‘SNL’ just wrapped its 50th season: It’s time to cruelly rank its musical guests – NPR
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‘SNL’ just wrapped its 50th season: It’s time to cruelly rank its musical guests
May 19, 20251:21 PM ET
Stephen Thompson
We’ve wrangled the great (like Chappell Roan), the middling and the truly misbegotten musical guests from SNL’s regular season into one digestible list.
Will Heath/NBC/Episodic
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Will Heath/NBC/Episodic
For a show that’s never been shy about celebrating itself, Saturday Night Live was bound to lean hard into its 50th season. But the results were as mixed as ever — a tendency that extended to the season’s musical guests, who formed an eclectic cocktail of massive chart-toppers (Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen, Lady Gaga), breakout stars (Chappell Roan, Benson Boone, Shaboozey), fading legacy acts (Arcade Fire, Coldplay), transcendent legacy acts (Stevie Nicks) and, of course, ever-effortful Timothée Chalamet, campaigning hard for an Oscar that never came. The SNL stage is always a crapshoot — some acts are better than others at making a nondescript space exciting, to say nothing of the show’s eternally shaky sound mixes — which makes ranking each season’s musical guests an adventure. But, because ranking the SNL musical guests for seven straight years means that subsequent lists are required by law, rank them we must.
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For the eighth consecutive year (here’s 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018), we’ve wrangled the great, the middling and the truly misbegotten from SNL’s regular season into one digestible list. As always, we’ve included links for the ones that are still streaming on YouTube, but if you really want to see for yourself, each of these sets is still streaming on Peacock, whether or not Morgan Wallen wants them to be. 20. Arcade Fire, “Pink Elephant” and “Year of the Snake” (5/10/25)
Arcade Fire
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SNL’s bookers are generally good at mixing major chart-toppers, big names in country and hip-hop, hall-of-famers and artists who at least seem like they might be the next big thing. It’d be a tough mix to master — there are only 20 slots to fill in a given season — even if they didn’t insist on booking certain past-their-prime legacy acts every single time they release a new album. Arcade Fire has been on a downward trajectory for ages now, with its last decade’s worth of albums producing only sporadic highlights — and that was before singer Win Butler was accused of widespread sexual abuse. Yet SNL still booked the band, which had released a flaccid new record called Pink Elephant just a day earlier, for the penultimate episode of its 50th season. If you’re seeking insights as to why, you won’t find them in the band’s joyless, by-the-numbers performance of two songs from Pink Elephant. Butler himself certainly committed to the bit, complete with showy costumery and a pointlessly smashed guitar. But his wife and co-bandleader, Régine Chassagne, spent most of “Pink Elephant” and “Year of the Snake” looking as if she’d just driven past an open sewer. This was a full banquet of crummy vibes, without even decent songs to lighten the mood. 19. Coldplay, “All My Love” and “We Pray (feat. Elyanna & Tini)” (10/5/24)
Coldplay
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Coldplay has played SNL eight times dating back to 2001, with a characteristically Coldplay-esque range of outcomes. In 2019, the band’s agreeable bombast was still playing well — Chris Martin even returned for a sweet solo encore late in that COVID-shortened season — while 2023’s corny, Up With People-esque calamity would have made a decent SNL parody had the band been in on the joke. Unfortunately, this one’s another leaden dud. If you watched “All My Love” live and managed to stay awake for “We Pray,” then you should pass along your trade secrets to the nation’s long-haul truckers, because that song is a weapons-grade snooze, with Martin sounding uncharacteristically pitchy to boot. More eventful by default, “We Pray” found Martin joined by two of the single’s many guest vocalists — Elyanna and Tini, each barely audible early on — as they did their best to liven up yet another grim slab of by-the-numbers inspirecore. 18. Morgan Wallen, “I’m the Problem” and “Just in Case” (3/29/25)
Morgan Wallen
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A big element of these SNL music rankings revolves around sheer effort; around the simple idea that, given a grand opportunity to reach millions, an artist ought to explore every opportunity to do something transcendent, eye-opening and all-around exciting. Which places country superstar Morgan Wallen at a disadvantage, because he so visibly doesn’t want to be there. He gave a listless, indifferent performance in 2020, and upon his return, he didn’t even stick around through the closing credits, sauntering offstage abruptly before posting “Get me to God’s country” — generating an instant meme in the process — on Instagram. The whole thing just seemed so… grudging, all around, so why bother in the first place? SNL only booked him because he’s country’s biggest star; Wal