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A few years ago, back in time; some kids thought up some MC rhymes.

Actually, it was just about 50 years ago that Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy threw a party in the recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — widely accepted as the birthplace of hip-hop. With the 50th anniversary of that party swiftly approaching, 2023 has become a year of celebrations of the world-changing genre and culture called hip-hop, and the Grammys are no exception.

The 2023 Grammy Awards honored the 50th anniversary of hip-hop with a tribute hosted by none other than LL Cool J, who has become the de facto torchbearer for the Golden Era of the ’80s and early ’90s when hip-hop went from being a regional fad to a global phenomenon.

The performance included contributions from across the hip-hop landscape, with old-schoolers like Grandmaster Flash, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Rakim, RUN-DMC, and Salt-N-Pepa mashing up with newjacks like Future, GloRilla, and Lil Baby. All-timers like Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, Missy Elliott, Method Man, Nelly, and Too Short bridged the gaps, all conducted by Questlove of The Roots and his bandmate Black Thought, who provided narration.

“The Message,” “The King Of Rock,” “Radio,” “Rock The Bells,” “My Mic Sounds Nice,” “My Melody,” “BUDDY,” “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” “UNITY,” and more foundational hits set things off but the performance ran the gamut from “ATLiens,” “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Where My Eyes Could See,” and “Outta Control” to “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and “Just Wanna Rock.” Oddly, though, the performance skipped straight from The LOX performing “We Gonna Make It” to Lil Baby playing “Freestyle,” leaving just about a whole decade and a half on the table.

You can check out clips from the performance above and see the full list of Grammy winners here.

Mary J. Blige returned to the Grammy stage tonight for a powerful performance of the title track from her Grammy-nominated album, Good Morning Gorgeous.

On stage, Mary stood in an activation resembling a morning sky, surrounded by clouds, and displaying a wide range of vocals that have aged like fine wine. Joined by cellists, she dived deep into her range, reminding the audience — and most importantly — herself

Good Morning Gorgeous pulled in six nominations for this year’s awards, as its title track is up for Record Of The Year,
Best Traditional R&B Performance, Best R&B Song. Her Anderson .Paak collaboration “Here With Me” is nominated for Best R&B Performance, and the album itself is up for Best R&B Album and the highly coveted Album Of The Year.

But even with all of these nominations, as well as her nine past wins, Mary revealed to People last month that she still makes time to center and ground herself. She does so with her morning ritual, by reciting “Good morning, gorgeous” to herself in the mirror.

“I do it in my prayer time. There’s no makeup, no nominations for an award,” she said. “It’s just me and God. And the beauty of being able to say, “I appreciate my life.” To look in the mirror, my eyes are half closed, and say something to myself that I never even believed.”

You can check out the performance of “Good Morning Gorgeous” above.

Mary J. Blige is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When it comes to hip-hop artists, the Grammys are far from the only award show to get themselves into hot water with an ill-timed omission. But they have been uniquely consistent in overlooking artists whose contributions to rap feel as crucial as their omissions have been glaring. Unfortunately, this year proved no different as the In Memoriam segment left out one of Southern Rap’s true pioneers: Gangsta Boo, who passed at 43 on New Year’s Day.

Rap fans were rightfully miffed when they didn’t see Gangsta Boo’s name during the segment. Gangsta Boo, who was a founding member of Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia before embarking on a respected and successful solo career of her own, has been honored by many of her peers, collaborators, and fans in the month since her death was announced. Unfortunately, for the Grammys to overlook her contributions constitutes an oversight far too familiar to the female pioneers of hip-hop.

That said, there are a lot of other ways the Grammys could have whiffed that it avoided. During ABC’s 2022 retrospective special, a photo of Quavo was used during a tribute to Takeoff, prompting the familiar outcry that “not all Black people look alike.” During the Grammys, Quavo offered a tribute of his own to Takeoff, performing his song “Without You” backed by a gospel choir.

The Grammys continue to announce this year’s winners; you can follow along here.

Beyoncé entered the 2023 Grammys today (February 5) already a winner. She’s the most-nominated artist of the night with nine total nods. That put her at 88 total nominations, which tied husband Jay-Z for the most in Grammy history. This made it possible for her to break the all-time record for the most total Grammy wins tonight. The record was 31 career wins, and now, the Grammy Awards have a new all-time champ: With Renaissance winning the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Music Album, Beyoncé officially earned her 32nd Grammy Award and broke the record.

While announcing the winner, host Trevor Noah made it clear that history had been made. After declaring Renaissance the victor, Beyoncé took the stage for an acceptance speech. She was clearly moved by the moment, as she took a few seconds to collect herself as she stood behind the mic with her record-breaking trophy in hand.

