The debate of whether or not the Grammys properly reflect popular music and culture feels like it’s been going on for our entire lives, but in truth it’s actually a much more recent conversation — because for a long, long time, they were so far off the mark that it wasn’t even worth debating. Take 1995, a period when alternative rock, crossover R&B and coastal hip-hop were defining the cutting edge, and the Grammys awarded Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged album with album of the year. Or a decade later, when Green Day, Usher and Kanye West were all nominated for game-changing blockbuster LPs, but top prize went to Ray Charles’ posthumous Genius Loves Company. For many decades, wins like these were arguably more rule than exception, and the Grammys reflected that with their performances, which drifted towards safer, adult-contemporary territory and rarely pushed the envelope or showcased the next generation.

If you wanted any of that during the late 20th or early 21st centuries, you’d have to go the MTV Video Music Awards. The VMAs were where the truly culture-shifting moments happened, where the pop, rock and hip-hop stars built their iconic legacies with performances, acceptance speeches and red carpet moments, where the music defining the era’s youth culture was ably represented by the artists on stage and in the audience. (At the VMAs, TLC were the big winners in 1995, while Green Day and Kanye reigned victorious in some of the biggest ’05 categories.) Occasionally, the show glanced towards history, but it was generally much more interested in the present and future, and in providing an alternative for plugged-in viewers who felt alienated by the perennially out-of-touch Grammys.

Which is what makes it so jarring to get to a place where the VMAs is now devoting a truly curious amount of stage time to lifetime-achievement-type performances from artists whose peaks are decades in the rearview, and often awarding its marquee moonpeople to big names with less-timely titles. Meanwhile, this Sunday’s (Feb. 1) Grammys evinced a show increasingly uninterested in either rewarding or handing the stage over to any artist whose commercial peak came during a year that started with a “1” — with its biggest winners lining up more and more frequently with the top of Billboard‘s annual Greatest Pop Star rankings, and creating the kind of vital moments with its performances and acceptance speeches that may still reverberate decades later.

It’s easy now to view last year’s well-received best new artist medley as something of an inflection point for the Grammys in this era. With the usual Spotify best new artist pre-Grammy showcase called off as a result of the California wildfires, the Grammys made the call to feature all eight nominees from the unusually strong 2025 BNA class as performers on its main broadcast, with five of them performing as part of a continuous medley. It was an unusually large amount of time for the Grammys to devote to such relatively unproven names, but the results were a near-best-case-scenario of those artists stepping up and seizing the moment — with Benson Boone backflipping his way into national recognizability, and Doechii leaping to star status almost immediately following her jaw-dropping breakthrough performance. Given the positive response, it made sense for the Grammys to continue moving away from the safer, sturdier veteran-artist performances that it had used to flesh out its lineups for most of the prior decades, particularly during the Ken Ehrlich era, and focus more on today’s and tomorrow’s hitmakers.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t proven vets playing roles of prominence at the 2026 Grammys — just none who fit the Boomer or even Gen X molds of what we’ve long considered a legacy act to be. The legacy acts at this year’s Grammys weren’t traditional pop vocalists or classic rock bands, they were the Clipse, a long-venerated rap duo finally seizing a Grammy moment denied them during their ’00s heyday, or they were Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, long-proven top 40 A-listers who’ve remained so relevant that they even teamed up for the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit of last year. The only 20th century acts on the bill were reserved for tributes to late legends Ozzy Osbourne, D’Angelo and Roberta Flack — and even those mixed contemporary hitmakers like Post Malone and Leon Thomas in with the spare Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fugees. For a show in its final year on CBS, there were surprisingly few obvious concessions made to the Matlock or NCIS demographics.

