Why should I even bother going after the Brit awards? After all, they’ve always been out of step, out of taste and completely irrelevant throughout all the years they have existed, even back when they were the BPI awards.
Well, mainly because a lot of the awards are voted for by the general public, and those that aren’t show a depressing lack of talent. For instance, the Best British Male this year is James Morrison, one of the many Blunt clones that are starting to pollute the charts, and amongst those nominated was Lemar who, let me remind you, came third in his “reality” show for a reason. The two decent nominees, Jarvis Cocker and Thom Yorke, both of whom released excellent solo albums last year, of course had no chance of winning.
Best International Breakthrough Artist, voted for by “MTV viewers”, gave us the pathetic, forgettable Orson over the musically interesting Gnarls Barkley. Best British Single had a truly terrible selection of nominees, all to a man (and they were only men) soft-rock garbage – depressingly including the resurrected Take That, who won, and probably deserved to over that lot. Best International Album was the Killers’ seriously inferior “Sam’s Town”, over Bob Dylan; the Killers also took Best International Artist over Bob, which on the basis of “Modern Times” is somewhat of a travesty.
What I don’t get about the Brits is that the BPI could, if it wanted to, award music that didn’t suck. It would be as easy as getting the right jury in. For instance, the best award by far is the one given out by Radio 2 listeners, Muse as best British live act (which they undoubtedly are right now); previous pleasant surprises by public vote have included the famous 1999 Belle and Sebastian “Best British Newcomer” win, rigged by their fanbase and ironically given out after their third album. So the Brits really needs better targeted public voting, and a better nominations stage – if Radio 2 and/or 6music listeners could nominate an “alternative Brit” award, for example, things would be a lot more interesting on stage.
And why isn’t there an award for hard rock and metal, anyway? Even the Grammys, boring as they are, give out awards for Best Metal Performance, which is often won by people like Tool. That would be a lot more fun than giving Oasis an award for outstanding contribution to British music (which obviously means, from the context, “ripping off other people’s riffs and being able to sustain it for two albums”.) Having an award with Iron Maiden competing is guaranteed to up the tempo a bit, although if it’s awarded the same way as the current system bloody Razorlight would probably win. They used to have Best Dance Act, awarded well to people like Massive Attack and the Prodigy; it became Best Urban Act, awarded to people like Joss Stone and Lemar, before dying this year.
The BPI are, of course, conservative and scared of controversy; the awards weren’t transmitted live between the 1989 Sam Fox disaster (although almost all of the problems with that were technical rather than personal) and now, and probably won’t be again for a while after they stupidly invited Russell Brand in. But controversy is all people ever remembers about the Brits – Sam Fox, the KLF and Extreme Noise Terror ‘dead sheep’ moment, Jarvis Cocker’s stage invasion, Chumbawumba and Prescott. They really shouldn’t be scared of it – a good award ceremony always has a few surprises in store, which is why moments like the Belle and Sebastian win are so memorable.
That appears to be, unfortunately, the way the British music industry works, so we probably won’t see it fixed for a while, if ever. Interestingly, the best British album award was given to the Overrated Bloody Arctic Monkeys, who won the Mercury prize a few months ago. The Mercurys are so much more credible than the Brits, aren’t they?
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 