When Celine Dion refused to play the Halifax Commons last November, the uproar from the East Coast city was swift and punishing.
Residents and city officials took the snub personally and soon sounded a clarion call telling one of Canada’s most popular exports that she could join the Titanic – which she so famously serenaded in the 1997 film of the same name – at the bottom of the sea.
In December, Carl Wilson, editor and critic at the Globe and Mail, authored a book named after one of Dion’s more popular songs. In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Wilson questioned how millions could pay $20 for the Quebec chanteuse’s CDs, a “bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast – R&B with the sex and slyness surgically removed, French chanson severed from its wit and soul.”
Dion, Las Vegas-adoptee, multi-millionaire and purveyor of questionable taste, also leads the nomination count for this year’s Juno Awards.
With six nods, including Artist of the Year, Fan Choice of the Year, Pop Album of the Year and two for the Album of the Year category, Dion, who has sold more than 180 million records worldwide, will walk away with at least two trophies.
With a little research, anyone can predict who will win the top awards at the ceremony, because six of the major categories are awarded solely on album sales. Dion’s Taking Chances, her first album in four years, has sold more than 400,000 copies since its release in November, and was the best-selling record in the country last year.
Dion, therefore, will win both Album of the Year as well as Artist of the Year. Hedley, featuring Canadian Idol cast-off Jacob Hoggard, will take Group of the Year, and Josh Groban’s Noel, a Christmas album in the same vein as Mantovani and Perry Como, will win International Album of the Year.
These awards will also take up most of the television broadcast and will lead to spikes in their already bloated album sales.
This is an embarrassment in a year in which Canadian music all but reached its tipping point for popularity.
In 2007, critical darlings Feist and Arcade Fire made breakthrough albums on independent record labels and cemented their positions atop the indie-rock food chain in Canada.
Joel Plaskett, from the same town which lambasted Dion in November, put out a Springsteen-esque tribute to a Maritime adolescence, and was shortlisted, alongside Feist and Arcade Fire, for the Polaris Music Prize.
Joni Mitchell, the Prairie singer-songwriter to whom Feist has garnered plenty of comparisons, issued her first album in nearly a decade, again to widespread acclaim. Or take Shad, the Kenyan-born, Ontario-raised rapper who eschews pimping and posturing for reflections on the Rwandan genocide and what it means to be African-Canadian.
These acts represent the creative talents of Canadians and while they can all be found on the radio dial, only the deserving Feist will be on the television broadcast. The other four are nominated in marginal categories that promise a statuette and little more.
By fawning over top-selling artists, the Juno Awards have missed out on an aspect of Canadian culture that has become a source of international inspiration.
The days when Canadian-content beneficiaries Anne Murray (nominated and slated to perform this year) and Nickelback (21 nominations, and nine wins in six years) dominated the radio are drawing to a close.
It would help if the premier music awards in this country took notice.