She started, “I want to thank God for protecting me. Thank you, God.” As she continued to speak and thank important people in her life, she appeared to be on the verge of tears as she experienced one of the biggest moments of her career/life.

Find the full list of this year’s Grammy nominees and winners here.

Sam Smith and Kim Petras dropped by the 2023 Grammy Awards to bless the crowds with a religious experience of their chart-topping hit “Unholy.”

Madonna introduced them by noting that “fearlessness does not go unnoticed,” just moments after Petras dedicated her winning speech to the pop icon.

Decked out in devilish red, Petras and Smith danced around the flames — fitting the chaotic themes of the track. She even performed from a pretend jail cell, while Smith donned a hat with horns.

“Unholy” earned the award earlier tonight for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. Smith has won four total Grammys throughout their career, while this is Petras’ first acknowledgement by the Recording Academy.

Smith and Petras appeared on the red carpet earlier this afternoon alongside Violet Chachki. All three stars were channeling some serious demonic vibes in similar red outfits.

“This is going to be special,” Smith teased about the duo’s performance on Twitter. They also shared two photos from what appears to be backstage rehearsals.

“I remember, it was like four or five o’clock in the afternoon. She had been recording for hours. And me and her just had this chat and we were like, ‘No, no, no. We need to scrap everything we’ve done, and rewrite it,’” Smith previously shared on Michelle Visage’s Rule Breakers podcast (via Pride). “And she went in and it was unbelievable. She basically wrote the entire melody in one take, and then we came in and we worked on the lyrics for her verse. And it was just so fun.”

Watch Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” performance above.

View Uproxx’s complete list of the 2023 Grammy Award winners here.

After stalling the apocalyptic action for a brilliant breakaway episode of television, The Last of Us returns this week to remind us that, even when the world ends — or maybe especially so — it’s people who are the real plague.

Episode four’s “Please Hold My Hand” doesn’t feel as exciting or impressive as its predecessor. Instead, it’s the morning after hangover, the serotonin-sapped come-down that’s happy enough to plod the plot along and let us all recover from the dizzying emotional heights of watching Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett build a happily-ever-after with strawberry fields and barbed wire and Linda Ronstadt in episode three’s “Long Long Time.” That’s not to say nothing happens or that this show’s entertainment value has somehow dropped off in between installments. More so that we’ve returned from an idyllic vacation in fungus-free suburbia and now we’re back to the grind of survival.

RV There Yet?

Few things grate the psyche more than a long and meandering road trip but add in a lack of working gas stations and a teenage passenger with a book of terrible puns and the idea of a cross-country trek by truck seems almost as hellish as fungi invading your synapses. Joel is exhaust-ed (fine, we’ll stop) with trying to explain the mechanics of gas siphoning while Ellie cracks lame jokes and wanders aimlessly like they’re not stuck in an American diaspora where the most unassuming shroom or toadstool could kill you. They’ve got a day and some change before they get to Wyoming, where Joel hopes his brother Tommy is still camped, and the drive drags more backstory about their post-outbreak selves from the stoic loner.

Unlike Joel whose worldview seems drenched in cynicism at the moment, Tommy has always been, as he puts it, a “joiner.” An idealist at best, a wannabe hero at worst, that need to make a difference pushed him to first join the Army, then a group of scavengers once the world went to hell, and now, the Fireflies, who he believes are trying to put it back together again. While Joel wants to outrun any sense of purpose, Tommy barrels headfirst toward anything that even remotely resembles it. It’s a noble quality, but an irritatingly naive one to hold onto post-apocalypse.

Joel and Ellie don’t share that same drive though they do bond on their way to finding someone who does — over Hank Williams songs set to the backdrop of sprawling plains dotted with roaming buffalo and decaying war tanks. They bond too over how good 20-year-old Chef Boyardee tastes and Joel’s secondhand embarrassment when Ellie finds a glossy artifact of Bill’s — a sticky bit of gay erotica that should please easter egg-hunting gamers.

Mostly though they bond over the monotony of apocalyptic life and the paradox of wanting to find others and not knowing if others will be what kills you in the end.

