Next week sees the Brit Awards return for another year and once again I won't be watching. In fact I won't be watching any music award ceremonies, I hate them all. The Brit Awards though pretty much sums up everything wrong with awards ceremonies.
I thought I'd take a look at the nominations for this year and comment on how rubbish the nominees generally are, but there is no need to do that. Instead the fact the "Outstanding Contribution to Music" award goes to Pink this year is a good enough reason in itself not to watch it.
Ok admittedly I have watched the Brit Awards in the past, but the years I did watch it made me realise what a load of nonsense it really is. I wondered how does one vote for their favourite to win an award? Turns out you can't. Instead a panel of 1000 music "experts" cast their votes. These so called experts apparently include the previous years nominees and winners, plus managers and record label bosses amongst others. Clearly all these so called experts will have their own agenda, sod what the record buying public think.
Perhaps the first time I truly thought the Brit Awards were a bit of a farce was in 1996. The previous year Blur had won a record 4 Brit Awards but in 1996 they won none. It wasn't that I was a massive fan of Blur, it was more the question of how could a band who dominated the awards one year win nothing the next year, particularly as over the year since then they scored their first number one winning the battle of the bands against Oasis, who won 3 awards themselves.
What got me more though was that it didn't represent the music I was listening to at the time and the nominees for each category was all the same. Take the "British Single of the Year" and "British Video of the Year" categories. Four of the five nominations are the same. Given the two are mutually exclusive I find it hard to believe that four of the five best singles also have at least the fifth best video. The nominees themselves in both categories were Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Take That with Radiohead in the video category and Everything but the Girl in the singles category.
Then there was best album who's nominees were Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Radiohead and Paul Weller, so four of these acts were also in the best video category. Of these acts, the four groups were in the best group category and Paul Weller was in the solo artist category which he won. Ok best group/solo act and best album do go hand in hand, but then what's the point in having both? The other group in the best group category was the Lightning Seeds. Seems like these "experts" were really into their Brit Pop that year. Yes Brit Pop was big, but there was other music too.
Being a Dance Music fan at the time though, the category I was most interested in was the "British Dance Act" one. The nominees included Massive Attack, Tricky and Leftfield, all decent acts. However, aside from the debate on whether Trip Hop should be classed as Dance Music, these are all acts who have been known to appeal to the Rock crowd. As for the other nominees, there was M People who I don't recall any Dance Music fan liking and Eternal which is the first and only time I've heard them described as being Dance Music. Ok I never expected DJ Dougal to get nominated but I just thought that the nominees didn't truly reflect what was going on in the Dance Music world at the time.
The singles chart has often been ridiculed for not being truly representative of peoples music taste and I don't dispute that at all. But at least the singles chart is essentially a measurement of the music people are buying/streaming that week. The winners of Brit Awards on the other hand is basically music "experts" telling the public this is who you should be listening too.
Would I entertain the Brit Awards if any member of the public could vote for whoever they wanted? Well no, the problem is you would only vote for someone you've heard of. The way most people have heard of the typical nominee at the Brit Awards is through the act in question being heavily promoted and all these awards achieve at the end of the day is further promotion irrespective of whether the act in question is any good or not.
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