Death of a Showman?

On Sunday night the 53rd Annual Grammys aired on CBS. As a buddy and I texted back and forth about performances and Cee Lo's outfit we both noticed a bandwagon that the Grammys jumped on this year: good music. We were both pleased that a lot of good artists not only were nominated, but actually won i.e. Arcade Fire, Esperanza Spalding etc.

But I don't care about the winners, so much as I care about the performances. And one performance in particular struck me as telling. This performance was the B.o.B, Bruno Mars and Janelle Monáe collaboration. This collaboration worked for me in theory because I mostly like all three of these artists and they all showed off their musical chops by both singing/rapping and playing instruments. But, it was surprisingly Bruno Mars who I thought had setup an excellent platform for which to wow the audience, and ended up falling short. Here is the link to the performance on youtube.


Bruno Mars, B.o.B, Janelle Monae - Medley Live... by wonderful-life1989

I was pumped for Bruno's rendition of Grenade which was laced with Motown/Stax characteristics like backup singers doing call and response and smooth group choreography. Showmanship, what a novel idea. Unfortunately Bruno Mars didn't have the voice to impress. But I liked the effort.

But Bruno's performance got me thinking, now that Michael is gone are we now headed into a world where the next generation will be looking up to Usher and Lady Gaga as their pillars of performance? Is Showmanship slowly dying? I hope not.