The 2018 Grammy Awards are less than a week away, and YouTube has created something special in honor of the biggest night in music. To commemorate the ceremony, held this year in New York, the Google-owned music and video platform has joined forces with native New Yorker and hip hop legend NAS to throw what is sure to be one of the biggest parties of the year. But the real news isn’t the party itself — it’s the invitation. The calling card for the upcoming party is a custom Google Home Max made even more unique by the work of New York graffiti artist CYCLE.
Meant to celebrate the rise of rap and hip hop over the last several decades (and the fact that the majority of nominees for both Album of the Year and Record of the Year this season are rappers), YouTube’s enormous art project celebrates “the rebellious and riotous spirit of those early days of Hip Hop, where kids with a mic or a spraycan were just looking for a way to express themselves.” As such, YouTube provided CYCLE with 400 Google Home Maxes from its parent company, creating a 55-foot wall of boxes as a canvas. The resulting mural promises to be “a gorgeous throwback to the past, realized on a backdrop straight from the future.”
The Google Home Max, released in December 2017, is a seriously enormous speaker, and is meant to rival Apple’s upcoming HomePod, but with Google Assistant integration rather than Siri. In our review, we called it “eye-catching thanks to its size,” and with great sound to boot. That said, given its $400 price tag, it’s not quite as accessible as some of Google’s other smart speakers, like the Google Home or Google Home Mini. But with YouTube using these speakers in their Grammys invitation, demand for the speaker just might kick into high gear.
“We’ve hand delivered these collectible invites to some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, and once our guests unbox, all they have to do is ask the Google Assistant for the details,” YouTube explained of its creative and high tech invitations. If you’re a lucky recipient of one of these Google Home Maxes (you probably won’t be, unless you’re a music industry heavyweight), you can just say, “Hey Google, take me to the YouTube party.”
But don’t worry — even if you don’t receive an invite, you’ll be able to use your own Google Home or Assistant to answer or ask about Grammys’ trivia.
