The Grammys Hallway Of Mirrors: How Celebrity Performative Politics Infects Culture

Over the weekend, we learned about a very powerful, very rich cadre of people who think they have inordinate control over the direction of our nation’s politics.

I’m speaking, of course, about the Grammys.

This year’s Grammys were filled with our usual celebrity geniuses spouting their usual performative politics to the cheers of their fellow celebrities.

The reason I’m pointing this out is because if you ever wonder what the room is like where special people hash out what our culture ought to look like, it looks like the Grammys.

What makes the Grammys and so many of our award shows fascinating is that they are an inside look for the rest of the world of what these people actually sound like at dinner parties.

I know a lot of the people in Hollywood. I’ve spoken with many of them. Far too often, we see people patting themselves on the back for their performative version of the most extreme radical politics in our society.

That’s the reason we are so annoyed when it shows up on our television. When people tune into the Grammys or the Oscars or any other awards show, what they expect is a celebration of the culture that we all share, the music or films that we all enjoy.

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Instead, what we usually get is a cocktail party punctuated by some people who share lifestyles holding up the trophy. These are the most protected, wealthy people in our society, and the people who share that lifestyle are people who tend to share their politics.

And they act as if we, the little people, are privileged because they are sharing their politics with us.

Sunday night at the Grammys, virtually every performer decided they were going to lead by ripping into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration. 

Obviously, there are other things going on in the world, and sometimes that’s the focus. Just a year or two ago, virtually everyone at the Grammys said something about the supposed evils of the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.

Now, of course, the Iranian government has been mowing down protesters, perhaps by the tens of thousands.

Not one single word about that at the Grammys.

But lots of words for Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing its job in Minneapolis.

Bad Bunny, whose real name is apparently Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, and who was nominated for six Grammys, won an award for his album.

He’s the same guy who is supposed to perform at the Super Bowl, apparently wearing a dress, which is exactly what we all want.

(Because if you’re showing your nine-year-old son the Super Bowl, where men are men and athletic performance and grit and determination and heart are the keys to victory, what you really want is a dude gallivanting around in ladies’ garments during halftime.)

Stewart Cook/CBS via Getty Images

Bad Bunny proceeded to rip into ICE, which is precisely what we need to hear from this human.

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ‘ICE out,” he declared to thunderous applause. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans. And also, I want to say to people I know it’s tough not to hate on these days. … The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love.”

Deep words. Love is more powerful than hate. That is deep verbiage. I can see why he is such an acclaimed songwriter and performer.

I love how celebrities really believe that they are Michael Scott in “The Office.” They think they can walk into the middle of a room and shout, “I declare bankruptcy,” and it is legally effective.

If you go into a room with all of your fellow celebrities protected by armed security outside, where every single human who comes into that arena has to have their background checked, you can sit there and tell the rest of America that no protection is available — for them.

Billie Eilish —whom I would guess not only has armed security but a palatial estate surrounded by a fence because she has stalker problems— said, “nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

By stolen land, I assume she means all of planet Earth, since populations have been moving since the beginning of recorded human history.

Billie Eilish does look significantly less unhappy since she started dating a dude. At least, she’s got that going for her.

Olivia Dean chimed in, “I guess I want to say I’m up here as a granddaughter of an immigrant, I wouldn’t be here.”

I should point out that a huge percentage of Americans have ancestors who came here at some point.

Oh, the bravery of these people. They all think alike. They all act as if they have similar lifestyles, and they are speaking to you, the little people, the people who don’t have armed security at your palatial estates or have people pay you millions upon millions of dollars to sing songs written by a large coterie of other people.

You need to hear their voices. You need to hear their words. These are the tastemakers. These are the people shaping the culture for our children.

Gloria Estefan compared ICE to the Holocaust.

You can’t just compare something to the Holocaust. Picking up individual illegal immigrants and sending them back to their home countries is not the same as an entire war infrastructure set up to systematically murder millions of people of a particular race.

America is not Nazi Germany. You know what you didn’t see in the middle of World War II? A bunch of artists getting up on red carpets, talking about how terrible the Nazis were — in Berlin.

Francis Specker/CBS via Getty Images

And of course, we got Trevor Noah hosting the Grammys, where he was his usual smarmy, obnoxious self, ripping Nicki Minaj for the great sin of having gone to the White House to promote the Trump accounts, which are savings accounts being set up for American children. “She is still at the White House with Donald Trump discussing very important issues,” he mocked to cheers from the audience.

I love that all the people cheering when he mocks Nicki Minaj for “discussing serious issues” act as though they are discussing serious issues.

They sing songs that are overproduced in autotune, and then they go on stage and pretend they know something about policy.

Noah dropped what he thought was a joke about Epstein Island and Trump and suggested that the president had been to Epstein Island. Trump fired back, threatening to sue Trevor Noah.

Why is any of this really important? Because when you have all the cultural tastemakers who are all pushing the same politics, that is likely to seep out into the broader culture, and sometimes these politics can go viral and turn into a brain worm that eats the American body politic.

You saw this, for example, with the trans issue, pushed by every cultural arbiter in American society. For a decade, this was promoted as the way to decide whether a person was virtuous or not, whether they were willing to say that a boy could be a girl and a girl could be a boy. 

It does make a difference when the entire cultural apparatus mobilizes behind an issue.

But there is something else here that is also worthy of note. Celebrities have their own social circle that tends to mirror itself. It is, in fact, a hallway of mirrors. You’re not welcome in a lot of these social circles if you have different politics. You cannot succeed if you don’t mirror their politics.

The story of Hollywood in its most depraved form, writ small, would be the Diddy “White Parties.” That was Hollywood in its most depraved form, writ small. That was a microcosm of what Hollywood is. That was the most extreme version of what’s happening in that cultural milieu.

But we are supposed to be privileged to listen to what these kinds of people have to say.