Chris Brown

Bruce Springsteen

With all his trademark energy intact and backed with a massive string section, the Boss — who lost his longtime collaborator Clarence Clemons last year – kicked off the evening with a rousing version of “We Take Care of Our Own.” It was soulful, spirited and just the right touch of mournful.

LL Cool J

Admitting that “There is no way around this — we had a death in our family,” the night’s host then announced “the only thing right is to begin with a prayer … for our fallen sister.” Depending on your philosophic perspective, watching the audience solemnly bow its collective head while Cool James invoked our “heavenly father” was either a moving tribute or a sudden reminder of why having an atheist like Ricky Gervais host awards shows is a cool idea. But when he cut to clip of Whitney blowing the roof off with a live performance of “I Will Always Love You” at the Grammys a generation ago, it set a bar for vocal performance that would be damn near impossible to match for the rest of the night.

Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt

Honoring the late, great Etta James, two knockout performers of different eras and genres gave a stripped-down version of “Sunday Kind of Love.” It was one of the few pairings of the night that worked, a stunning moment of sincerity and finesse in an evening that often veered heavily to schmaltz.

Chris Brown

It’s not that we can expect the music industry to ignore chart-topping, domestic-abusing, frequently terrible Chris Brown. He’s had a huge year, and on Sunday’s broadcast, he even managed to pick up a Grammy. But aside from his historic awfulness, there’s another reason to ponder whether it was really necessary to subject America to two separate performances. Decked out in his preppy “I’m not dangerous, ladies!” varsity jacket, he jumped around lip-syncing “Turn Up the Music” and “Beautiful People” with a posse of bat-winged, masked performers in a performance apparently inspired by the old video game Q*Bert early in the night, then came back near the end for a dead-behind-the-eyes “tribute to dance.” At least he managed to prove that he doesn’t need his abusive record to be reviled; feel free to shun him just because he sucks.

Jennifer Hudson

It took the powerhouse Jennifer Hudson — who two years ago performed Houston’s most successful smash for the woman herself at the BET Awards — to take “I Will Always Love You” back from the place of power ballad clichés where it’s lived the last two decades and make it ache like new. No big crescendo, no sappy orchestration, just a clearly emotional Hudson belting her heart out. Beautiful.

Foo Fighters

In an intense performance outside the Staples Center for the regular folk, Dave Grohl and company – a gang whose own experience of tragedy was brought home by that audience member thrashing around in a Nirvana shirt — howled through a fiery rendition of their “never wanna die” anthem “Walk.” Later, picking up the Grammy for best rock performance, Grohl admitted, “We made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine,” eloquently pleaded for “the human element of music” and promised, “It’s not about being perfect.” It was a shining example of old-school authenticity, only slightly undercut by the appearance, immediately after, of Ryan Seacrest.

Glen Campbell

Lifetime-achievement award winner Campbell, who last year announced he was facing Alzheimer’s and would release a final album and do one last tour, is not going gently into his disease. After the Band Perry shouted uncomprehendingly through “Gentle On My Mind” and Blake Shelton did a serviceable “Southern Nights,” it was Campbell himself who rocked the house. Looking undeniably unwell but in remarkably stronger voice than the likes of fellow Grammy performers Carrie Underwood or Paul McCartney, he staunchly belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy,” enthusiastically coaxing the entire audience to sing along. It was by the far the greatest exhibition of bad-ass, rock ‘n’ roll indominability of the night.

Katy Perry

Aw, remember when Katy Perry did the Grammys gently swaying in a trapeze swing, showing off home movies from her wedding? Sure you do; it was last year. Post-Russell Brand divorce Katy seems to have decided to go for a different vibe. Performing her new song “Part of Me,” she was all about shattering glass, engulfing ice effigies of men in flames, and declaring, “You can keep the diamond ring, in fact, you can keep everything.” Katy, you blue-haired, pissed-off little minx, you know what? I believe you.

Nicki Minaj

The Catholic Church hasn’t taken this much of a beating since Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” era. In a performance of “Roman Holiday” that topped even Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” Minaj went through a confession gone wrong, an exorcism, and wound up surrounded by dancing monks getting groped by hot leather babes – all while “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” took on a whole new meaning. Did we mention she levitated? It was the closest the Grammys has ever come to turning into a Ken Russell movie.

Adele

Taking the stage after vocal surgery in November, the night’s biggest winner was clearly not in as forceful voice as in her Royal Albert Hall performance of last year. But she was so clearly enjoying her triumphant night of multiple wins, pointing at herself while snarling, “You could have had this all,” she personified bittersweet awesomeness. When the audience thundered to its feet, Adele’s mastery of simultaneous heartbreak and victory was not just in powerful evidence, it was conspicuously infectious. And when, later, she tearfully picked up the final award of the night for album of the year, she copped both to an inspiring “rubbish relationship” and to fending off “oh my God, snot.” And that is whyyyyyyyy we will always love youuuuuuu, Adele.

It would have been a challenge to promote a movie in which he stars without his doing any publicity for it, and Gibson appears to have chosen very carefully for his first foray back into the spotlight. Finally owning up to the veracity of the tapes he long refused to acknowledge, Gibson bravely dealt with journalist Allison Hope Weiner’s hard-hitting questions like “Aren’t you going to be hurt if people judge you based on what they believe occurred here?” and her reassurances that director Todd Phillips’ decision to ax his cameo in “The Hangover 2″ “a very Hollywood hypocritical moment.” It’s the interview that reads like a colonoscopy!

