The Jay-Z and Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne was arguably the biggest hip-hop superstar collaboration ever – and the pair were rewarded with three gongs at the Grammys on Sunday night. The song No Church in the Wild was named best rap/sung collaboration, while Niggas in Paris won the awards for best rap performance and best rap song.
Niggas in Paris became the signature of the pair's team-up, its repeated performances becoming a theme of their performances together on the Watch the Throne tour. When they began touring in November 2011, it was performed three times per show. By December it was getting 10 consecutive airings per show. But come their Paris shows in June 2012 they ran through the song 11 times on the first night and 12 on the second.
Writing in The Atlantic, David Samuels described the performances of the song as "the one moment when the interplay between the two men as artists rather than as mega gate attractions shone through … by repeating one song over and over, Kanye turns it from a heavily produced studio track on a collaborative album into a moment of exhilarating free-form abstract expression that allows him to stand side by side onstage with Jay-Z, trading verses as friends, while using the bigger star as an expression of his own sensibility."
The song has sold 3m copies in the US and more than 400,000 in the UK.
The prize for best rap album went to Drake, for Take Care. Elsewhere, two of the past year's breakthrough stars in R&B picked up awards. Although Frank Ocean missed out on best new artist to the rock band Fun., he scooped the prize for best urban contemporary album. And Adorn, by Miguel, was named best R&B song.
See the list of winners in the main categories here.
This piece was amended on 11 February to remove the statement that Watch the Throne had "missed out" on the Best Rap Album award.
