This week, we're be approaching the question of "what is Canadian music?" by looking at three distinct perspectives: the community, the critics, and the charts.
Today: as critics look back not only on 2015 but on the canon as a whole, they're changing perspectives on what music really represents the country. But, in many ways, it's just as problematic as before.
This year in Canadian music was filled with milestones as homegrown artists dominated charts, streaming services and year-end lists. With the country's music feeling the glow, 2015 was also a time for reflection. As attitudes shift and generations change, some critics have taken the opportunity to revisit the Canadian music canon and ask if those usually held up are the albums and artists that represent the country’s best. And, in the process, they began to form a new canon.
In the same period that awarded the veteran indigenous artist Buffy Sainte-Marie this year’s Polaris Music Prize, the critics award also launched the Slaight Family Heritage Prize, a new distinction given out to albums that came out prior to the inaugural Polaris Prize in 2006. Each year, there will be four awards given out in four categories, which are divided by decade (2000s, 1990s, 1980s, and 1960s/’70s share), with five to six nominees in each (five in every other category except for the 1980s which gets six for some reason).
The Heritage Prize might’ve been developed with good intentions ("the Polaris version of a hall of fame," says Polaris founder Steve Jordan) but its existence points to a larger problem with how the Polaris Prize operates and how Canadian music criticism functions in general.
The idea of “Canadian music” is an institutionally produced entity, and it’s an idea that’s always shifting — a constant work in progress that is routinely being made and unmade.
In resisting the longstanding singular vision of what Canadian music was considered to be important or valuable, Polaris presented a new opportunity to re-evaluate what “Canadian music” means and expand its popular conception beyond Neil Young and The Tragically Hip. The Heritage Prize continues that vision, but it does so from the vantage point of ten to fifty years.
Writing about regretting his vote for Viet Cong for this year’s Polaris Prize short list, Chart Attack Editor-in-Chief Richard Trapunski argued that despite Polaris’ mandate, music cannot be separated from its context: “When I hear a song like ‘March Of Progress’ I might not be hearing the name of the band that wrote and recorded it, but that's only because I have the privilege not to.”
It’s impossible to know what discussions went on in the jury room, but it was common to hear the offensive band name treated as one of those external factors separate from the music itself. But the simple act of dismissing the controversy to focus on “artistic merit” is a political one, motivated by the very context that Polaris is attempting to isolate the music from.
This attitude isn’t limited to the Prize itself, as evidenced by the fact that not a single journalist challenged the name “Viet Cong” in Canadian media until April Aliermo’s public opinion-shifting piece in Exclaim!. Even after her piece was published, defense of the name has continued unabated, even in the same magazine. Exclaim! picked the album Viet Cong as the #12 best Pop/Rock album of 2015, evidently ruling the record’s “quality of art” qualifies it above what, according to the same magazine, is a racist name.
This isn’t a localized phenomenon, it’s a widespread issue throughout Canadian music journalism. Trapunski didn’t get the band shortlisted alone and Exclaim! wasn’t the only publication to include Viet Cong on their year-end list. Among them was CBC, the country’s government-funded public broadcaster, who included it on its Best Canadian Albums of 2015 list.
Since the final vote is decided by popular poll rather than a chosen jury, the Slaight Family Heritage Prize won’t get into the same closed-door debates around the merits of the art vs. its context, but that emphasizes just how limited the “quality of the art” argument is. It’s great that musicians like Peaches (winner of this year’s ‘00s category over perennial indie stalwarts Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire and Feist) and Jackie Shane (nominated for ‘60s/’70s, but didn’t win) are finally being recognized for their landmark works in a modern canon of Canadian music, but that they’re even being nominated is a reflection of what we value in art today.
Since The Teaches of Peaches came out in 2000, her influence has spread so far and wide that you can’t help but hear and see it in the work of musicians like Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, M.I.A., Spank Rock, Amanda Blank and Miley Cyrus. Her sound is everywhere, and looking back 15 years, we’re seeing it belatedly for how we should've seen it upon its release — as a seminal work of Canadian queer culture — but with all of the accumulated baggage of the music she’s influenced in the meantime.
As for our appreciation for the previously underrepresented Jackie Shane in 2015, that’s largely the result of the hard work of amazing journalists and historians who made sure Shane was not forgotten. That he was even nominated at all is perhaps a testament to the thoughtful and in-depth histories of Shane to come out recently, including CBC’s I Got Mine and Carl Wilson’s “‘I Bet Your Mama Was a Tent Show Queen’” for Hazlitt.
Retroactively awarding records that should have won had your award existed at the time is as much a fiction as it sounds. What we place value on today will not be what we value ten years from now, or twenty. The idea of “Canadian music” is an institutionally produced entity, and it’s an idea that’s always shifting — a constant work in progress that is routinely being made and unmade. That’s not to say that canon-formation is a futile exercise, but it does highlight how much context plays into what we end up adding to the canon and more importantly, what we leave out.
For a long time our understanding of Canadian music was bound to Cold War ideas of cultural sovereignty and protectionism that spawned Pierre Juneau’s Canadian Content regulations. You can see how that hegemonic Canadian identity is now fracturing.
Consider how The Teaches of Peaches was originally released via a Berlin-based label before being re-released in 2002 by UK-based XL, which only then helped Peaches find the widespread critical acclaim and attention she deserved. Our understanding and appreciation of her art would not be possible were it not for the larger global context she operates in. She is not just some exception to the rule, her reality is one of the business itself.
The Canadian music business is a global one, and as was discussed in a recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication, “Canadian artists are increasingly signing with international independent labels and, by the same token, Canada’s independent labels are more apt to sign international musicians.” Narratives of Canadian musicians are transnational, which suggests that how we think about and discuss their art should take a similarly nuanced approach.
Engaging with art in a vacuum is a philosophy and privilege that is all too often invoked to justify exclusion.
I am not saying that what Polaris has championed in the past was undeserving, but I seriously question its ability to do its job moving forward. The introduction of the Slaight Family Heritage Prize has highlighted just how unavoidable context is in the process of canon-forming, as our values and priorities shift over time and determine how we approach art in the first place. Understanding who we put on these lists and why means always looking beyond the art itself. Now is the time to highlight those politics, not obscure them.
More PERSPECTIVES ON CANADIAN MUSIC
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In a year where many discussions focused on appropriation, race and misogyny, we ask: was activism a trend? Or is real change taking place?
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Canadian music journalism and its Polaris problem by Michael Rancic | Chart Attack.