Ostensibly, the star was there to mark a moment in popular music history, to introduce the performance of Sam Smith and Kim Petras, the first transgender singer to win a Grammy. She was reliably Madonna about it, meaning that she first talked about herself, then used words like “scandalous” and “unholy,” and managed to somehow paint Smith, an artist who has graced the cover of such mainstream publications as Rolling Stone, Billboard, and GQ, as someone who “has risen above the critics.”
