Carnival of Soul

The 47th annual American Music Awards were held Sunday night at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Though awards were handed to new stars like Post Malone, Billie Eilish and Halsey, the show gave plenty of screen time to comparative veterans like Kesha, the Jonas Brothers and Toni Braxton. Here are five of the event’s notable moments.

Taylor Swift has been involved in a very public feud with Scott Borchetta, the founder of her former label, Big Machine, and Scooter Braun, the executive who purchased it (and acquired the bulk of her hugely successful catalog). She wrote a post on Tumblr earlier this month to say the two men were preventing her from performing any of the songs from her first six albums on the AMAs, a claim that Big Machine denied.

Swift brought her concerns to national TV at the show, dressed in a white shirt imprinted with the names of the six albums she no longer owns: “Speak Now” was given top billing on the front, “Fearless” on the back. Her performance started sternly with the chorus of “The Man,” a song from her most recent album, “Lover,” that’s explicitly about sexist double standards. Then came a spill of hits from her Big Machine catalog: “Love Story” from 2008, “I Knew You Were Trouble” from 2012 and “Blank Space” from 2014. Camila Cabello and Halsey joined her for “Shake It Off,” trading lines and performing choreographed shake-shake-shake routines. Swift closed behind a piano for a soaring version of “Lover,” accompanied by the spins of the ballet stars Misty Copeland and Craig Hall.

Swift never explicitly referenced Braun and Borchetta, but accepting her final award of the night, she addressed a year of challenges: “This year for me has been a lot. It’s been a lot of good, it’s been a lot of really complicated, and so on behalf of my family and me, thank you so much for being there and for caring.”

Accepting her first AMA (favorite pop/rock song for “Without Me”), Halsey gave a speech that was both awed and cynical. She started by explaining she grew up watching awards shows “wide-eyed” as artists picked up gold-plated “metaphors” representing “validation for the soul-crushing and heartache-inducing work that they put into writing a song and bringing it to life.”

“But most of these awards really aren’t what they seem,” she continued. “At all. But that’s O.K. because I’m up here right now and I am so thankful to the AMAs because they’re the world’s largest fan-voted awards show. And I’m thankful to the fans because they’re the people who” — at this point the audio cut out, but reading Halsey’s lips, you can tell she used an expletive to express “caring to a high degree.”

Swift, whose “Lover” album didn’t receive as many Grammy nominations as many expected, was clearly listening: “The speech of the whole night goes to Halsey,” she later said at the podium.

Green Day was the only rock band to play the American Music Awards this year, and certainly didn’t show up to wave a banner of “authenticity” in the age of big pop. The singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, dressed in a white blazer and shades — and not holding his guitar — led the band for their dancey new single “Father of All …” However, the moment that made the crowd go wild was a performance of the 1994 single “Basket Case,” a song that helped usher in an era where snotty punk rock could be pop itself. Armstrong started with a few notes of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and wound down by singing a little of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” The broadcast made sure to cut to punk-centric pan-genre pop stars like Billie Eilish and Post Malone ­— both younger than “Basket Case” itself, and both loving it. “Growing up, there was no band more important to me or my brother,” said Eilish, who introduced the band.

The close-whispered alterna-gloom of the teenage breakout Billie Eilish has made her the pop star of the moment. For her first awards show performance, she sang “All the Good Girls Go to Hell,” keeping her muted, keep-it-like-a-secret energy intact and leaving most of the pyrotechnics to the stagehands. As she stalked the catwalk in her giant T-shirt, the stage sizzled with slowly roasting flames and ominous streetlights. When the song exploded, so did she.

The country-pop icon Shania Twain, whose Vegas residency starts next month, closed the night with a little bit of schmaltz and a little bit of bluster. Starting a nearly eight-minute performance, she used a glittery guitar to do acoustic covers of the pop hits of the day: Post Malone’s “Rockstar,” Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out,” Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and Drake’s “God’s Plan.” She then pulled something from Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” playbook, letting the production slowly grow bigger and bigger. Vocal harmonies emerged from the ether to help her with her 1998 hit “You’re Still the One.” A cabal of shirtless cowboys came out to boot-scoot along with her 1995 track “Any Man of Mine” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much” from 1998. For the closer, her 1999 smash “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” it was 16 dancers on a full Busby Berkeley-style staircase.