The nominees are out for this year's Juno Awards and, though there's more to celebrate than most years given the dominance of Canadian artists on the world stage over the last 12 months, as usual there's also much to criticize. Following suit from #OscarsSoWhite and #CanStageSoWhite, Canadian music-watchers have started their own hashtag to describe the dude-heavy dominance of Drake, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber: #JunosSoMale
It started with a set of tweets from Amy Millan (solo artist and singer in Stars), using the Junos' image-driven nomination announcements to let the categories speak for themselves:
All the dudes congratulating the dudes @TheJUNOAwards #junossomale
— Amy Millan (@amymillan) February 2, 2016
Dudes pic.twitter.com/cc6Fw7IPQQ
— Amy Millan (@amymillan) February 2, 2016
Dudes pic.twitter.com/dNihs8B04W
— Amy Millan (@amymillan) February 2, 2016
Twitter lit up from there. There were plenty of predictable "I don't see colour/gender" type responses that presuppose a level playing field that doesn't exist. There were also a number of tweets pointing out female artists who were left out of the major categories, from Alessia Cara to Carly Rae Jepsen to Grimes.
Grimes' Art Angels may have been physically released too late to qualify, but she had some of the most barbed criticism (later deleted after her tweets were, as usual, turned into tabloid-style "Grimes blasts..." music journalism). But Exclaim! got a screenshot:
There's a lot to criticize about the Junos, and we have. The safe, industry-driven nominations often fail to recognize the vibrancy and diversity of Canadian music, or shunt the "multicultural" music off into specialized, genre-specific categories that don't get shown on the official broadcast (including hip-hop, which can hardly be considered "niche" at this point, even in Canada).
Even the Alternative Album of the Year category, which gives nods this year to unabashedly political and socially aware albums from U.S. Girls and Braids, includes the self-titled debut from Viet Cong, who deserve criticism for even submitting an album bearing a name they have admitted is offensive and vowed to change (though never did). As I've said elsewhere, bestowing these kinds of honours on this band weakens the whole field.
So yes, the #JunosSoMale hashtag hardly scratches the surface, but it's still heartening to see people scrutinizing the award show in the same way that #OscarsSoWhite has taken the Academy Awards to task for failing to recognize racialized film artists.
That said, criticizing an awards show like the Junos is really attacking a symptom, not the disease. But it's not meaningless. The Junos are largely run and controlled by those calling the shots at the highest level of the Canadian music industry. It's easy to laugh off an awards show that never fails to nominate Nickelback (this year is no exception), but it affects who gets signed, where the grant money goes, and what's marketed as "Canadian music."
Grimes, in her deleted twitter spree, highlights a systemic problem that even goes beyond visibility of female artists (only one of the Junos performers, Alessia Cara, is female): even behind the boards, female producers and engineers especially are not recognized. She goes so far as to suggest some great examples: Wondagurl, Allie X and a l l i e.
The Junos aren't the only thing that's broken, but it doesn't hurt to try to fix them.
#JunosSoMale just scratches the surface of Canadian music industry problems by Richard Trapunski | Chart Attack.