THE WEEKND CLEANS UP AT JUNOS
Give this man a hand (he’ll need it to carry all his awards). Ben Rayner breaks down Canadian music’s big night,
CALGARY— For a chap who claims to dislike the spotlight, The Weeknd has sure been hogging it a lot lately.
The smokin’-hot Toronto R&B sensation rolled into Calgary for Juno weekend and laid complete waste to his competition, walking away with trophies in five of the six categories in which he was nominated and only being stopped at the very edge of a complete sweep by the more than six million Justin Bieber fans who voted the Bieb into yet another Juno Fan Choice Award.
The Weeknd, a.k.a. Scarborough 20-something Abel Tesfaye, took Album of the Year for last year’s Beauty Behind the Madness and Single of the Year for the indelible and still roundly inescapable smash “Can’t Feel My Face” on Sunday night.
He’d already taken home Soul/R&B Recording of the Year for “Beauty,” Songwriter of the Year and Artist of the Year on Saturday at the pre-broadcast Juno gala and dinner at the Calgary Convention Centre and he had a spot on CTV’s Sunday Juno broadcast from the Calgary Saddledome performing “Acquaintance” and “Might Not” (the latter with help from rapper Belly) to a truly adoring crowd, so he likely didn’t mind throwing one to the Beliebers.
Bieber, for his part, was thus elevated by his Fan Choice Award victory to a tie with living CanCon legend Buffy Sainte-Marie for second place in the 2016 Juno Awards tally.
His hugely popular comeback LP, Purpose, was named Pop Album of the Year on Saturday evening. Sainte-Marie, who performed a brief spoken-word piece on the Juno broadcast, picked up Aboriginal Album of the Year and Contemporary Roots Album of the Year for last year’s Polaris Music Prize-winning Power in the Blood at the pre-release gala.
Bieber was booed by the crowd at the Saddledome for the few curt words of thank you (“I love you”) he offered to his Canadian fans during a 10-second video clip apparently taped while he was training in a boxing gym, but we didn’t get much more out of The Weeknd and he was actually in the building.
The Weeknd’s aversion to the press is well documented — he’s done, like, three interviews in the past five years — so it wasn’t much of a surprise that he didn’t offer much comment on his many Juno victories.
A couple of CTV insiders groused privately that he’d decreed from the outset that he would either walk the red carpet outside the Saddledome or visit the press room, but not both. In the end, he did neither.
But, really, when you’re doing as well as The Weeknd, do you really need to play the game?
He became a star by giving his first three EPs away free. He just won two Grammy Awards. He’s not going to accomplish much more by talking to the media or posing for paparazzi pictures outside the Saddledome. The man is set.
He was gracious enough in victory, anyway, thanking his fans (“I wouldn’t be here without you”) and the numerous songwriters — such as his “Can’t Feel My Face” co-author Max Martin — who helped make Beauty Behind the Madness his proper international breakthrough and giving a shout-out to “all the nominees who put out amazing albums this year” on the broadcast. And, despite his somewhat sinister and debauched image, he made sure to make time for his mother.
“I want to thank my mom,” Tesfaye said after accepting his second award of the night. “Thank you for putting up with all my bull for so long. So I thank you.”
Speaking of moms, rising Brampton starlet Alessia Cara brought her folks along — as she usually does — to see her open the Juno broadcast with a performance of her international smash “Here” and “Wild Things” and to collect a well-deserved trophy for Breakthrough Artist of the Year. She nearly burst into tears at the podium and warned the crowd that “I’ve never made an acceptance speech before so this is going to be horrible.”
“It’s insane. It really doesn’t feel like it’s real. I was just telling my mom it really doesn’t feel like it’s happening,” she said later backstage. “It hasn’t processed in my brain yet. It hasn’t hit the part of my brain that processes things yet. I’m floating above myself right now.”
Cara, 19, has been celebrated in the press for not fitting the typical model of a teen pop star and for publicly speaking out against the conformist expectations of image and behaviour culturally imposed on young women.
She was modest, however, about how this has played into her success and the success of her anti-social, anti-party anthem “Here.”
“My music is really what every teenage girl is thinking anyway. People are like, ‘Oh, you’re so wise’ and all that, but in reality, I think this is what every girl is thinking. I’m not saying anything new. I’m saying things that a bunch of teenagers are going through and a bunch of teenagers are thinking about. I just have a platform to say it. I think they’re relating to it because it’s what they’re going through, too.”
Burlington rockers Walk Off the Earth turned the tables on Cara and brought their own kids to the Junos, although Sarah Blackwood — whose 3-year-old son with bandmate Gianni (Luminati) Nicassio, Giorgio, accompanied her to the press room — was caught in a similar shock of Juno disbelief.
“I don’t even know how to feel still, because I’m kind of in shock. I just thought ‘It’s going to go to somebody else’ because we’ve been nominated a few times before and we didn’t win. So this is another milestone that we’ve reached in the massive ocean of goals that we have . . . We’re just building an empire, basically. We’re gonna do everything.”
The only other artist to receive one of the scant six awards actually presented on the Juno show — a brisk, no-fat affair hosted by Calgary homegal Jann Arden and former Olym- pic medallist/ Amazing Race Canada host Jon Montgomery — was British Columbia-bred singer/songwriter Dean Brody, who won Country Album of the Year for Gypsy Road.
The country category made it to the broadcast because all the nominees but Brody were from Alberta, but he maintained he had enough of a connection to the town to avoid being lynched when he left the Saddledome
“I lived here for two years, so I think I might be safe,” he laughed. “I lived in Bowness for two years. I used to hang up on Sarcee Trail and watch the fireworks during Stampede and stuff. And my first dream was to be a punter in the CFL and I made the Calgary Colts and that’s why I moved to Calgary for two years and then moved on from there. So, yeah, I feel OK. I feel safe. Unless you know something I don’t.”
Calgary itself, which used the Junos to unveil the extravagant work-inprogress that is its new Canadian Music Centre at the opening reception on Friday evening, co-operated most graciously with the entire Juno affair, not least by proffering two days’ worth of unseasonably summerlike temperatures that saw visitors to the city delightedly promenading up and down the Stephen Avenue patio strip in T-shirts on Saturday and Sunday.
Attendance for the almost univer- sally packed and unapproachable JunoFest club shows was through the roof and the broadcast performance drew 12,600 patrons to reach 90 per cent of its capacity, much to the relief of the event’s organizers at the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, who conceded that the recent downturn in Alberta’s oil fortunes had been a matter of some concern going in.
“I was a little worried about what was going to happen in Alberta,” CARAS president Allan Reid said backstage at Saturday night’s pre-broadcast gala. “But the response in Calgary has been phenomenal.
“When the Great Depression hit, people turned to music, movies and booze . . . I don’t think I’ve seen a response to ticket sales as strong in years.” Burton Cummings was also moved to the brink of tears — and moved to invoke his late mother — while accepting his induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame by surprise Alberta-bred guests Nickelback.
“I almost started crying up there. I wish my mom could have been around two years longer to see this,” he said backstage at the end of the night. “I’m a music fanatic. Hearing Nickelback say they grew up listening to my music, you’d have to be an idiot not to like that.
“You’d have to be an idiot to take that lightly, and I don’t.”