Diverse music scene? Not in these Juno nominees
Awards show selling itself short with telecast that doesn’t showcase progressive acts
Canada has grown into one of the most consistently vital and interesting music-producing nations on the planet, but you’ll see little evidence to support that statement on Sunday night’s Juno Awards telecast.
Which is too bad, really, because the Junos and their caretakers at the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences have taken diligent strides since the turn of the millennium towards making the awards more inclusive and reflective of our nation’s thoroughly diverse music scene as a whole.
In fact, this weekend’s Juno Awards festivities are fairly inclusive. It’s just that, of the 41 total Juno categories, only six — Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, Single of the Year, Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Rock Album of the Year and the viewer-voted Juno Fan Choice Award — will actually be handed out during CTV’s broadcast from Copps Coliseum in Hamilton Sunday at 7 p.m. And many of the nominees for these categories are so “been there, done that,” you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d rolled the clock back to the days when the Junos were just a CanCon corporate-pop dumping ground.
Granted, a year when Toronto reggae-rock newcomers Magic! — the lads responsible for last summer’s one-hit wonder-scented single “Rude” — boast the most nominations going in doesn’t announce itself as the Juno Awards’ most progressive.
But this year’s list of nominees was about as progressive as the Junos get, with the disparate likes of Alvvays, Zeds Dead, Jenn Grant, the Barr Brothers, Lights, Plastikman, Tre Mission, the Deep Dark Woods, Caribou, Ryan Hemsworth and Tanya Tagaq all represented here and there.
Most of these names don’t get a turn in the TV spotlight, though, since they turn up in categories that were relegated to Saturday night’s pre-awards gala. And so the Junos sell themselves a bit short by putting on a public face that makes them look more out of touch with the contemporary Canadian music business than they really are.
Oh, well. They can’t please everybody, obviously, and they’re not perfect. But awards shows are easy targets, and the Junos are far from the worst of the lot. They don’t take themselves nearly as seriously as the Grammys, for one thing, and despite what you might think about his day job fronting Hedley, host Jacob Hoggard’s abundant sense of humour should guarantee that some laughs will be had.
And while it’s a crime that Polaris Music Prize winner Tanya Tagaq is only presenting Sunday evening and not performing, the talent strutting the stage — the Weeknd, Bobby Bazini, deadmau5, Kiesza, Lights, MAGIC!, the Sam Roberts Band, Shawn Mendes, Hamilton homeboys Arkells, Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee Alanis Morrisette and, of course, Hedley — puts forth a reasonable cross-section of what’s going on in the Great White North these days. There’s probably at least one thing you’ll like in there, anyway.
Without further ado, then, let’s have a look at the six Juno Awards to be distributed Sunday. I must add, however, my usual disclaimer that I’m terrible at picking these things. ALBUM OF THE YEAR Nominees: Bobby Bazini, Where I Belong; Hedley, Wild Life; Leonard Cohen, Popular Problems; Nickelback, No Fixed Address; Serge Fiori, Serge Fiori. Who will win: Bazini. He and Fiori — both blessed to reside in Quebec, a province that still buys a fair number of records — notched the seventh and eighth bestselling albums in Canada last year separated by a gap of barely 4,000 units, according to Neilsen SoundScan, and were the only two homegrown artists to rub shoulders with Taylor Swift, Sam Smith and the Frozen soundtrack in the nation’s 2014 Top 10. Sales matter in this category, or else Michael Bublé’s Christmas wouldn’t have won Album of the Year in 2011. And since Bazini does his nu-skool Roch Voisine thing in English and is younger and more attractive and infinitely more marketable nationwide than a grizzled ex-member of ’70s Francoprog outfit Harmonium, he’ll probably be the platinum success story the Junos choose to celebrate this time around. Who should win: Fiori, maybe? The