Thursday 28 February 2013
Monday 25 February 2013
Brits 2013: nothing more than a mirror to the charts
Brits 2013: nothing more than a mirror to the charts
Packing no surprises or punches, the ceremony churned out yet another predictable list of winners
One Direction's Brit
award for global success was one of the night's predictable outcomes.
Photograph: Joel Ryan/Joel Ryan/Invision/AP
In Wednesday's Guardian, the outgoing chairman of the Brits, David Joseph, proudly announced
that during his three-year tenure he had successfully rid the awards of
their "chaotic" element and introduced "more gravitas". There's a
compelling argument to suggest that gravitas isn't necessarily the thing
you're looking for in an event that's supposed to be celebrating a
thrilling youth phenomenon, but what Joseph seemed to mean was that the Brit awards ceremony no longer has an interest in delivering surprises of any kind.
Lumbered with a script that appeared to have been written by the same person responsible for the quips in an early 70s Miss World contest, host James Corden spent much of the evening apologising for the solitary moment of off-message excitement at last year's Brits, when Adele's acceptance speech was cut short. Adele didn't turn up this year to collect her best single award for Skyfall, opting instead to rehearse for her performance at Sunday's Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles.
Certainly there were no surprises among the winners, which furthermore rather defy any kind of meaningful analysis. The Brits exist to reward success, thus the winners tell you nothing about the state of British music that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the charts doesn't know already.
You could argue that makes the Brit awards slightly superfluous to requirements, as the winners had been rewarded fairly abundantly for their efforts even before they took delivery of the spotted statuettes Corden described a little confusingly as designed "by the visually British artist Damien Hirst", but it means there's something inarguable about the results.
Emeli Sandé, whose debut album was the biggest-selling new release of 2012, won two awards. Mumford & Sons, whose second album Babel was the fastest-selling of 2012 in the UK and the US won best band. One Direction won the global success award and even the most devoted opponent of their Simon Cowell-assisted brand of pop would have a hard time arguing that they aren't a global success, given that they've sold about 22m records worldwide.
There are doubtless people on messageboards and in comment sections currently positing angrily and at length that laid-back singer-songwriter Ben Howard isn't necessarily the most exciting new artist to emerge in the past 12 months. On the evidence of his two acceptance speeches, he didn't win on the basis of his fathomless charisma and star quality – but that's a qualitative judgment. The Brits is clearly interested only in making commercial judgements and Howard's debut album has gone platinum.
"The lineup goes from pop to discovery to indie," added Joseph, puffing the event's supposed variety. Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have invented a hitherto-unheard-of genre called discovery, it's perhaps worth noting that the winners aren't really as eclectic as all that. What holds sway in the British musical mainstream in 2013 isn't a genre so much as a certain earnestness: it's perhaps the only thing that links Sandé's pop-soul and Mumford & Sons' tweedy take on acoustic folk rock.
Even One Direction, an old-fashioned boyband cynically manufactured before the general public's very eyes on The X Factor, have bought themselves a slice of sincerity: their last single Little Things was written not by the kind of shadowy production team who make their living intensively farming pop hits but acoustic troubadour Ed Sheeran, whose success is at least partly predicated on his being the diametric opposite of a cynically-manufactured boyband. But again, that's a story already told in the charts, which the Brits, as is its wont these days, only served to reiterate.
Lumbered with a script that appeared to have been written by the same person responsible for the quips in an early 70s Miss World contest, host James Corden spent much of the evening apologising for the solitary moment of off-message excitement at last year's Brits, when Adele's acceptance speech was cut short. Adele didn't turn up this year to collect her best single award for Skyfall, opting instead to rehearse for her performance at Sunday's Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles.
Certainly there were no surprises among the winners, which furthermore rather defy any kind of meaningful analysis. The Brits exist to reward success, thus the winners tell you nothing about the state of British music that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the charts doesn't know already.
You could argue that makes the Brit awards slightly superfluous to requirements, as the winners had been rewarded fairly abundantly for their efforts even before they took delivery of the spotted statuettes Corden described a little confusingly as designed "by the visually British artist Damien Hirst", but it means there's something inarguable about the results.
Emeli Sandé, whose debut album was the biggest-selling new release of 2012, won two awards. Mumford & Sons, whose second album Babel was the fastest-selling of 2012 in the UK and the US won best band. One Direction won the global success award and even the most devoted opponent of their Simon Cowell-assisted brand of pop would have a hard time arguing that they aren't a global success, given that they've sold about 22m records worldwide.
There are doubtless people on messageboards and in comment sections currently positing angrily and at length that laid-back singer-songwriter Ben Howard isn't necessarily the most exciting new artist to emerge in the past 12 months. On the evidence of his two acceptance speeches, he didn't win on the basis of his fathomless charisma and star quality – but that's a qualitative judgment. The Brits is clearly interested only in making commercial judgements and Howard's debut album has gone platinum.
"The lineup goes from pop to discovery to indie," added Joseph, puffing the event's supposed variety. Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have invented a hitherto-unheard-of genre called discovery, it's perhaps worth noting that the winners aren't really as eclectic as all that. What holds sway in the British musical mainstream in 2013 isn't a genre so much as a certain earnestness: it's perhaps the only thing that links Sandé's pop-soul and Mumford & Sons' tweedy take on acoustic folk rock.
Even One Direction, an old-fashioned boyband cynically manufactured before the general public's very eyes on The X Factor, have bought themselves a slice of sincerity: their last single Little Things was written not by the kind of shadowy production team who make their living intensively farming pop hits but acoustic troubadour Ed Sheeran, whose success is at least partly predicated on his being the diametric opposite of a cynically-manufactured boyband. But again, that's a story already told in the charts, which the Brits, as is its wont these days, only served to reiterate.
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