2023 Grammys: As long as Beyoncé keeps losing, no one wins.

Stevie Wonder said it best: “Thank you, but stop.” He was trying only to curtail the standing ovation that greeted him at last night’s Grammys so he and his fellow uncannily undiminished senior citizen Smokey Robinson could get on with the music. Thank you, Recording Academy, for a broadcast that carried on the recent trend of avoiding the overdone production numbers and ungainly musical mismatches of the the pre-pandemic era in favor of simply first-rate performances—like Wonder and Robinson’s stage-flattening Motown tribute, Steve Lacy’s supercool rendition of “Bad Habit,” or the Questlove-curated, astoundingly all-star celebration of hip-hop at 50 that made for a jaw-dropping centerpiece, and arguably a bit of an apology from the Grammys for giving that genre short shrift for most of that half-century. As Harry Styles put it when sheepishly accepting his album of the year award for Harry’s House, “There is no such thing as best in music,” and artists creating music in a recording studio are not like sports teams giving their all to win a championship. Everyone knew it in advance, as spelled out in headlines such as “The Beyoncé Paradox,” “It’s Beyoncé’s Time to Shine at the Grammys … Right?,” and, most aggressively, in the Los Angeles Times, “Grammys, You Have One Job on Sunday: Give Beyoncé Album of the Year.” It’s because this is the third consecutive studio album for which Beyoncé Knowles has been nominated and then passed over for a white artist, despite all three records’ status as music-industry milestones. It would be a bit too much of a case of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Except for one final point: The Grammys’ new Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change was awkwardly introduced, with the sudden appearance of Jill Biden and confusing talk about the number of “submissions,” which led me to think that this was going to be some kind of amateur talent competition.