2019's Mercury prize shortlist is alive to today's politics and pain
Over the years, the Mercury prize shortlist has been many things – bafflingly eclectic, controversial, indescribably boring – but it’s never seemed quite so engaged with and informed by current events as the list for 2019.
What’s striking is how many of the nominees are up for albums which actively seek to address social and political issues. There isn’t much that sonically binds the livid, scabrously witty punk racket of Idles with the 1975’s eclectic but pop-facing brand of altrock, and rapper Dave, whose debut Psychodrama may well be the most thoughtful, intelligent and complex album to thus far emerge from UK rap’s commercial renaissance; its lead single Black was provocative and unflinching enough in its exploration of race to cause a storm of protests from listeners when it was added to the Radio 1 playlist. They’re linked, however, by a desire to offer something other than escapist entertainment.
You could say the same of Little Simz’s Grey Area, an album haunted by gun violence and gender inequality; Foals’ Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 (climate change, political uncertainty, mental health issues); SEED Ensemble’s Driftglass (home to tracks called Wake (For Grenfell) and, provocatively, The Darkies); Anna Calvi’s examination of sexuality and gender, Hunter; Slowthai’s self-explanatorily titled Nothing Great About Britain; and Fontaines DC’s fantastic debut Dogrel, which, amid its poetic character studies, addresses Dublin gentrification and post-Brexit tensions.
Even the albums that don’t specifically address any hot-button topics seem explicitly like products of difficult times. Cate Le Bon’s Reward and Black Midi’s Schlagenheim offer different brands of introversion – the former offering warm, idiosyncratic post-punk, the latter a challenging, cerebral, distorted fusion of prog, math rock and free improvisation. But both feel fraught and wracked and occasionally disturbing; alienated rather than contemplative.
Of course, a cynic might suggest, we’re currently living in an era where wokeness sells, where no manufactured pop act is allowed to grace the Radio 1 Big Weekend stage without first being furnished with some vaguely expressed lyrical thoughts about body positivity, anxiety, feminism or gender. But at their best, the albums on the Mercury shortlist feel like heartfelt personal broadsides, attacking their subject matter with real originality and wit, rather than someone paying lip service to fit a trend. Neither Idles’ Joy As an Act of Resistance nor Slowthai’s debut – Streets-esque reportage, delivered in a manic yowl equal parts Dizzee Rascal and John Lydon in sneering, venomous Rotten mode – sounds much like a surefire commercial success. Both made the Top 10, which suggests their contents hit a nerve.
As with every year, there are notable omissions from the list, some more predictable than others. Metal in its umpteen varieties is overlooked by the Mercury as a matter of course, so no nomination for Employed to Serve’s rapturously received Eternal Forward Motion. The prize seemed to give up on modern classical music some years ago, which on one level makes sense – no one but the judging panel seemed to honestly believe there was any way of making a qualitative comparison between the work of John Tavener and that of the Spice Girls – but on another feels like missing a trick. Just as the Kamasi Washington-led resurgence in spiritual jazz, updated with influences from hip-hop and dance music, has given that genre a wider audience, so the subgenre of music somewhere between classical composition, ambient and electronica – the stuff that makes up the playlist on Radio 3’s Unclassified – has moved out of the rarefied region usually occupied by modern classical music towards the mainstream. But there’s none of that here. In fact, there’s no electronica or dance music at all, nor mainstream pop – the closest it comes is Nao’s distinctive take on R&B – nor have any folk artists been allowed the traditional burst of mainstream publicity and increase in sales that ameliorates the charge of tokenism when a Mercury nomination heads their way.
An actual winner looks as hard to definitively pick as ever, but if you were inclined to place a bet, you might do worse than Fontaines DC’s Dogrel, a fantastic debut album that also ticks a lot of Mercury Prize buttons: recalling the kind of post-punk alt-rock that the late John Peel would have played, it is fresh, punchy, intelligent and – like so much of this shortlist – relevant.