Asked about how he felt about the release of the tapes — which he says were edited — he sighed, “Who anticipates being recorded? Who anticipates that? Who could anticipate such a personal betrayal?” He described the tapes as “a heated discussion at the height of a breakdown” and “one terribly, awful moment in time, said to one person, in the span of one day.” Just a reminder — that “one moment” is represented by five lengthy tapes in total.

Gibson went on to insist, “I’ve never treated anyone badly or in a discriminatory way based on their gender, race, religion or sexuality — period,” an interesting assertion for a man who once said that the “fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” who in the tapes referred to “wetbacks,” and who famously told the mother of his baby Lucia that “if you get raped by a pack of niggers it’ll be your fault.” And it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t anything “bad” or gender-specific about Gibson’s assertion to Grigorieva that “I’d like to show you what mean really is, bitch, cunt, whore, gold digger” or when he said that “I’ll burn the goddamn house down” and that “I’m threatening, I’ll put you in a fucking rose garden, you cunt. You understand that? ‘Cause I’m capable of it.”

At other times in the interview, Gibson was understandably tight-lipped about aspects of his personal life — he’s still got a young daughter to raise and court orders to honor. But he insisted he entered the no contest plea simply because “I could have continued to fight this for years and it probably would have come out fine. But I ended it for my children and my family” — a boldly confident statement in light of the photographic evidence of Grigorieva’s teeth after Gibson got through with her, and the tape of Grigorieva telling him, “You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands. You. What kind of a man is that? Hitting a woman when she’s holding a child in her hands? Breaking her teeth, twice, in the face, what kind of man is that?” To which Gibson angrily replied, “You fucking deserved it.”

Fortunately for Gibson, in a world where Charlie Sheen can do a sold-out tour and Chris Brown can have a No. 1 album, audiences can be very forgiving toward a man who will wallop a woman, call her a whore and then insist he’s been betrayed. And based on some of the comments for the story applauding his “courage” and “class beyond measure,” Mad Max still has plenty of supporters beyond Whoopi  and Jodie. But the next time they see a genial, well-coached Gibson insisting he’s never treated anyone badly, they might do well to remember the furious, verbally abusive side of Gibson he never intended the world to hear. At one point in the interview, Weiner observed to Gibson that “Your public persona is not really you.” Whatever else he said in the service of self-promotion, believe what he said when he responded to her: “It never is.”

Brown, whose parents divorced when he was young, has long claimed — and his mother affirms — that his stepfather was physically abusive. “He used to hit my mom … He made me terrified all the time, terrified like I had to pee on myself,” Brown told Giant magazine in 2007. “I remember one night he made her nose bleed…. I hate him to this day.” (Brown’s former stepfather Donnelle Hawkins has denied the accusations, saying Brown is trying to make him a “scapegoat.”) He has lived his own very public experience of domestic abuse; two years ago he was charged with felony battery and took a plea deal after a violent dispute with then-girlfriend Rihanna.

Whatever the root causes of his actions, Brown, at the still very young age of 21, has certainly struggled to restrain his volatile personality — and had to do it with all the pressures of international fame and constant media scrutiny. O’Donnell is not the only person to ask whether Brown, who himself tweeted (and then deleted) recently that “I’m so over people bringing this past shit up!!!!” is being excessively demonized as an abuser in a way that the Charlie Sheens and Mel Gibsons of the world are not.

Yet the issue for Brown — whose success, by the way, has barely been dented throughout any of this — is that he repeatedly demonstrates an inability to, as they say, “break the cycle” of unacceptable behavior. It’s not “past shit” when he keeps acting out. Just one week after happily showing off his certificate of completion in a domestic violence program, Brown was taunting singer Raz-B as a “dick in da booty ass lil boy” on Twitter — a spiteful jibe at a man who claimed he was sexually abused as a teenager. And then, two weeks ago, he famously went bananas after a tough interview with Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America,” trashing his dressing room and shattering a window. Not that the “GMA” freakout slowed down his new album, “F.A.M.E.,” one bit; it subsequently debuted at the top of the Billboard chart.

Is there room in the public’s heart for what O’Donnell brands “compassion” toward a young man who obviously has a great deal of growing up to do, regardless of what his fancy domestic abuse program certificate of completion may say? Of course there is. But when O’Donnell said on her radio program that “I actually felt bad for Chris Brown during that interview and I felt mildly angry at Robin Roberts” and that she wishes she could ask her, “Can you take a look at this again and see if maybe you find in any way your responsibility in this?” she seems to be conveniently omitting any mention of Brown’s responsibility as well. And frankly, at this point, I’m finding it harder and harder to feel too bad for a guy whose ridiculous tantrums keep getting rewarded in the form of television appearances and No. 1 albums.

Though O’Donnell says she’s not condoning Brown’s actions (she tweeted Monday that “no one I know thinks it’s ok – I don’t think it’s ok – to understand how and y it happens is helpful to all”), a further acknowledgment of the wrongness of his shenanigans and of the obvious amount of work the guy’s got to do would go a long way toward clarifying her point. Mercy is rare and necessary, but without justice and true changed behavior, it’s meaningless.