitation to meet current design and safety standards,” the report said. “They are not only aging, but are subject to stricter criteria as a result of increased downstream development and advancing scientific knowledge predicting flooding, earthquakes, and dam failures.”

But California is by some standards among the best states for dam safety in the country. While it has an enormous number of high-hazard dams—a classification meaning that lives are at risk if they fail—they are also inspected far more regularly than in some other states. More existing dams in the U.S. were built in the 1960s, like the Oroville Dam, than in any other decade. The combination of aging dams, bad maintenance, and spotty inspections means that what looks like a trickle of worry out of Lake Oroville and over the dam’s fragile spillways could turn into a gusher of danger around the U.S. in the coming years.

Adele, Beyoncé, and the Grammys' Fear of Progress

Set aside Adele splitting her Grammy like Solomon; forget, for a moment, all the pre-ceremony analysis about the awards’ fraught history with race and taste and tradition. Based solely on the performances last night, viewers would need to be arguing about Adele vs. Beyoncé—it’s hard to think of a more meaningful distinction in popular music than the one between them.

Adele performed twice on darkened stages where the focus could be on nothing other than her singing. For her George Michael tribute, she flubbed some notes and started again, because otherwise what would the point have been? Beyoncé meanwhile offered a floral golden swirl of performance art and video wizardry and spoken word, with holographic and real bodies evoking da Vinci’s Last Supper. Some people will worship it, and some people will mock it; either way, sans sound, Beyonce’s performance could survive as gifs and memes and mashup videos. Adele’s meanwhile could be ripped to MP3 and lose nothing for lack of images.

Adele’s song-no-dance routine, while often impressive, creates less entertaining TV and less daring art than Beyoncé’s audiovisual spectacles do. But the Grammys have made clear which it considers the better approach to music. Adele won all five Grammys for which she was nominated, including the three big awards where she competed with Beyoncé: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year. This extends a sweep of every category in which she’s been nominated since 2011, resulting in a total of 15 Grammys.

If Adele’s dominance seems unseemly to you, Adele sympathizes. Accepting Album of the Year with her team of producers and co-writers, she tearfully offered thanks and then pivoted: “I can’t possibly accept this award … My artist of my life is Beyoncé.” Addressing Beyoncé in the audience directly, Adele said that Lemonade was “so monumental and so well thought-out and so beautiful,” and that “the way you make me and my friends feel, the way you make my black friends feel, is empowering.” At the end, she broke her Grammy statue in two—presumably to split it with her idol.

Debates will now unfold about the optics of the moment, Adele’s manners, the awkwardness of mentioning her “black friends,” and the parallels with Macklemore’s apology after beating Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys. But Adele’s sincerity burns brightly—just try to be cynical about her backstage testimony of being a “Beyoncé stan” since she was 11 years old and now wondering “what the fuck does [Beyoncé] have to do to win Album of the Year?”

Good question. A follow-up to the megaton musical engine 21, Adele’s comparatively restrained 25 was a strong display of ability from a powerful singer; it sold well but got mixed reviews. As an artistic statement, Lemonade smokes it. It’s not just that Beyoncé’s album had a fully realized video component; it’s not just that it played with juicy tabloid rumors; it’s that it told a story as it alchemized disparate sounds for seriously entertaining songs that no one but Beyonce could have made. It said something about its creator and its world, and it pushed at the boundaries of pop. It was progress.

But the Grammys aren’t, in the end, interested in progress. Adele could have pulled off last night’s performances basically in any decade of the Grammys’ existence. Last year’s Album of the Year winner, Taylor Swift’s 1989, was explicitly retro; Beck beat Beyoncé in 2015 with a collection of folk rock that needed no timestamp; the only black artists to have won the Album of the Year prize in the last 14 years were septuagenarians performing covers.

Black visionaries have fared poorly in Grammys general categories while delivering the performances that make the show worth watching.

Beyoncé’s display at last night’s Grammys, by contrast, needed the now. That’s not only in a technological sense (I wasn’t sure what was real and what was fake—were you?) but also an aesthetic and political one. Her forthright celebration of black sisterhood and maternity, her references to contemporary art, and, yes, her music—the synth tapestry of “Love Drought” especially—all reflect the moment. So does the notion of a singer who does more than sing, who disregards traditional notions of musical respectability—the ideal of a woman in a gown standing alone and belting—for a broader sense of the medium’s potential.