Of course, as with most things in 2026, it helped to have Bad Bunny in the building. While, for the first time since 2017, Taylor Swift was not present either at the event or in the nominations this year — the Showgirl will certainly be heard from in 2027 — her absence was made less conspicuous by the all-consuming presence of El Conejo Malo, who proved such a magnetic force that host Trevor Noah kept saddling up to him throughout the evening to beg him to perform. Benito declined to do so — gotta wait for the Super Bowl next Sunday for that, though Noah did goad him into joining in on a few bars of “DtMF,” with the help of a pop-up band parading through the crowd. But he did take album of the year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a win that would’ve been near-unthinkable for such an uncompromising Spanish-language album just five years ago, but seems much less so after a half-decade of Bad Bunny’s relentless normalization of such achievements, and of the Grammys aggressively self-modernizing.

He wasn’t the only such winner on the night. For a decade, Kendrick Lamar was perhaps the most unanimously acclaimed and beloved in artist in hip-hop, but still couldn’t break out of the rap categories at the Grammys; now he’s won record of the year two years in a row, this time alongside SZA for “Luther.” (A confused Cher’s proclamation of “Luther Vandross” as the award’s winner will likely go down as one of this year’s eternal moments.) Best pop solo performance usually goes to the biggest artist and/or biggest song — each previous winner this decade had topped either the Hot 100 or the Global 200 — but on Sunday, four of the biggest names in top 40 were left clapping for newcomer Lola Young, whose alt-leaning, frayed-at-the-edges “Messy” was the broadcast’s biggest surprise winner. And even in the rock categories, given out before the telecast and usually awarded to the longest-tenured radio bands, the cult-favorite post-hardcore act Turnstile — who never had a major hit on the airwaves before 2025, but climbed to the second line on this year’s Coachella poster — took home two trophies.

And once again, the performers reflected the shift as well. For the second time in two Grammy tries, Tyler, The Creator gave the night’s most electric performance, with a blending of Chromakopia‘s “Thought I Was Dead” and Don’t Tap the Glass‘ “Sugar on My Tongue” that ended up like an ’80s Michael Jackson video directed by David Lynch. Sabrina Carpenter again proved herself the most reliable artist among current pop stars in cleverly recontextualizing her already-trademark hits with one-off concept performances — this time setting “Manchild” in an airport baggage claim, hardly an obvious thematic match for the song (except for the “baggage” double meaning), but one she sold through one gloriously choreographed mini-setpiece after another. And Gaga and Bruno both stayed out of just-play-the-hits territory by grunging up the arrangements of their respective performances of “Abracadabra” and “APT.” (with ROSÉ), giving those ubiquitous pop singles a newfound edge and vitality.

And yes: The best new artist medley was back, and with an even more pronounced spotlight this time out. While 2025’s medley still carried the air of spontaneity to it, 2026 was clearly the product of grand design, with Addison Rae and KATSEYE kicking things off outside the building, and then the remaining five artists weaving their way through various main-room stages with a choreography nearly as complex and considered as any of the individual performances. (The Marias, like Khruangbin last year, were apparently deemed too vibey for the proper medley and instead were used more as bumper music coming out of the commercial break.) Neither the collective medley nor any of the individual performers quite packed the kinetic energy of last year’s unexpected triumph — but the considerable talent on display, and performances ranging from Rae’s and KATSEYE’s music video-like staging to Olivia Dean and Sombr’s old-school showmanship, showed this class as plenty promising in its own right. It’s certainly worth keeping the best new artist medley around, and making a full tradition out of it.

Even more important to the vitality of this year’s ceremonies than either than the performers or the winners were the speeches. A year after the 2025 Grammys — held in the wake of both the wildfires and President Trump’s second election to office — caught many of our pop A-listers in the mood for statement-making ICE’s violent occupation of several major American cities and the president’s wildly unchecked immigration crackdown proved similarly inspirational in 2026. Bad Bunny and song of the year winner Billie Eilish both delivered unequivocally anti-ICE messages in their speeches — as did Kehlani in her pre-telecast best R&B song acceptance — while best new artist Dean talked about being the granddaughter of an immigrant and best country duo/group performance winner Shaboozey (“Amen” with Jelly Roll) also preached pre-broadcast about immigrants building the country. Coming just weeks after a Golden Globes when few seemed interested in speaking up for causes beyond themselves and their work, the words from pop’s elite on Sunday night were loud and resounding.

