The Polaris Music Prize is a yearly award given to a Canadian artist for best album, as decided by a group of music journalists and broadcasters. The prize includes a cash award of $30,000, and this year it was given to Feist for her album Metals. This drives me crazy.
Even if Feist’s album wasn’t terrifically boring (it is), she has to be the artist, out all the people nominated, who needs money and publicity the least. Well, okay, Drake was also nominated, but Take Care is really great. So is Japandroid’s album Celebration Rock, which is like a stiff drink and all of the excitement and angst of being young distilled into musical form. Heck, I’d even prefer it if a band called Cold Specks had won, and I know nothing about them.
The Polaris Music Prize provides the opportunity to support a promising young artist so that they can maybe get a shot at paying their rent, and this year the award was wasted. What’s the purpose of arts awards ceremonies, anyway?
Hamilton’s own version of music awards, the appropriately-named Hamilton Music Awards, happened last Sunday, Nov. 18. When I first heard about it, I thought what you’re probably thinking now: “So what?” Well, I’ll tell you what. The Hamilton Music Awards are our antidote to the out-of-touch Polaris Music Prize.
The Hamilton Music Awards don’t come with a $30,000 prize, but they do support great local bands that are playing really close to you, this week, probably for five bucks. One of those great local bands, the Dirty Nil, won punk recording of the year for their passionately catchy single “Little Metal Baby Fists.”
“Mickey, the singer of the band Forgotten Rebels, was announcing the winner,” said Kyle Fisher, the Dirty Nil’s drummer. “But when he went to go say it he would cough, and he did it like three times, for way too long. And I was like, ‘Fuckin’ say it, man! My heart is pounding through my chest, stop doing this to me.’ And then he told us. And it was a relief.”
The Hamilton Music Awards are a refreshing antithesis to the bloated pomp of something like the Grammys.
“There wasn’t anything about business,” said Fisher. “It was a lot of congratulations, and then it became, ‘Let’s all party now.’”
“It’s different because it’s more about the community,” said Fisher. “Hamilton has such an intertwined music community, where punk bands hang out with folk people. There’s a lot of crossover and just a lot of friends. A lot of homies hanging left and right. I think that’s what those awards really stand for. The brotherhood of Hamilton music. And sisterhood.”
Other music awards could learn from our example.
Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor
You’d have to be a little crazy to open a record store in 2010. And to open that store on Friday the 13th? That’s like saying, “I hate this stuff called money.”
The store in question is Hammer City Records, which opened two years ago on (Friday) August 13th at 228 James Street North. The place is a dream for anyone who likes their record stores independent, small and punk.
Craig Caron is an owner of Hammer City Records and was involved in its opening. He said that he missed the kind of record stores that he used to spend all his time in when he was a kid, and so he decided to open his own.
“I remember going upstairs to Star Records, on King and James,” said Caron. “You’d open that door and just smell pot. And I though, ‘What the hell is up there?’ This is the early ‘80s, and I thought, ‘Punks - they’re mean, they’re crazy, they’re going to kill us. We have to go up there.’”
I’ll admit that I felt the same way when I first walked up to Hammer City Records. Standing out in front was a classic punk: black leather, chains and a Mohawk. The thought that he’d kill me didn’t cross my mind, but the thought that he might be crazy did. He turned out to be funny and nice.
My first experience with Hammer City Records was definitely less intense than Caron’s first time facing the killer punks of Star Records, but I could relate. It’s like Hammer City Records is the modern reincarnation of Star Records, bringing back the feeling of old record stores.
“I’d be in Star Records, and the guy from Teenage Head would walk in,” said Caron. Teenage Head are legendary local heroes, and in the 1980s they were among the most popular punk bands from Canada. “It was the greatest thing ever. We wanted a place like that, where young bands could come and hang out.”
I had my own mini version of the freak-out that Caron described when he saw Teenage Head as the singer of TV Freaks walked in to Hammer City Records. I’m only a recent fan of the band, but I think their shit-hot punk rock is just about the coolest thing ever.
It might seem like Hammer City Records is built on pure nostalgia, an isolated little basement where rockers can escape the changing outside world, but Caren said that he hopes the store can be part of something new – part of changing the music scene to be more like how it was in the past.
“Once some of the old record stores closed, pieces of the community closed,” said Caren. “I know after Reigning Sound closed, a lot of bands just stopped playing. Or if they were playing, you never heard that they were doing shows.”
For those us who grew up going to HMV, this might be hard to imagine, but record stores used to be a places that did so much more than sell music. They were places where people formed bands, artists and musicians collaborated, and concerts were promoted.
The decline of the music industry is often blamed on us, the people who download music, but maybe it has more to do with independent record stores being replaced by big commercial chains that people would never think about hanging out in.
When people say something is “community-based,” it seems like it’s mostly bullshit. “Community” is so overused that it’s really just a word that people use to describe something that might impact someone somewhere when they are too lazy to consider who those people are specifically. Hammer City Records has given an actual meaning to community.
