Rachel Sennott is worried. Sennott, the star of Shiva Baby and Bodies Bodies Bodies, is a truly exciting actor who can’t help but come across as a fully-formed human being. In The Idol, the Weeknd and Sam Levinson’s much-discussed new HBO show, Sennott might be the only fully-formed human being in sight. Sennott plays Leia, the friend and personal assistant to Jocelyn, the vaporous pop star played by Hollywood scion Lily-Rose Depp. One night, Leia and Jocelyn are sitting around and watching Basic Instinct, the kind of sleekly sleazy entertainment that The Idol aspires to be. Jocelyn decides that she wants some male companionship, so she’s booty calling Tedros, a mysterious nightclub owner played by the Weeknd. She’s only just met him, but she’s intrigued.

There will be no new album. There will be no tour, either. Rihanna says she’s “excited” to release new music but that she has no updates on what that new music will be, when it will arrive. Don’t hold your breath. Back when she was the most consistent hitmaker in all of pop music, Rihanna would reliably crank out a new album full of monster singles once a year. But last night, when Rihanna returned to the stage — or to the floating space-platforms that did the work of a stage — she sang nothing new. She didn’t sing anything from the past five years because she barely has any music from the past five years. Instead, Rihanna made a different type of announcement.

Who needs live music, anyway? ABBA’s going on tour in hologram form. Travis Scott brought Astroworld into Fortnite. Artists keep offering “virtual experiences,” livestreams, and festivals over screens — maybe in-person performance is passé in pandemic times.

Pop culture and corporate forces love to tout “music” as a unifying metaphor. “Music” as an idea and Music™ as a business turn a bigger profit than music as music. And Hollywood is really taking “When words fail, music speaks” to heart this year.

The mere existence of Hulu's High Fidelity remake is, on a level, perplexing. The 10-episode series developed by TV vets Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka (Hart Of Dixie, GCB) marks the third time that Nick Hornby's 1995 novel has been adapted for another medium. If you missed the 2006 Broadway musical's extremely short-lived run (13 performances and 18 previews in total), you're likely familiar with Stephen Frears' quasi-iconic 2000 film adaptation, which featured John Cusack as lovesick record store proprietor Rob.

Just when it seemed this year's Grammys would be defined by scandal, they were defined by death instead.

There's a moment three episodes into Ken Burns' new eight-episode/16-hour binge-doc Country Music when I had to hit pause. Ernest Tubb, an up-and-coming country crooner who loves to sing but hates his voice, visits the widow of his hero, Jimmie Rodgers, popularly known as the Singing Brakeman and generally considered the first superstar in country music. She loans him her late husband's signature guitar, which is already iconic, with his name spelled out in iridescent mother-of-pearl along the neck. Together, the three of them embark on a tour of theaters and honkytonks, although it's not quite clear who's getting top billing: the widow, the acolyte, or the instrument. One show poster reads, "Ernest Tubb singing and playing 'Jimmies famous $1500.00 guitar,'" and the second half of that announcement gets a lot more space on the page than the first part.

Could it have been any more obvious that the Grammys were desperately trying to do some serious image rehab this year? You don't drag out Lady Gaga, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and Michelle motherfucking Obama in the first five minutes of your telecast unless you're hoping to do some course-correction when it comes to how your industry treats and recognizes anyone who isn't a man.

Before this year's Grammys, news broke that Lorde would not be performing at the ceremony, since the producers wouldn't let her sing one of her own songs -- an invitation extended to all four other Album Of The Year nominees, all of whom were men. So in looking at this year's performances, of which there were many, a question naturally arose: Is the show any better with this performance instead of Lorde? And in virtually every case, the answer was: No. Fuck no. Are you kidding me? No. Jesus. No.

Some of us dared to dream that maybe the Grammys would have a good year this year. They'd nominated a diverse and often worthy group of records, and they'd announced a strange and fascinating roster of performers. But the Grammys will be the Grammys, and the show will always find some way to slowly drag the life out of you. Our own Chris DeVille was entirely right: The Grammys, once again, sucked. And when the show finally awarded Album Of The Year to Adele over Beyoncé, giving the English singer a clean sweep of the major categories, it was only the latest and greatest indignity in a long, long series of them.

But as ever, the Grammys hosted a few great performances, including one or two that might've even justified the continued existence of our most tangled and confused awards show. Below, as we did last year, we have ranked this year's many Grammy performances, from the irredeemably shitty to the genuinely great.

In a year of prestige TV featuring respected auteurs mixing music history with fiction like Vinyl and The Get Down, the best thing about Cameron Crowe's Showtime series Roadies may be its relative lack of ambition. Instead of heroic musical innovators creating new genres, the protagonists of Roadies are the touring crew of an arena rock act, working out the day to day logistics of putting on a show. But as the show's flawed, low rated first season comes to a close this weekend, and I wonder whether the network will pick it up for renewal, I find myself hoping Roadies gets a chance to continue, and improve.

Hey, we made it through another year! This was the first year I can remember in which all five Album Of The Year nominees were, in one way or another, pretty good. And that led some of us to the foolish, optimistic belief that this could be a pretty good Grammy telecast. Nope! Never underestimate the Grammys' ability to take good performers and turn them into leaden paragons of respectability. This year's show saw so many acoustic-guitar lullabies that it's a wonder anyone made it to the OK-they're-just-trolling-us-now Pitbull/Travis Barker/Robin Thicke finale. The vast majority of the performances were pure, unalloyed garbage, with only a couple of bright spots buried in there. Let's relive the horrorshow, in descending order of awfulness. (I'm not including half-performances, like Miguel's sleepy Michael Jackson cover and the please-pay-for-music piano kid.)