The shift towards the new and now for the Grammys was hardly without fault — country, as central a genre as any to contemporary popular music, was almost totally missing from the performances, as was any predominantly non-English music. And no doubt there were plenty of viewers who prefer a little more reliable stability to their Music’s Biggest Night, and were wincing their way through some of the more bombastic, heavily choreographed and perhaps partially lip-synched performances, wondering what the hell the Grammys had been reduced to. But for the first time in decades, the question of the Grammys reflecting popular music and culture need not have been asked, and this time for the opposite reason as 20-30 years ago: Yes, they obviously did, and rather impressively so. And it’s hard to imagine the Grammys going back in the other direction — or the VMAs reclaiming that turf — anytime soon.

The atmosphere outside Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday (Feb. 1) afternoon was organized chaos meets high glitz, as nominees, significant others, publicists, photographers, agents, security guards and other assorted industry folks and fans swanned around the site of the 2026 Grammy Awards.

It was 80 degrees and sunny, but despite the heat, looks stayed fresh as everyone filed inside for the ceremony. A select number of these people eventually made their way on stage to accept awards, and some of them were later routed to the backstage press room to offer remarks to the pool of assembled journalists.

Read on for everything that went down that you didn’t see on TV.

3:14 p.m. PT: While reflecting on his win for best country duo/group performance for “Amen,” his collaboration with Jelly Roll, Shaboozey got emotional several times while talking about being a child of immigrants and how this topic overlaps with the roots of country music itself.

“My parents were born Nigeria and came here and my dad. I know the things he sacrificed, came here and my mother as well,” the artist said. “So to know that I’m an example of that and I’m from that lineage and I’m inspiring people hopefully and just trying to live up my fullest potential. I’ve had so many dreams of being able to do something like this. I’m from a small town in Virginia. I wasn’t the most talented in any respect, but I had dreams; I was a dreamer. And I think this is just a representation of one of my dreams.” The artist then took a moment to fight back tears, getting applause and encouragement from those gathered in the room.

Then speaking about the history of country music, Shaboozey continued that “the banjo came from West Africa … Irish immigrants and Irish settlers came here along with people who were forced to be here to work on this country. They kept their stories, they kept their traditions, they could have let all of that die with them. They had to have hope to bring those stories here … country music and music is general is just people being brave and having hope and continuing to keep something alive.”

7:05 p.m. PT: Coming backstage to speak about winning all three Grammys he was nominated for, including best contemporary country album for his Beautifully Broken LP, Jelly Roll smiled big and announced that “as you can imagine, I’m f–king elated!”

When asked what his younger self would think of the accomplishment, he said, “If 16-year-old me could see this, he would probably think to himself, ‘How in the hell are we going to end up there?’ I would tell him that everything that’s happening, believe it or not, as horrible as some of things that are going to happen are going to be, God is going to use that in a way you can never dream of. On the world’s biggest stage you’re going to sweep and go three for three in front of the world. You’re going to scream his name, people are going to cheer for you and you’re going to shut down the Sunset Strip and turn a little water into wine, baby!”

The artist, who recently lost roughly 275 pounds, was then asked about how he got the weight off. He advised, “First of all, I did it with a lot of consistent cardio and food. I had to fight my food addiction just the way I fought my cocaine addiction. I had to really take it serious; I had to change my relationship with food; I had to do a lot of mental therapy and a lot of mental work … Never did a GLP-1, but I don’t judge nobody who does it. Anybody who’s 500 pounds, I don’t care if you take one shot or 10. Do whatever it takes to get the weight off, don’t listen to nobody else. Get your life straight and save that heart.”

