Gojira Wins Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance for “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)”
Ah, The Grammys, a veritable shitshow of absolutely terrible decision making. While The Grammys are nice enough to throw rock artists a bone with a handful of rock categories, when’s the last time you saw a rock artist actually win one of the big awards like Record of the Year or Album of the Year? The big categories always seem to be a showdown between pop stars with huge corporate songwriting teams behind them. Record of the Year and Song of the Year both went to Kendrick Lamar’s diss track accusing Drake of liking suspiciously young girls, and Album of the Year went to Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and the massive team of people who wrote and performed it for her. According to the album credits on Cowboy Carter, all the actual music was produced by other people, with Beyonce only being credited for vocals, percussion on one track, and hand claps on another. Do hand claps count as an instrument?
But once you get down to the actual rock categories, which I’m surprised aren’t handed out in the sub-basement or something, it seems someone made a good decision because Gojira’s performance of “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!),” which the band performed with opera singer Marina Viotti at last year’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games, won for Best Metal Performance. That was a bit of a no-brainer considering the fact that Gojira’s performance at the Olympics kind of blew everyone’s minds, even as people who don’t matter like Andrew Tate made headlines for calling it “satanic.” Like that’s an insulting thing to call a metal band, anyway.
Gojira was up against Judas Priest, Knocked Loose, Metallica, and Spiritbox, all of which had great years but, yeah, that Gojira performance was iconic. Gojira frontman JoeDuplantier gave the acceptance speech (which was reported on by Loudwire), saying:
“We are extremely excited to receive this award. We had the privilege to perform at the Olympic ceremony with Marina [Viotti] and Victor [Le Masne] so this is a great day for us, obviously. We want to dedicate this award to all the bands that are pushing the boundaries, support your local artists, support your local bands because that’s where it’s at and they’re inspiring us to continue. So, thank you very much for this.”
Some of the other winners in the rock category included St. Vincent, who won for Best Rock Song, Best Alternative Music Performance, and Best Alternative Music Album, The Rolling Stones who won for Best Rock Album, and, believe it or not, The Beatles who won Best Rock Performance. Wait, half of the Beatles are dead, so how did they perform anything? I don’t understand the fucking Grammys.