two old guys from Montreal definitely have the respectable records here, but Cohen already earned a give-it-to-granddad Artist of the Year trophy in 2013 on the heels of his hit comeback disc Old Ideas, and Popular Problems is basically Leonard-doing-Leonard once again. Maybe it’s time, then, to honour another, lesser-known CanCon elder still capable of doing decent work that captures the popular imagination? The dark horse: Hedley. Frontman Jacob Hoggard is hosting the Juno finale, don’t forget. ARTIST OF THE YEAR Nominees: Bryan Adams; deadmau5; Leonard Cohen; Sarah McLachlan; The Weeknd. Who will win: Cohen. He’s a Canadian icon still holding it down pretty freakin’ well at 80 and is, therefore, better positioned to achieve consensus amongst a multi-generational Juno jury that might, as a whole, not quite grasp the more “specialized” appeal of youngsters like the Weeknd and deadmau5, but should still recognize that Sarah McLachlan has been running on autopilot for a decade and that Bryan Adams coasted back to prominence in 2014 on a 30th-anniversary reissue of Reckless and an album of classic-rock covers. Who should win: The Weeknd. Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye hasn’t released a full-length album since 2013’s Kiss Land, so the Junos are pretty late to the game here. Four years on from House of Balloons, though, a sizable swath of contemporary R&B is still being remodelled in the Weeknd’s blurred image, so an undeniable stamp of artistry has been imposed upon the history books. The dark horse: Deadmau5. Dude is huuuge and, for good or ill, inseparable from the EDM explosion. SINGLE OF THE YEAR Nominees: Drake (featuring Majid Jordan), “Hold On, We’re Going Home”; Hedley, “Crazy For You”; Kiesza, “Hideaway”; Magic!, “Rude”; Sam Roberts Band, “We’re All in This Together.” Who will win: Kiesza. The unshakable “Hideaway” was arguably the single of the year everywhere in 2014, not just in expat-Calgarian Kiesa Rae Ellestad’s home country. Surely even the Juno Awards will bow before it. Who should win: Kiesza. “Hideaway” is an up-from-the-underground, grassroots smash that even too-cool-for-pop hipsters will admit to liking. It’s never going away. The dark horse: Magic! The band’s field-leading five nominations imply an industry attempt to position it as more than a reggae-lite one-hit won- der. And, well, “Rude” is Magic!’s one hit. BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST OF THE YEAR Nominees: Glenn Morrison; Jess Moskaluke; Kiesza; Mac DeMarco; Shawn Mendes. Who will win: Kiesza. As I write this, the cheap-as-crud, one-take video for “Hideaway” that started it all stands at 204,601,415 YouTube views. That, my friends, is a breakthrough. Who should win: Kiesza. See above. The dark horse: Jess Moskaluke. Shania Twain’s been away a loooong time and, as Brett Kissell’s win in the same category demonstrated last year, the Junos have a weakness for cherubic pop-country kiddies from the Prairies. ROCK ALBUM OF THE YEAR Nominees: Arkells, High Noon; Big Wreck, Ghosts; Sam Roberts Band, Lo-Fantasy; The Glorious Sons, The Union; Your Favourite Enemies, Between Illness and Migration. Who will win: Arkells. Because they’re from Hamilton, this award is being handed out on the telecast and a victory would fit the script. Also, since there’s no real competition in any particular direction in the rock-album category this year, one can imagine a good-natured Juno juror aware that the awards are being held in the Hammer this year going: “They’re likable enough. Give it to the Arkells.” Who should win: The Big Wreck album is pretty listenable as modern-rock radio bait goes, but I’ll say the Sam Roberts Band because LoFantasy is probably the only record here I’d ever think to throw on at home. The dark horse: Glorious Sons. People like the Sheepdogs, so … JUNO FAN CHOICE AWARD Nominees: Arcade Fire; Bobby Bazini; Drake; Hedley; Leonard Cohen; Magic!; Michael Bublé; Nickelback; Serge Fiori; You & Me. Who will win: Guessing which performers’ fans will mobilize in suitable numbers to vote him or her the winner is a fool’s game, so I just wrote each of the above 10 names on a separate recipe card and threw them down the stairs at my place to see which would fly the farthest. The winner? Magic!