Deadly Detours

We’ve watched enough of these shows to know it’s people — the uninfected, unbitten kind — that pose the biggest threat once the trappings of society are shed like dead skin and the ugly moral void of humanity peeks through. And we’ve seen this part of the story enough to recognize when an actual roadblock — this time in the form of an overturned Sarah Lee bread truck barring Ellie and Joel’s path around Kansas City — represents a metaphorical detour that’s about to throw everything into complete chaos. Joel should know better than to venture into any major city, so we can only assume the hours spent listening to Ellie recite puns from that cursed pamphlet have finally addled his brain. Whatever the reason, the shortcut proves dumb and dangerous. The city’s QZ has been demolished and raiders are left roaming the street. The pair try to avoid one of their traps — one Joel recognizes instantly because he’s pulled the same scam before — but that only ends in busted tires and a pitstop into a street front boutique.

Ellie hides in a crawlspace while Joel trades bullets with the group, eventually emerging to use her Chekhov’s gun to shoot one of the scavengers in the back before they can finish Joel. She doesn’t kill him outright — that act is done by Joel and his knife off-screen — but semantics don’t really matter when you’re a teenage girl watching a grown man beg for his life for the first time. Later, when the two are hiding out in a different shop, waiting for the city to go quiet so that they can escape, they’ll hash out this nasty bit of business. Joel’s paternal instincts will begin to wake back up — groggy, crusty-eyed, and mumbling incoherent apologies for failing the child he’s supposed to protect (again). He’ll teach her to hold a gun while awkwardly extending a bit of comfort that she quickly bats away revealing that the stranger who cried for his mother in his final moments isn’t the first she’s killed. In the fungal apocalypse, kids sure do grow up fast.

For now, though, they’re stuck evading a ragtag militia with its own agenda and a manic leader on a deranged quest for revenge.

Either Hunter, Or Prey

Episode four seems to cover a storyline in the game known as the Pittsburgh section. That won’t really matter to non-players, and the location change doesn’t really factor in any meaningful way on the show either. Who does benefit from this small-screen revision are the villains. The Last of Us isn’t really a show about fungal plagues and post-pandemic isolation and societal downfall — it’s about what remains after all of those things take place. Us. People. Good and bad, weak and capable, leaders and followers, hunters and prey. We’re obviously meant to root for Joel and Ellie, but by giving face to the “bad guys” they encounter — along with vague, trauma-tinged backstories that make you question how bad things were for everyone else while we focused on Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s journey — the show humanizes them, adding a needed layer of nuance to the concept of survival. What it takes. Why it matters. And who gets to win at it.

Naturally, the best way to make us care about a power-tripping tyrant is to cast Melanie Lynskey in the role. There’s something immediately disarming about the way she plays Kathleen here — as if this woman strong-arming the elderly in a FEDRA detention cell today could’ve been one of the moms in the school’s carpool line a week ago. Kathleen is on the warpath, willing to hold people she’s known her entire life at gunpoint to find the traitors who sold her brother out to FEDRA soldiers before the QZ was taken. She’s got a crazed obsession with finding a man named Henry, one that leads her to incorrectly assume the bodies dispatched by Joel and Ellie come courtesy of him.

It’s clear early on Kathleen is likely not a leader that’s been tested in any meaningful way. Maybe she led an uprising, but governing a bunch of bloodthirsty rebels high off overthrowing a dystopian dictatorship requires patience and thoughtful maneuvering and she lacks both. She kills what may be the group’s only doctor. She sends her entire army out looking for Joel and Ellie. She orders her henchman to keep quiet about a sewer-dwelling menace that may turn out to be our first glimpse of the game’s dreaded Bloater faction. She makes bad decision after bad decision but she’s terrifying in a kind of unassuming way that only piques our curiosity. How did this woman become the most powerful person in the city? We won’t find out this episode, though we do finally meet the men she’s searching for when they hold Ellie and Joel at gunpoint just before the episode ends.

Survival Odds

Joel (5 to 1 odds)
Joel knows how to siphon gas — even if the science of it eludes him — and how to brew a good cup of coffee to keep him awake for days at a time. Joel does not know that driving through an overthrown QZ with a truck full of supplies and sleeping with his hearing-impaired ear towards the door are no-nos post-apocalypse. Do better, Joel.

Ellie (10 to 1 odds)
Netting another kill. Making use of her small size to help the pair evade a city-wide search. Taking 30-something flights of stairs like a champ. Ellie’s learning to survive on the road despite Joel’s mistakes — and not a moment too soon because he sure is making a lot of them.

Sam / Henry (4 to 7 odds)
Henry and Sam have managed to avoid detection so far but there’s no way both of these newcomers survive past next week’s episode. That kind of optimism is delusional and it has no place here.

Kathleen (4 to 3 odds)
Melanie Lynskey is loved by both homosexuals and (less exciting) heterosexuals but Kathleen is surrounded by a bunch of AK-47-toting meatheads so every crack in her voice when she issues orders has us worried for her longevity as a leader.

