Daft Punk, Pharrell dominate at 2014 Grammy Awards

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Grammy Awards celebrated outcasts and outsiders, including a couple of French robots, white rappers and a country girl singing about gay rights.

The Recording Academy’s voters on Sunday night awarded French electronic music pioneers Daft Punk for teaming with R&B legends to make a hybrid album that celebrated both genres, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Kacey Musgraves for supporting gay rights and New Zealand’s Lorde for her simple message to the masses.

Daft Punk and collaborator Pharrell Williams won four awards, including top honors album and record of the year, and best new artists Macklemore and Lewis matched that with four of their own. New Zealand’s Lorde won two awards for her inescapable hit “Royals.”

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo of Daft Punk showed the celebratory feel of their hit, record of the year “Get Lucky,” by asking Stevie Wonder to join them with Williams and Nile Rodgers in a colorful performance. And Macklemore and Lewis invited 33 couples, including some of the same sex, to get married with Madonna serenading them and Queen Latifah presiding.

Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” was the year’s event album, capitalizing on the growing popularity of electronic dance music. They beat out reigning pop queen Taylor Swift, the favorite to win the award.

The dance music crowd had been waiting for a major win since the Bee Gees’ 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, the last dance LP to win album of the year.

Rodgers said the duo richly deserved the win after taking years to put the album together as they sought authentic musical moments that can only be recorded live by real musicians.

Macklemore and Lewis have dominated the pop world with three huge hits that were wildly different and rivaled “Get Lucky” in popularity — “Thrift Shop,” ”Can’t Hold Us” and the gay rights anthem “Same Love.”

They won three awards during the Grammys’ pre-telecast ceremony — rap song and rap performance for the comical “Thrift Shop” and rap album for “The Heist,” beating out Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z and Kanye West in that category before taking major award best new artist.

The Recording Academy’s own rap committee tried to exclude Macklemore and Lewis from the genre’s categories before being overruled.

Queen Latifah, who was certified by the state of California to perform the wedding ceremony, spoke out after the show about rap being more inclusive.

“I think this is exactly what hip-hop is capable of,” she said.

Lorde, the teenager whose invitation to ignore all the status symbols of pop music in her song “Royals,” was one of the year’s out-of-nowhere hits. She took major award song of the year and best pop solo performance.

The singer shyly summed up the experience in just a few words during her acceptance speech: “Thank you everyone who has let this song explode. Because it’s been mental.”

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AP writers Anthony McCartney and Beth Harris contributed to this report.

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