'SNL' Musical Guests, Ranked From No. 1 To Greta Van Fleet
Saturday Night Live's 44th season ended over the weekend with the help of host Paul Rudd and musical guest DJ Khaled, who brought with him an all-star cast that included J Balvin, John Legend and SZA. As the season's 21st and final featured musical guest, Khaled joined a wildly mixed bag that included K-pop (BTS), blues-rock (Gary Clark Jr.), country (Thomas Rhett), R&B (Khalid, Ella Mai), hip-hop (Lil Wayne, Travis Scott, et al), neo-classic rock (Greta Van Fleet), old-school-classic folk-pop (Paul Simon) and, of course, a performance in which Kanye West rapped from inside an outfit shaped like a gigantic Perrier bottle.
SNL's Studio 8H stage is famously unforgiving: The sound can be iffy, the crowd came to see comedy and the energy can be hard to maintain. But, as with previous years, Season 44 unveiled a few gems, as well as a few true head-slappers. It's a fool's errand — a truly cruel and pointless exercise — to attempt a dispassionate rank of 21 vastly different musical performances, especially when they've been spread out over an eight-month-long season.
So, for the second year in a row, here goes.
21. Greta Van Vleet
"Black Smoke Rising," "You're the One"
Whichever side of the Greta Van Fleet divide you occupy — whether you herald the Michigan band as a welcome return to classic-rock grandiosity or dismiss it as an unbearably derivative Led Zeppelin clone — it's hard to defend the band's SNL debut, which somehow sounded both over-the-top and thuddingly lifeless. Swallowed whole by the stage, singer Josh Kiszka shrieked with grating, maximalist pitchiness through "Black Smoke Rising" and "You're the One," while clad in what appeared to be either a beaded curtain or a yarn bomb. The latter song was duller than the former, but each played out like the limpest gag of Adam Sandler's SNL career.
20. DJ Khaled
"Jealous"/"You Stay," "Just Us"/"Weather the Storm"/"Higher"
Imagine a stage full of hip-hop, R&B and pop heavy hitters — the sort of people you might expect to headline on any given week. Some of them have
