Letting the indies in
You’ll find Lights alongside Avril Lavigne, and Deadmau5 next to Drake, but the Juno Awards have not fully ceded major-label dominance
There’s more to the Juno Awards tonight than Bublé and Bieber. Critic Ben Rayner makes his picks,
It’s not as easy to dismiss the Juno Awards as it once was.
True, the whole thing is still as silly as any celebration of the purported “best” in a given field of artistic endeavour ever was, but that’s another discussion altogether. At least, in recent years, the Junos have given the impression of trying to be inclusive, of trying to shake off what was once a welldeserved reputation for blindly stumping for whatever corporate Cancon product a major-label-dominated domestic music industry saw fit to shove down the nation’s throat.
That still happens to some extent, of course. The nominees gunning for trophies on Sunday’s Juno Awards broadcast from Scotiabank Place in Ottawa includes such usual suspects as Michael Bublé, Justin Bieber and Avril Lavigne.
Rubbing shoulders with your typical, boardroom-approved Juno mainstays, however, you’ll find the likes of Leslie Feist, City and Colour, and Dan Mangan — independent artists who might once never have gotten near the Juno ceremony — enjoying four nominations apiece, enough to put them on even footing with Nickelback, Hedley and Drake.
Strung throughout the minor categories, and occasionally even intruding into the major ones, too, you’ll also find underground-approved names like Diamond Rings, Braids, Austra and F---ed Up. Anne Murray is nowhere to be found.
Now, no one’s going to mistake an awards show that touts Nickelback’s Here and Now, Lavigne’s Goodbye Lullaby, Drake’s Take Care and two Christmas albums as Album of the Year contenders for being a champion of musical underdogs.
“When I was younger following the Junos, nothing I liked was ever nominated.” DAMIAN ABRAHAM F---ED UP
But it is nevertheless encouraging, as a music fan, to see artists and recordings operating outside the dollars-and-cents mindset of the mainstream music business getting a little boost by association with the Juno brand. And it’s even more encouraging, I’m sure, for those artists themselves.
“When I was younger following the Junos, nothing I liked was ever nominated,” says F---ed Up frontman Damian Abraham, heading to the Juno festivities in Ottawa this weekend in hopes that his forwardthinking hardcore troupe might squeak out a win in the Alternative Album of the Year category for its ambitious “rock opera” David Comes to Life.
“We were nominated a couple of years ago for The Chemistry of Common Life, but that never really felt like we were nominated. We were never invited to the ceremony or anything like that, whereas this time we’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve been brought into the club.’ We’re gonna be sitting down drinking drinks next to Ronnie Hawkins and Avril Lavigne in no time.”
The Junos didn’t suddenly welcome F---ed Up to the party out of the goodness of their hearts, mind you. Like Feist or last year’s big winners the Arcade Fire, F---ed Up can’t help but blip across the Juno radar these days because it’s an indie act that’s grown rather too big for the mainstream to ignore.
As Abraham puts it: “The Junos, as reflecting Canadian music, kind of have to reflect this stuff now be- cause it’s part of the Canadian mainstream.”
It is simply good business — and a good strategy for the Juno Awards’ longevity — to get on board with Canada’s booming independent music scene, which has come to rival those of the U.S. and the U.K. as a seemingly endless supplier of both critically lauded and commercially viable new sounds.
While the major labels have seen their market share and their business fortunes erode dramatically since the turn of the millennium, Canada’s parallel indie sector has emerged as a successful, if smaller scaled, commercial force in its own right. It commands a substantial — and, more importantly, a growing — audience, which is why you’ll see Deadmau5, Feist, Lights, City and Colour, and Hey Rosetta! performing on Sunday night’s CTV broad- cast alongside Nickelback, Simple Plan, Blue Rodeo and Hedley. Putting those artists on the broadcast will attract scads of viewers who might otherwise never have given watching the Junos a second thought. Melanie Berry, president of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences — the organization that oversees the Junos — acknowledges that in the past, the awards might not have done as good a job as they could of fulfilling their mandate to “celebrate and promote Canadian artists across all genres,” fomenting no small amount of distrust of the Junos amongst the denizens of the nonmajor-label side of the music industry. CARAS has tried to correct past oversights by inviting up-and-coming acts to perform at the Junos in recent years, she says, and by adding new categories, such as Electronic Album of the Year in 2011 or Metal/hard Music Album of the Year this year, to better represent the broad spectrum of music being made in this country. Efforts have also been made to find a better balance between the categories determined by album sales and those determined by jury votes. It’s not perfect yet, maybe, but Berry, at least, always gives the impression of someone whose heart is in the right place. “Saturday night last year, looking out, you had Neil Young there, but you also had Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene and that’s really good. It’s great. You realize it’s all important,” she says. “There are certain artists who are more internationally recognized or more recognized by the mainstream population, but I definitely think there’s a greater awareness of different types of music now than there was 10 years ago.” That said, the Nickelbacks and Bublés and Biebers still reign supreme at the Junos. The power remains in the hands of the industry’s traditional, big-time players, and that’s not likely to change. This wouldn’t be so irksome to discerning music lovers were events such as the Junos not so intent on championing their favourite artists as the “best” Canada has to offer. Despite their efforts to embrace artists who might normally find better favour with, say, the Polaris Music Prize, “I don’t see much of that getting through,” observes veteran music journalist and author Bob Mersereau. “There is a ton of talent in Canada. A ton of it. Yet how is Avril Lavigne up for Album of the Year?” he says. “We’ve got to walk away from this and say the album of the year belongs to a Christmas album from Michael Bublé? “They’re still trying to position themselves as the best music recorded in Canada and that’s just not the case . . . “This is a bought-and-paid-for, very big production that goes out to Canada in connection with a major television network marketing itself as the best music in Canada. And there’s a huge difference. In any other business, that’s false advertising.”