Jelly Roll was also asked about the advice he’d give to people going through hard times in their lives, with the artist, who’s been very open about his own experiences with drug addiction and jail time, observing that “the saddest feeling that we can all feel is hopelessness and loneliness. I say plug into something. Find a community, find a source of love, get way from the hate on the internet and go connect with actual people. If you’re struggling with drugs, I suggest you go find an AA room or an NA room, and you’d be surprised by how fast you can connect. Or a local church, or a local mosque. Go connect with community and people who are doing stuff for betterment, get away from the toxicity on the internet.”

7:48 p.m. PT: After winning the award for best pop solo performance for her hit song “Messy,” Lola Young came backstage and was asked why she thinks the song resonates with people so deeply. The British artist observed: “I feel like ‘Messy’ is a song that symbolizes how we all feel. I’m very proud of this song. I feel it speaks on just being a messy human being, and not being enough for the world. That’s how a lot of us feel a lot of the time, and I how I felt a lot of the time, so that’s why I think it related.”

Young then also comments on the hiatus she took in late 2025, announcing last September that she was “going away for a while” after collapsing on stage at All Things Go Festival. Speaking to this situation and her comeback with a Grammy win, Young said, “I would say this is a very difficult industry to be in, and I took the time out to get better, because there was a lot of things going on in my head and in my personal life. We constantly have to be protected as artists, and I had to make a decision to do it for myself and to be kind to myself and give myself space, but now I am back.

“I feel better,” she continued. “I will do as much as I can to be good for my fans and to be good for the people that love me, and thank you to all of my fans and everyone who supports me and is following me on this journey. It’s a great and beautiful moment for me, this is.”

7:42 p.m. PT: The songwriting team behind K-Pop Demon Hunters sensation “Golden” arrived backstage to discuss the song’s win for best song written for visual media. The group’s EJAE gushed, “So proud to be Korean. Growing up, people didn’t know where Korea was and what Korea was. That’s why it’s so incredible to have ‘Golden’ being sung all over the world, [seeing people] singing Korean lyrics word by word means so much. I think this award is about that representation; today is about celebrating culture, and music that unites all cultures and we need that right now.”

8:42 p.m. PT: Jon Batiste, who has an incredible 25 Grammy nominations and eight wins dating back to 2019, came backstage to discuss winning the award for best Americana album (for his Big Money LP) and then performing in the all-star tribute to Roberta Flack and D’Angelo.

“To come and celebrate the life of D’Angelo and Roberta Flack with Ms. Lauryn Hill and all my friends, it was a reunion on stage. It was like Black music Avengers. It was a great vibe, and rehearsal was like that too, there were so many stories, just interconnected in ways that we knew and didn’t know. I’m all about lineage, and this music is bigger than any one person. It’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than anybody, it’s bigger than any award.”

9:13 p.m. PT: When asked why is it important for artists to speak on social issues, as many artists did on Grammy night, SZA remarked, “It’s incredibly dystopian that we’re dressed up and able to celebrate accolades and the material world and people are getting snatched up and shot in the face on the street. It just feels bizarre, and I find so many of us don’t really know how to feel right now, besides rage and hopelessness, and I don’t feel like that’s the calling card I want to subscribe to.

“I really believe in great possibility,” she continued. “I believe that entropy can rechange. I believe that this is a time when we can dig deep as a community and really learn that it’s not time to count on anyone else but us and our neighbors to protect ourselves, to provide for each other, to be that morale booster, to disseminate mutual aid, to take are of each other. I just feel like, yay, that’s an amazing opportunity, boo that this is even happening. It’s always f–k ICE, but it’s also matter of, I just don’t want everyone to fall into despair, because when you lose morale, change becomes impossible, but it’s so not. I personally am not going. I will not being going quietly into the dying of the light, so I encourage everyone the same.”

The room burst into applause.