Before the official 2023 Grammy Awards kicked off tonight, several awards were given out during a pre-show, including announcing who won for Best Music Video. A stacked category that included submissions from BTS to Harry Styles, Taylor Swift ended up winning with her “All Too Well: The Short Film” for the ten-minute rerecorded version.

It also marked Swift’s continued foray into directing, as she cast Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien in the video. Throughout last year, she attended film festivals like TIFF to showcase and speak on her experience creating the project.

“I can’t put into words what this means to me. For the @RecordingAcad and my peers to acknowledge me as a director, and in doing so, acknowledge my work to try and reclaim my music…” she shared on Twitter. “I’m blown away. Thank you to all the fans who willed this to happen.”

Swift is still up for Song Of The Year for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).” She was also nominated for Best Country Song with “I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” and Best Song Written For Visual Media with “Carolina” from Where The Crawdads Sing, but did not win.

She is currently in the process of working on her recently-announced full directorial film debut with Searchlight, as more details are to come.

View Uproxx’s full list of the 2023 Grammy Award winners here.

Following last week’s extraordinary episode of The Last of Us, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass star Rahul Kohli wrote a note that has since been credited to Naughty Dog. It wasn’t an official statement from the developer of the Last of Us video games, but his point still stands. “I made the mistake of reading other people’s comments about TLOU. Many masking their homophobia with ‘why can’t it stick to the game?’, others just straight up not wanting LGBTQIA representation in mainstream media,” it reads. Kohli then shared his thoughts on the review bombing over Bill and Frank’s relationship (which is only hinted at in the video game, but it’s a strong hint).

“This is and has always been a progressive series. Bill was gay,” he wrote (I removed a spoiler for another character from his note, but you’re welcome to read it here). “This *IS* a faithful adaptation. If TLOU is a little too diverse/ progressive for you, I think you may need to stop watching. It’s been their story since 2014. There are countless stories which avoid representation altogether, I dunno what to tell you, watch them instead.”

Episode four, “Please Hold My Hand,” faithfully adapted a memorable (and funny) moment from the video game, but to Kohli’s point, it has a different meaning on the television show after we spent an entire episode with Bill and Frank.

Here’s how it plays out in the game:

What a stinker, that Ellie.

The Grammys delivered here in 2023 when it comes to musical performances during the broadcast: Performers during the show include Harry Styles, Bad Bunny, Mary J. Blige, Steve Lacy, Lizzo, Kim Petras, Sam Smith, Brandi Carlile, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Chris Stapleton, DJ Khaled, and Luke Combs. Some performances were bittersweet, though: Kacey Musgraves, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Mick Fleetwood, and Migos’ Quavo performed in honor of Loretta Lynn, Christine McVie, and Takeoff as part of an In Memoriam tribute.

Musgraves started with an acoustic rendition of Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” as names and photos of late music figures were displayed on the giant screens behind her. After a few more names were shown, Quavo performed “Without You,” the song he wrote in Takeoff’s memory, while wearing a Phantom Of The Opera-style half-mask. Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, and Mick Fleetwood then took the stage as a trio to perform McVie’s “Songbird.”

Crow had herself a nomination this year, as “Forever” was up for Best American Roots Song, although Bonnie Raitt’s “Just Like That” ended up winning. Raitt had a few other nominations beside that one: “Just Like That” is up for Song Of The Year, Just Like That… is up for Best Americana Album, and “Made Up Mind” is nominated for Best Americana Performance.

Find the full list of this year’s Grammy nominees and winners here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

In addition to celebrating the albums, artists, records, and songs of the year, the Grammys also offer a chance to look back on the past year and acknowledge those members of the recording industry community who are no longer with us. This year’s In Memoriam segment had a broad range of talent to salute, but the inclusion of Migos member Takeoff is especially tragic. He was only 28 years old when he was fatally shot last year and was just entering a new phase of his career in which he was beginning to receive more recognition for his talent.

A large part of that recognition was the reconfiguration of Migos into a duo-and-one, as Quavo and Takeoff split from Offset to release their own separate joint project, Only Built For Infinity Links. Unfortunately, instead of celebrating the album’s success, Quavo paid tribute to his fallen bandmate (and nephew), performing his new single “Without You,” which was written and released in honor of Takeoff early this year. Backed by the contemporary worship group Maverick City Music, Quavo performed his solemn ode to Takeoff, sending him off in style. Quavo channeled the Phantom of the Opera, with a black half mask that represented the masked pain he’s undoubtedly carrying.

You can watch the performance above and check out the full list of Grammy winners here.