JUNO LIST REASSURES STATUS QUO Indie acts largely left off nominees list Ben Rayner – Toronto Star Idols, establishment crooners and the usual corporate Can-rock herd dominate the nominees list for the 2006 Juno Awards, confirming that while the domestic music industry will occasionally pay lip service to the emergent Canadian indie scene, "product" is still what receives its official endorsement.
Meat-and-'taters Alberta rockers Nickelback came out on top with six nominations, while young-fogey crooner Michael Bublé and pop-jazz songstress Diana Krall drew five nods apiece.
A total of four Canadian Idol contestants — 2004 winner Kalan Porter and his arch-rival Theresa Sokyrka, 2004 fan favourite Jacob Hoggard and his mall-punk outfit Hedley, and last year's runner-up Rex Goudie — and one American Idol winner, Kelly Clarkson, will also be in the running for Juno statuettes when the awards are handed out in Halifax on April 2.
The cherubic Porter's three nominations put him in the same league as fellow three-timers Neil Young, the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Montreal underground heroes the Arcade Fire.
Aside from the preponderance of youthful talent-search graduates, the rest of the Juno field was largely dominated by the usual suspects.
Nickelback will vie for group of the year with Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo, Our Lady Peace and Theory of a Deadman, for instance, in a category that has remained essentially unchanged, give or take a name or two, since the 1990s.
The band's All the Right Reasons will face off in the stridently mainstream rock album category against Theory of a Deadman's Gasoline and Our Lady Peace's Healthy in Paranoid Times, as well as Hedley's eponymous debut and Quebecois performer Jonas's Jonas.
All The Right Reasons also takes on Krall's Christmas Songs, Porter's debut 219 Days, Bublé's recently Grammy-nominated It's Time and Goudie's Under the Lights for album of the year.
Despite producing little music save an Air Canada jingle since she took up residence in Las Vegas in 2003, Céline Dion will compete with Krall, Bublé, Nickelback and Montreal kiddie punks Simple Plan for the fan-voted Juno Fan Choice Award.
Jann Arden's Jann Arden turned up in the running for pop album alongside Porter's 219 Days, Bublé's It's Time, Sokyrka's These Old Charms and francophone star Boom Desjardins's Boom Desjardins.
The message, unintentional or not, was one of reinforcing the industry status quo and of reassuring the major labels that the sort of safe, innocuous talent they've been grinding out for years — a breed of pop embodied by the cookie-cutter Idol kids, faceless angst-lite moaners like Hedley, Simple Plan and Theory of a Deadman (itself a knock-off protégé of Nickelback front man Chad Kroeger) — is still the way to go.
The artist of the year category was the most egregious example of where the industry's priorities lie: Krall and Bublé, two adult-contemporary jazz musicians who sell most of their records to an over-40 crowd that tends not to do much downloading and file sharing; Porter and Goudie, two TV karaoke performers who sell most of their records to the 'tweens and young teens the rapidly contracting mainstream record business needs to stay alive in the future; and Desjardins, a token francophone without a hope in hell of winning but whose presence in a major category might, presumably, stem the tide of Quebec separatism.
How nondescript discs from Porter and Goudie both wound up in the running for album of the year and Neil Young's acclaimed Prairie Wind was tossed to the "adult alternative" category, meanwhile, is a puzzle for the ages.
It's not that the Junos and the voters in the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences are oblivious to the independent talent explosion that has launched homegrown acts like Toronto's Broken Social Scene and Metric, Vancouver's New Pornographers and Montreal's Arcade Fire to acclaim on the world stage.
Record sales determine who gets into some of the major categories and, despite enjoying a growing fan base worldwide, most of those groups simply don't move units on the order of a Michael Bublé.
And indeed, even though the Arcade Fire's smash Funeral turned up in last year's crop of nominees, the Academy diligently managed to dredge up three nominations (two for video of the year, one for songwriter of the year) in recognition of the art-rock troupe's ongoing success. Metric's Live it Out, Broken's Broken Social Scene, the Pornographers' Twin Cinema, however, had to settle for duking it out with Tegan and Sara's So Jealous and Hot Hot Heat's Elevator in the alternative album ghetto.
It was nice to see multiracial Kingston trio Bedouin Soundclash's international hit "When the Night Feels My Song" and Toronto rapper/songwriter k-os's "Man I Used to Be" injecting some colours other than white into a single of the year short list that included Bublé's "Home," Nickelback's "Photograph" and Feist's "Inside and Out." The Soundclash is also up for best new group with Hedley, Silverstein, Boys Night Out and Toronto's Pocket Dwellers. |