Taylor Swift wins Album of the Year Grammy for ‘1989’

But if you just focus on the work … you will look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there.

The Internet is abuzz with speculation that Swift was responding to Kanye’s song. Kendrick Lamar’s politically-charged performance is among the most talked about moments.

But her win for “Album of the Year” brought her to the podium – and she let loose with a rousing speech. Adele’s much-hyped performance was torpedoed by an errant mic; the sound on the whole night, in fact, was weirdly off for some cable subscribers (including me), with some performances only fully coming through once they were watched on YouTube.

Taking us on journey through the musical highlights of the late, great David Bowie’s catalog, Lady Gaga gave a touching tribute to Ziggy Stardust that won’t soon be forgotten.

In an awards ceremony that saw Taylor Swift as the star, it was “Uptown Funk”, by Mark Ronson and singer Bruno Mars, that bagged the record of the year laurel. Chris Stapleton’s Traveller was nominated in a nod to America’s heartland and the stronghold that country music still has in the U.S. Then there were the Alabama Shakes – a genre-melding twist on the rock tradition. His album To Pimp A Butterfly won the first award presented on the telecast, Best Rap Album, while his song “Alright” won Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song. A week after Beyonce’s Super Bowl show saluted the black power movement, Lamar opened his “The Blacker the Berry” performance in chains, dressed in a prison uniform along with several dancers. But while he’s being touted as an alternative to commercially successful artists who dominate country music, the reality is a bit more complicated: as a writer, he’s written and co-written songs that have been recorded by Luke Bryan, Thomas Rhett and Kenny Chesney. A commercial immediately following the performance for a technology company involved in the production was a discordant note, too. The two, however, seemed like they had made up at last year’s Grammys.

The Grammy telecast has made the awards that are apparently the show’s reason for existing nearly irrelevant-only eight, of 83 total, were given out on the telecast.

Pentatonix – the vocal group who surpassed 1 billion YouTube views in 2015 – took home the award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental Or A Capella for their version of “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy”, from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker.

One surprise of the night was Hollywood actor Johnny Depp. In her place, Antonoff accepted the trophy and called the pop singer using his cellphone.