So it's once again time to cruelly rank them all: the magnificent, the flawed-but-forceful, the forgettable and the truly, epically misbegotten. Naturally, the vagaries of live performance - and of SNL's notoriously unforgiving Studio 8H, not to mention late-night TV's eternal issues with sound mixing - meant that some musical guests were bound to outshine the rest. The results were a typically mixed bag, with occasionally transcendent results. For the second straight season, SNL leaned away from the safe spaces of guitar-driven rock, opting instead to focus more heavily than ever on R&B and (especially) hip-hop. But at least the musical guests offered some major highlights. It was a rough season for Saturday Night Live, which endured painful cast attrition (Aidy Bryant, Cecily Strong, et al.), mixed reviews and a writers strike that knocked out Season 48's final three episodes. For his "Rich Spirit" / "N95" medley on SNL, Kendrick Lamar performed with minimal visual accompaniment, perfectly geared for the raw intimacy of his newest material.
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