Black artists from Prince to Michael Jackson to Kanye West have been on the forefront of this sort of expansion of what pop music means. Maybe that fact has something to do with why they have mostly fared poorly in the Grammys general categories over the years even as they have served up exactly the kind of performances that make the Grammys worth watching at all. Or maybe it’s just a deeper sort of bias: With only three black women ever winning Album of the Year (Lauryn Hill, Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston), little in Grammys history suggests a non-white Adele would have the success of this white one. Beyoncé’s one televised win last night was for Best Urban Contemporary Album—founded in 2013 surely to include more artists of color, but with the effect of highlighting how they are sidelined in the general categories.

The awards success of traditionalists like Adele, ultimately, comes across as a rejection of the forward thinkers, a rejection that stings especially when it fits a clear pattern of excluding black visionaries. It’s not as if old-fashioned singers need the Grammys to defend them: 25 has moved more than 10 million copies, while Lemonade sales and streams figured out to 2.1 million units in 2016. Surely change is necessary when even the avatar of tradition, Adele, knows something’s amiss. By saluting Beyoncé on stage, she joins a trend with Frank Ocean, Kanye West, and other influential stars pointing out how strange it is that the Grammys’ judgement of the best in music, year after year, looks about the same.

John Oliver Is Buying Ads on Cable News to Talk to President Trump

It’s become a truism of the weeks-old presidency of Donald Trump: If you want to reach the chief executive, and if you don’t happen to have the kind of sway that might get you a White House meeting or a golf game at Mar-a-Lago … no worries: Simply advertise to him. Buy some ad time during the shows the president is known to watch—cable-news morning shows, Saturday Night Live—and influence away. Trump is a creature of television, his fame a product of its charms and his daily habits attuned to its rhythms. If you happen to be in a position to buy yourself some time on TV, it’s possible to talk to him—directly to him—via that defining medium.

Related Story

John Oliver, Activist

The latest political actor to realize (and, then, promptly make fun of) this particular state of affairs? John Oliver. On Sunday, the comedian made his return to HBO after a long(ish) hiatus; he dedicated his first Last Week Tonight episode since Trump’s inauguration to, first of all, offering a detailed examination of the administration’s attempts to destabilize the notion of shared reality. It was an episode that, with characteristic Oliverian nuance, explored the idea that Americans “all need to commit,” as the comedian-activist told his audience, “to defending the reality of facts.”

Oliver concluded that analysis with the suggestion that President Trump—who came to the presidency though a nontraditional path that might have left gaps in his knowledge when it comes to the particularities of country-running—might benefit from some learning sessions. The comedian pointed to that infamous moment when then-candidate Trump was unable to answer a question, during an early-in-the-primaries debate, about the nuclear triad.

And here’s where things got meta.

Trump, Oliver assumes, does not watch Last Week Tonight; he doesn’t have the SNL lobby-by-way-of-sketch-comedy path available to him. So Oliver announced that he and his staff had come up with a way to circumvent that unfortunate situation: ads. Cold, hard, capitalistic ads. Bought for the time during the morning hours of cable news—set to air, specifically, in Washington, D.C., between the Trump-friendly times of 8:30 and 9:00 a.m.

Oliver and his team based their ads on one spot that commonly airs during Fox & Friends and the like—an ad starring a cowboy, talking about his catheter.

Last Week Tonight’s spin on that ad went like this: “I’m a professional cowboy, and I use catheters,” the Oliverian cowboy tells his viewers. “Been cowboyin’ for 25 years, and there’s two things I know: I don’t like pain when I cath. And the nuclear triad consists of land-based missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and aerial bombers. This increases our ability to strike back in the event one of those is destroyed, and deters an attack on us or our allies.”

The cath-cowboy concluded: “So that’s the nuclear triad, in case you’re the kind of person who might really need to know that.”

Oliver was suggesting that, in the interest Americans have in having a president who knows how to govern, we are all on common ground.

