Prizes for Silk Sonic, Doja Cat and Olivia Rodrigo showed the awards at their best – which can’t be said for Louis CK’s honour
There’s nothing the Grammys like more than classiness. Many of the albums and songs to have won the top prizes have been ones that are handsomely, rather than raggedly, made; emotionally forthright but keeping themselves in check. And so it proved at the 2022 ceremony, where strong work of great classiness by Silk Sonic, Jon Batiste and Olivia Rodrigo secured the big prizes.
Silk Sonic’s Leave the Door Open is a very deserved winner of four awards, for record and song of the year, plus R&B performance and R&B song (the latter shared with Jazmine Sullivan, also the rightful winner of R&B album). With its immaculate session musicianship and vocal harmonising, it seems to be in conversation with R&B itself, lampooning the earnest lust of the late 70s and 80s iteration of the genre but not mocking it. There is a kind of sketch comedy detail to the way Anderson Paak makes sure all the bases are covered to seal the romantic deal, proffering fillet steaks and marijuana – but without such sumptuous songwriting it would have risked coming off as a Lonely Island-type parody. These wins mean Paak’s Silk Sonic partner Bruno Mars is now a 14-time winner, and Mars is perhaps the very vision of what the Recording Academy loves: technically brilliant, in tune with history and alive to love and sex without being threateningly erotic.
