Wednesday saw the announcement of the 2010 Polaris Music Prize shortlist. The award, now in its fifth year, gives $20,000 to the album voted by music bloggers, journalists and others to have the most "...artistic merit", according to a press release from the Prize's website. Past winners have included Owen Pallett, Patrick Watson, Caribou, and Fucked Up, and both Pallett and Caribou are up for the prize again this year. The winner will be announced at a gala event at the Masonic Temple in Toronto on September 20, and if things are anything like they've been in the past, said gala will feature performances from each of the nominated artists.
You can find the rest of the shortlist in this Exclaim! piece.
All the necessary details aside, the reason I'm so pumped up for these awards is that the Polaris Prize gives exposure to some of the best artists in Canada. Other major music awards here, like the Junos or the MMVAs, don't really take the time to represent independent artists outside of a small category or two. As a result, there's more of a focus on units sold than on the quality of music (which explains why Nickelback always clean up at those shows). The Polaris Prize has also acted as a good barometer for up-and-coming talent in the past; K-Naan was nominated for the prize in 2006 and again last year, before his song "Wavin' Flag" took off and was used to promote charitable aid to Haiti and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
As for my reaction to the shortlist, I can't say that I'm really shocked by any of the nominees. Like in the past, there's nothing here that I find polarizing; there are bands on here that I'm not really into, but I can still see the merit in them being nominated. I'm most happy to see that the Besnard Lakes, Broken Social Scene, and Owen Pallett are up for the award, but I'm definitely looking forward to hearing and revisiting some of the other nominees as the date draws closer.
While I wasn't shocked by who got nominated, I was a bit surprised at who got left out, specifically longlisters Zeus and Holy Fuck. Zeus's Say Us received warm reception when it was released earlier this year, and the fact that they've never been listed for the prize before would've brought more new blood into the mix. Previous nominees Holy Fuck's Latin also got pretty good reviews. Aggregator site Metacritic lists the album as having a score of 75/100, only two points less than Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record, which made it onto the shortlist. It's not unfathomable that neither make the cut, but I'd expected that at least one of them would get on the list.
There are other issues to consider when thinking about who should've been put on the shortlist. One of the more noticeable ones is returning nominees. Last year's list included five previous nominees and one previous winner, and this year's list includes three previous nominees and two past winners. I know that the award is looking for the best album "...based solely on artistic merit", but considering the fact that Polaris is supposed to represent an alternative to other Canadian awards where the same group of artists clean up year after year, having repetitive shortlists would definitely be a problem. That's what makes the whole thing tricky; there needs to be a happy medium between representing newer artists and making sure the very best albums are nominated. Where that medium lies, I haven't a clue (Hell, my three favourites are either returning nominees or past winners). This year's list of nominees includes a variety of different genres (indie rock, baroque pop, bluegrass, rap, electronic, etc.), so it's still pretty inclusive, regardless of how many of them have been up for the award before.
So that's pretty much it for right now. I intend to write about the Prize again as the gala draws closer and after I've heard every album on the list. In the meantime, if you want to hear more from each of the nominees, a potential primer may be this week's CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence, which is doing a special this week on the nominees. You can find that here. Otherwise, you can find a song from Dan Mangan, off of his shortlisted album Nice, Nice, Very Nice, embedded below.
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