Oliver’s crowd went wild. And there will be other ads, as well, he told them. Here’s more from the cath-cowboy:

- “Not all black people live in the inner cities. And not all people in the inner cities are black.”

- “Now, I know it can seem like you’re the only person in the world. But if you look here, you’ll see that, actually, there are many non-you people. We call those ‘other people.’”

- “Just because it’s sometimes cold, that don’t mean there’s no global warming. You’re confusing climate with weather, partner.”

- “Gabon is a country on the west coast of Africa."

- “Tiffany. Tiff-uh-ny. Tiffany!”

- “The unemployment rate is a carefully calculated measure derived from a monthly survey conducted by two federal agencies, and has been the agreed-upon standard since 1948.”

The whole thing was dripping with hot, sticky condescension. That was the joke of it. Oliver was embracing the notion of the “smug, liberal elite” rather than attempting to fight it; he was arguing that knowing stuff, far from being a political posture, is simply a good thing for a president to do. He was suggesting that, in that particular way—that vested interest Americans have in making sure the president knows how to govern—we are, all of us, on common ground. There is such thing as shared reality. “We are prepared to educate Donald Trump, one by one, on topics we’re pretty sure he doesn’t know about,” the comedian said, as his audience cheered. He preceded his claim with a caveat: at least, Oliver said, “until we are shut down.”

The Biggest Moments From the 2017 Grammys

By the end of the 2017 Grammys, viewers had reason to argue about Beyoncé, the Bee Gees, and Donald Trump. Below are the winners, remarkable performances, and memorable moments of the night in reverse chronological order.

Matt Sayles / AP

It’s Adele’s night: She just won Album of the Year, following wins for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Best Pop Solo Performance, not to mention having given two Grammy stage performances tonight. But in both of her final acceptance speeches, she deflected attention onto another nominee: Beyoncé. Saying that she “can’t accept this award” for Album of the Year, Adele praised Beyoncé’s Lemonade as “so monumental,” adding, “the way you make my friends feel, the way you make my black friends feel, is empowering.”

Adele’s sweep continued with Record of the Year going to “Hello” over Beyoncé, Lukas Graham, Twenty One Pilots, and Rihanna. Adele let co-writer and producer Greg Kurstin speak first, quipping to the Grammy producers, “You cut him off last time!” Adele took the chance to praise Beyoncé: “You move my soul … and I want you to be my mummy.”

John Legend and Cynthia Erivo’s tender rendition of “God Only Knows” bookended a brutal in-memorium reel that included Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard, George Martin, Butch Trucks, Keith Emerson, Muhammad Ali, Debbie Reynolds, and Greg Lake, in addition to folks already memorialized tonight: Prince, George Michael, Phife Dawg, Sharon Jones.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Best New Artist Chance the Rapper took the Grammys to church with a medley of songs off of Coloring Book. As gospel singers Tamela Mann and Kirk Franklin sang praises to God, Chance passionately rapped selections from “How Great,” “All We Got,” “Blessings,” and “No Problem.”

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Prince was memorialized by his pals in The Time, who recreated a Minneapolis funk club circa 1985 while playing “The Bird.” Then Bruno Mars showed up in ruffles and purple sequins to do “Let’s Go Crazy” climaxing in a lengthy and lascivious guitar solo.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

A Tribe Called Quest delivered a bold anti-Trump statement in a performance with Anderson .Paak, Consequence, and Busta Rhymes. A big wall was broken down; Busta called out “President Agent Orange” for “perpetuating evil” and an “unsuccessful attempt at a Muslim ban.” During the anti-nativism anthem “We the People,” the band brought up a diverse group of unfamous people—the implication being that they were endangered by Trump’s policies. Fists shot into the air, and then a rallying call: “RESIST! RESIST! RESIST!”

Adele won Song of the Year for “Hello,” beating Beyoncé, Lukas Graham, Justin Bieber, and Mike Posner. “I really do apologize for swearing,” Adele said, referring to the glitch during her earlier George Michael tribute. Co-writer and producer Greg Kurstin’s portion of the acceptance speech was cut off, spurring the audience to boo.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

A colorful Bee Gees medley rotated through a cast of performers including Demi Lovato, Tori Kelly, Little Big Town, and Andra Day. The setlist highlighted “Stayin’ Alive,” “Lonely Days,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” and then, of course, “Stayin’ Alive” again.