Somewhere between the third and fourth tribute performances, a few minutes after Meghan Trainor won Best New Artist, reality set in: These are not the bold new Grammys of our imagination. A promising slate of nominees had our hopes up for a night when deserving winners claimed all the major categories, and maybe the ceremony would even be watchable rather than hate-watchable. But no, we got the same old, lame old Grammys. They always sucker me into forgetting that most of the awards are handed out before the telecast, that most of the musical numbers won't even feature contemporary hits let alone songs nominated for Grammys, that John Legend will find a way to be on stage again. Even relatively new traditions, like inviting LL Cool J to host and having Taylor Swift open the show and tricking Kendrick Lamar into thinking this would be his night, felt uncomfortably played out.

Vinyl, Martin Scorcese and Mick Jagger's much-hyped series about record company men in early '70s NYC, premiered last night on HBO. Stereogum turned to punk luminary and author Richard Hell (Television, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell & The Voidoids) to assess the first episode. As it turns out, the frontman of the show's fictional group the Nasty Bits is based at least partly on Hell. Jagger's son James, who plays the singer named Kip Stevens, said as much in a recent interview. You can see the resemblance during an early performance scene:

The MTV Video Music Awards are, by their very nature, extremely awkward. Maybe it's just that I long since aged out of the network's key demo, but the entire enterprise feels teeth-clenchingly forced and needlessly faux-outrageous -- even Miley Cyrus' freed nipple in a night filled with NSFW moments. But if you're a pop-culture addict (or an employee of a pop-culture website), you watch, even if it means subjecting yourself to hours of cringing, because maybe Kanye West will surprise-release his new album or at least go on one of his trademark rants/inspirational speeches and finish up by announcing he's running for president five years from now. Even on a night that felt like one elongated awkward moment, these stood out.

The most uneventful Grammys in recent memory climaxed with an utterly anticlimactic Album Of The Year winner. Rarely has such a shocking upset felt so bereft of drama, and it could not have been more fitting. The triumph of Beck's Morning Phase wasn't even a head-scratcher of the Steely-Dan-in-2001 or Herbie-Hancock-in-2008 variety so much as the most pronounced shrug in a night full of ¯\_(?)_/¯. There's not anything wrong with Morning Phase, really. It's the epitome of nice and easy, a pleasant morning sunbeam of a record, an expertly crafted soundtrack for rubbing the sand out of the corner of your eye. We at Stereogum praised it in our review and liked it enough to put it in our mid-2014 albums roundup. But when it came time to honor 2014's absolute best at year's end, we left it off the list. I doubt the artist himself would have protested; when the British music mag Mojo put Morning Phase at the top of its 2014 albums list last November, Beck tweeted "Morning Phase: #1 of 2014? Thanks @MOJOmagazine" as if he had inherited a small fortune from some previously unknown uncle. He seemed grateful but confused, the same way he looked while accepting the Grammy tonight, even beckoning Kanye West when West feigned another stage crash to defend Beyoncé's honor. Beck is nothing if not a man of exquisite taste, and like most people with taste, he knew who deserved to win.

Robots ruled the 56th annual Grammys. Daft Punk seized both Album and Record Of The Year for Random Access Memories and "Get Lucky," respectively, plus Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Best Dance/Electronica Album for a total of four awards. Their cohort Pharrell tacked on Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical in the pre-telecast and took home the award for largest hat in spirit (his outfit was "Buffalo Gals"-inspired, in case you were wondering). The RAM crew also teamed with Stevie Wonder for the night's most universally beloved performance, so it's fair to say Daft Punk won the Grammys by every possible measure. And they didn't even have to stay up all night to do it! Pharrell's right: "I bet France is really proud of these guys right now."

About two thirds of the way through last night's endless Grammy ceremony, Justin Timberlake ambled onstage for the second time, this time to flank Recording Academy CEO and inveterate pirate-scolder Neil Portnoy. Timberlake asked a question: "Best Grammys ever?" Then he answered himself: "Best Grammys ever." Well, no, Justin. The idea of a "best" Grammys, or even an "OK" Grammys, is nearly impossible to conceive. As far as I can remember, the best Grammys ever was 1998, when Ol' Dirty Bastard soy bombed Shawn Colvin and Soy Bomb soy bombed Bob Dylan, if only because that was the year that the entire enterprise seemed to be falling apart, with fun and interesting results. Since then, precious little has interrupted the Grammy parade of self-congratulation and bad old-people decision-making. Last night falls somewhere on a long and predictable continuum of disappointment.

Barely 24 hours before this year's Grammy Awards ceremony began, Whitney Houston, a woman who'd once seemed like a cyborg engineered to win as many Grammys as possible, was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room. Houston was exactly the sort of artist who the Grammys are built to honor -- enormously talented, ridiculously popular, showy in a way that people in the cheap seats could hear just fine, willing to completely ignore any youth-culture musical trends. She was Grammy royalty before her demons brought her down, and the show should've bent itself into pretzels to honor her legacy. It should've opened with Mariah Carey or Adele or Dolly Parton or maybe even Beyoncé belting out "I Will Always Love You," and it should've thrown tons of clips of her in, every time it went to commercial. That didn't happen.