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Nicki Minaj puts the ‘Devil’ back into the Devil’s music at the Grammys

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I’m drawn to The Grammy Awards much in the same way that I find myself rubbernecking at a multi-car pile up on the freeway or dropping a crisp dollar bill to see the two-headed cow at a carnival sideshow. This year’s production wasn’t much different than the usual pop star circle jerk. The Boss opened the festivities with his usual blue collar bombast (which I did find rousing) followed by….well, I can’t really remember. Disembodied heads float through my brain like balloons at a birthday party - I think that one is Brian Wilson…oh look, Paul McCartney…isn’t that a Foo Fighter…George Jones?...no, Glen Campbell. For a moment, I thought I saw James Brown but according to later reports it was Bruno Mars channeling the lost Hawaiian member of Sha Na Na.

Alright, I’m fucking around here. No one expects much of the Grammys and it always pretty much lives up to our diminished expectations even in a year when the ghost of Whitney Houston hovered above the ceremony, stuck in some kind of twisted Bardo Plane, a malignant magnetic field that humans create to entrap the vestiges of the ones they love, as if the dead are paying attention to any of it. If Whitney managed to make it to heaven she had to bypass the purgatory of media hype. Among the dead, this is known as tabloid turbulence. As I’m not a fan of the long wail that follows a pop stars death, that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate Houston’s talents. But I save my hue and cry and gnashing of teeth for Syria, Libya, Greece and the radiated folks who lived near the Fukishima power plant. You know what I mean? Or maybe you don’t. Go ahead tell me that I’ve somehow disrespected Whitney in our national hour of mourning. Fine. I can dig it.

So where is all this leading? Well, it leads to the performance that managed to transform the banalities of award ceremonies into something so awesomely tacky, cheesy and sublime that it makes Madonna’s appearance at the Super Bowl look like a classy outtake from Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra. I’m talking about Nicki Minaj’s delirious take on her hit “Roman Holiday,” a spectacle so staggeringly unhinged that I thought I had taken some Ambien and wandered into a theater where a triple bill of Showgirls, Flaming Creatures and The Exorcist were playing simultaneously while a popcorn machine was ejaculating giant buttered nuggets into my lap causing my scrotum to pulsate like a vibrating bed in a sleazy motel somewhere on Route 666. And I loved it!

Dave Grohl may have worn a Slayer t-shirt but it was Minaj that brought the dark stuff to the Grammys.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.13.2012
03:19 am
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