The late Sharon Jones was memorialized by Dwight Yoakam as he introduced Sturgill Simpson, who with Jones’s band The Dap Kings performed “All Around You.”

Matt Sayles / AP

Lady Gaga and Metallica teamed up to shred, growl, and gyrate through the metal band’s “Moth Into Flame.” James Hetfield’s mic didn’t work for much of the performance, but the pyrotechnics definitely did.

Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book won Best Rap Album over Kanye West, Drake, De La Soul, and Schoolboy Q. A streaming-only album, Coloring Book’s Grammys success is history-making: “This is for indie artists,” Chance said from the stage.

Matt Sayles / AP

Adele paid tribute to George Michael with a spare, orchestral version of “Fastlove.” Apparently unhappy with her vocals, she paused and restarted the performance midway through, apologizing and explaining, “I can’t mess this up for him.” She had tears in her eyes as the audience gave a standing ovation at the end.

Beyoncé’s Lemonade won Best Urban Contemporary Album over Gallant, King, Anderson .Paak, and Rihanna. Reading from a statement, Beyoncé said “it’s important for me to show images to my children that reflect their beauty” and mentioned “the news, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the White House, and the Grammys” as places where all kids should be able to “see themselves and have no doubt that they are beautiful, intelligent, and capable.”

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Matt Sayles / AP

Reflecting the themes of her new single “Chained to the Rhythm,” Katy Perry gave a vaguely political performance in which a drab white-picket-fence home broke apart and the preamble of the Constitution was projected behind her. “PERSIST” read a pink sparkly armband she was wearing.

Maren Morris won Best Country Solo Performance for “My Church” over Brandy Clark, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, and Keith Urban.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters



Matt Sayles / Reuters

A very visibly pregnant Beyoncé delivered a dazzling buffet of maternal imagery. After an introduction from Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, Lemonade ballads “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles” became a lengthy odyssey featuring psychedelic holograms, an epic dinner table, anti-gravity chair movement, golden flower crowns, regular flower pedals, a host of handmaidens, Biblical imagery, and so much more. “If we’re going to heal, let it be glorious,” went the closing spoken-word line, and “glorious” is certainly a fitting way to describe the spectacle. Another description you’ll in the coming days hear, fairly or not: “pretentious.”

David Bowie won Best Rock Song for “Blackstar,” over Radiohead, Twenty One Pilots, Highly Suspect, and Metallica.

Matt Sayles

Ohio rockers Twenty One Pilots dropped trou upon winning Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Stressed Out,” for which the Chainsmokers, Lukas Graham, Rihanna, and Sia were also nominated. Onstage, singer Tyler Joseph explained that he and bandmate Josh Dun met long ago at a party where everyone was in their underwear, and they always vowed that if they ever won a Grammy, they’d accept it pantsless.  

Matt Sayles / Invision/ AP

The Weeknd and the Daft Punk served up some Imperial Guards-on-Hoth vibes with the set design and costuming of their “I Feel It Coming” performance.

Matt Sayles / Invision / AP

Chance the Rapper won Best New Artist, besting nominees Kelsea Ballerini, The Chainsmokers, Maren Morris, and Anderson .Paak. “I claim this victory in the name of the Lord,” he shouted after receiving the trophy from Jennifer Lopez. The first presenter of the night, Lopez had acknowledged the political moment without getting partisan: “At this point in history, our voices are needed more than ever. … We do language, that is how civilizations heal. So tonight we celebrate our most universal language, music.”

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Adele opened the night with a power move: performing “Hello” alone on a darkened stage, the focus being just on her vocals and sparkly geometrical top. Then host James Corden arrived in self-consciously bumbling fashion, pretending to fall down stairs and botch his choreography before launching into a rap about the night. One line that landed: “Sturgill Simpson is here, and Google just crashed from people asking who the hell is that.”

Three remarkable looks from the red carpet below. Here’s Adele in green:

Jordan Strauss / AP

Here’s Cee Lo Green, as “Gnarly Davidson”:

Jordan Strauss / AP

And here’s the singer Joy Villa with a #MAGA gown. The back says “TRUMP”:

Jordan Strauss / AP

A number of awards were handed out at the pre-televised ceremony—Billboard has the list. Highlights include:

David Bowie’s Blackstar earning four trophies, including for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance
Drake’s “Hotline Bling” taking Best Rap Song and Best Rap/Sung Performance
Chance the Rapper earning his first Grammy, with “No Problems” taking Best Rap Performance
John Williams getting his 23rd grammy with Star Wars: The Force Awakens taking Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media
Sturgill Simpson’s album-of-the-year nominee A Sailor’s Guide to Earth winning Best Country Album
Beyoncé’s “Formation” getting Best Music Video
Adele’s 25 winning Best Pop Vocal album, and “Hello” winning Best Pop Solo Performance

Here’s the state of play for the four general awards categories, taken from my larger preview of the ceremony:

Album of the Year

Contenders: Adele, 25; Beyoncé, Lemonade; Justin Bieber, Purpose; Drake, Views; Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth

Last year’s winner: Taylor Swift, 1989

The state of play: The conventional wisdom says that this year’s ceremony is a clash between two recent Grammy titans, Adele and Beyoncé—and that Adele’s best-selling but unspectacular 25 is a safer bet than Beyonce’s provocative Lemonade. But watch for Sturgill Simpson. Though the relatively unfamous alt-country singer seems like an underdog, as the sole white guy with a guitar he may benefit from a split vote among the four commercially minded radio stars, recalling when Beck beat Beyoncé’s self-titled release in 2014.

A Sturgill win wouldn’t be undeserved; A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is gobsmackingly beautiful, a bittersweet chronicle of new fatherhood. But Beyoncé’s politically charged, sonically diverse, and tabloid-scrambling Lemonade was a seismic cultural event, and the album’s celebration of identity in the face of disrespect would resonate even in loss: The Grammys haven’t selected a young black artist’s album as best since 2004, and they haven’t picked a black woman since 1999.

Record of the Year

Contenders: Adele, “Hello”; Beyoncé, “Formation”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”; Rihanna ft. Drake, “Work”; Twenty One Pilots, “Stressed Out”

Last year’s winner: Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk”

The state of play: If there’s ever been a hit that’s more a great recording than a great song, it’s Adele’s “Hello,” whose repetition on the page becomes an avalanche in the ear thanks to Adele’s pipes and Greg Kurstin’s production. Nightmare scenario: Grammy voters’ fetish for old-timey authenticity rewards the Danish band Lukas Graham’s “7 Years,” a bit of treacle that uses old-timey authenticity as affectation.

Song of the Year

Contenders: Beyoncé, “Formation”; Adele, “Hello”; Justin Bieber, “Love Yourself”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”; Mike Posner, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”

Last year’s winner: Ed Sheeran, “Thinking Out Loud”

The state of play: There are two brilliant pop songs in this category, “Formation” and “Love Yourself.” Beyoncé’s melds rap swagger and pop flash and social subversion. Bieber’s inverts campfire strum-along tropes for a nasty kiss-off that’s perfect for a performer whose persona continually flits between angelic and demonic. Between those two, “Love Yourself” has the better shot; Fox News never declared war on it.

Best New Artist

Contenders: Kelsea Ballerini, The Chainsmokers, Chance the Rapper, Maren Morris, Anderson .Paak

Last year’s winner: Meghan Trainor

The state of play: In this class of legitimately promising young stars, the legitimately irritating electronic-dance bros of The Chainsmokers may be hard to beat. Even if you set aside their insane chart success and factor in the “EDM Nickelback” backlash against them, the “Closer” duo benefit from vote splitting: Ballerini and Morris are climbing up the rungs of country music, and Chance the Rapper and Anderson .Paak have fired up the hip-hop/R&B world.

The 2017 Grammys: Winners and Performances

By the end of the 2017 Grammys, viewers will likely be arguing about one or more of the following: Beyonce, the Bee Gees, Donald Trump. In the meantime, I’ll be updating this post with the winners, remarkable performances, and memorable moments of the night.

A number of awards were handed out at the pre-televised ceremony—Billboard has the list. Highlights include:

David Bowie’s Blackstar earning four trophies, including for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance
Drake’s “Hotline Bling” taking Best Rap Song and Best Rap/Sung Performance
Chance the Rapper earning his first Grammy, with “No Problems” taking Best Rap Performance
John Williams getting his 23rd grammy with Star Wars: The Force Awakens taking Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media
Sturgill Simpson’s album-of-the-year nominee A Sailor’s Guide to Earth winning Best Country Album
Beyoncé’s “Formation” getting Best Music Video
Adele’s 25 winning Best Pop Vocal album, and “Hello” winning Best Pop Solo performance

* * *

Three remarkable looks from the red carpet. Here’s Adele in green:

Jordan Strauss / AP

Here’s Cee Lo Green, as “Gnarly Davidson”:

Jordan Strauss / AP

And here’s the singer Joy Villa with a #MAGA gown. The back says “TRUMP”:

Jordan Strauss / AP

* * *

Here’s the state of play for the four general awards categories, taken from my larger preview of the ceremony:

Album of the Year

Contenders: Adele, 25; Beyoncé, Lemonade; Justin Bieber, Purpose; Drake, Views; Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth

Last year’s winner: Taylor Swift, 1989

The state of play: The conventional wisdom says that this year’s ceremony is a clash between two recent Grammy titans, Adele and Beyoncé—and that Adele’s best-selling but unspectacular 25 is a safer bet than Beyonce’s provocative Lemonade. But watch for Sturgill Simpson. Though the relatively unfamous alt-country singer seems like an underdog, as the sole white guy with a guitar he may benefit from a split vote among the four commercially minded radio stars, recalling when Beck beat Beyoncé’s self-titled release in 2014.

A Sturgill win wouldn’t be undeserved; A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is gobsmackingly beautiful, a bittersweet chronicle of new fatherhood. But Beyoncé’s politically charged, sonically diverse, and tabloid-scrambling Lemonade was a seismic cultural event, and the album’s celebration of identity in the face of disrespect would resonate even in loss: The Grammys haven’t selected a young black artist’s album as best since 2004, and they haven’t picked a black woman since 1999.

Record of the Year

Contenders: Adele, “Hello”; Beyoncé, “Formation”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”; Rihanna ft. Drake, “Work”; Twenty One Pilots, “Stressed Out”

Last year’s winner: Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk”

The state of play: If there’s ever been a hit that’s more a great recording than a great song, it’s Adele’s “Hello,” whose repetition on the page becomes an avalanche in the ear thanks to Adele’s pipes and Greg Kurstin’s production. Nightmare scenario: Grammy voters’ fetish for old-timey authenticity rewards the Danish band Lukas Graham’s “7 Years,” a bit of treacle that uses old-timey authenticity as affectation.

Song of the Year

Contenders: Beyoncé, “Formation”; Adele, “Hello”; Justin Bieber, “Love Yourself”; Lukas Graham, “7 Years”; Mike Posner, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”

Last year’s winner: Ed Sheeran, “Thinking Out Loud”

The state of play: There are two brilliant pop songs in this category, “Formation” and “Love Yourself.” Beyoncé’s melds rap swagger and pop flash and social subversion. Bieber’s inverts campfire strum-along tropes for a nasty kiss-off that’s perfect for a performer whose persona continually flits between angelic and demonic. Between those two, “Love Yourself” has the better shot; Fox News never declared war on it.

Best New Artist

Contenders: Kelsea Ballerini, The Chainsmokers, Chance the Rapper, Maren Morris, Anderson .Paak

Last year’s winner: Meghan Trainor

The state of play: In this class of legitimately promising young stars, the legitimately irritating electronic-dance bros of The Chainsmokers may be hard to beat. Even if you set aside their insane chart success and factor in the “EDM Nickelback” backlash against them, the “Closer” duo benefit from vote splitting: Ballerini and Morris are climbing up the rungs of country music, and Chance the Rapper and Anderson .Paak have fired up the hip-hop/R&B world.