“One of the biggest highlights for me since we had the store is that we released a local music compilation LP,” said Caren. “It’s all Hamilton bands. A girl that hangs out in the shop painted the front and back covers. For me, that’s the dream come true. It’s this community that creates this amazing product.”
That’s what a community is – real people coming together and interacting in a significant way.
Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor
If you grew up in the 1980s and were gay, there weren’t really any TV shows you could relate to. All in the Family featured the first gay character on a sitcom in 1971, but it took awhile before gay characters had major roles or storylines. Liss Platt wanted to do something about that.
“When I was in school, you didn’t have Will and Grace, you didn’t have the L Word,” said Platt, an artist and a professor in the multimedia program here at Mac. “Not that these representations do us any favours, but there was just so little - especially representations of lesbians. I really wanted to make work that provided something else to identify with.”
One of Platt’s films, You Can’t Get There From Here, was recently featured in an exhibit at Brock University and describes what it was like for her to be 16, gay, and trying to figure out what that meant. “We see a lot of coming-of-age stories and I love them, but they’re tidy, and I don’t think coming of age is very tidy,” said Platt. Her story is anything but tidy – her sister was dying, the girl she loved liked guys, and everything just felt so intense. What describes being 16 better than the feeling of not knowing what’s important but still thinking everything is.
“A lot of my work is about trying to engage with the everyday and assumptions that we make that we don’t think about,” said Platt. Consider the purse, for example, which is the focus of a surreal film by Platt. At one point in the piece a tuft of hair appears in a purse that a lady is carrying, only to be franticly shoved into the bag’s depths. Purses appear totally harmless, but it’s kind of weird how much we associate them with being feminine without thinking about it. “Purses can emasculate butches; they’re like a threat to female masculinity,” said Platt, half joking and half serious.
Another one of her films, Long Time Coming, subverts the everyday (although, given the strike, it’s not really anymore) pillar of masculinity that hockey appears to be. One of the scenes replays a guy wiping down the Stanley cup, over and over. “That’s just rude, on purpose,” laughed Platt. “I love hockey, but it is so physical, and the men are on top of each other, writhing around. It was ripe for the picking, as they say.”
Sure, mocking hockey is funny, but there is a point – to ask why we think it’s okay for straight guys to be all over each other on ice, but in real life, not so much. “We have gendered notions of appropriate behaviour, and they’re limiting for everyone,” said Platt. “Queer culture has always been about not trying to just bring queer people into what’s normal, but to loosen up what normal means.”
In honour of Mac’s pride week, we present an ANDY that’s (mostly) full of articles about gender and sexuality. Hopefully we’ve managed to loosen up normal at least a little.
By: Nolan Matthews
Amid all the big talk about the economy during this presidential election, a mini-drama played out earlier this week over the use of a song by The National in a pro-Mitt Romney video. The decision to soundtrack a Romney video with The National is a confusing one – the band played two concerts in support of Obama not even a month ago. And even more confusingly, the song used in the Romney video, “Fake Empire,” is the same song Obama used in a video about his “signs of hope and change” that came out shortly before the 2008 election.
The National posted a scathing response to the Romney video on Youtube, saying that “every single person involved in the creation of the music you’re using is voting for President Obama.” The video, made by a group called “Ohio University Students for Romney,” was taken down the next day.
You might see this as a win for artists looking to control how their work is used and to prevent it from being used without permission. Though it’s easier than ever to take and use music without permission, it’s also easier to get caught. When I watched the Romney video, The National’s comment had around 1,500 up votes, easily making it the top comment. It worked pretty well to undermine the message of the video. The band had real power; they were able to do something about the misuse of their work, which hasn’t always been the case for artists.
In the early 1990’s, members of “riot grrrl,” a feminist punk rock movement, notoriously avoided all contact with the media to prevent the misrepresentation of their message. If anything about the riot grrrl movement was expressed, it was on their own terms.
But avoiding the media completely isn’t a great solution, and The National have shown that artists today can still control how they are being presented while still reaching many people.
A question remains, though: Why did the Ohio University Students for Romney choose “Fake Empire”? Surely there are plenty of other songs that could have been used in the video that didn’t have such a clear association with Obama. Either the Students for Romney didn’t do their homework about the history of the song they decided to use, or they are actually much smarter than they seem.
News about the Romney video didn’t start to spread until The National commented on the video, and maybe the Ohio University students chose to use “Fake Empire” precisely because it was the worst choice they could have made. Publicity about a bad decision is still publicity. They were able to take advantage of The National’s ability to point out how ridiculous it was to use their music to also draw attention to the video it was in. It seems that artists will never be able to control the use of their work, even when it appears that they do.
And maybe, if we want to really take it to the next conspiracy theory level, the whole thing was cleverly planned so that the statement of apology made by the Ohio students would reach the largest number of people. The students used the opportunity to write, “unfortunately we’ve learned that partisan divide exists on Youtube and in music as much as it does in Washington.” The apology spins the whole thing to claim that Romney is really about bringing different people together, and though he is running on the idea that he represents a change from Obama, it’s a change that can appeal to everyone.
Is a partisan divide really such a bad thing?
Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor
For those of us who weren’t there, music scenes have a romantic, almost mythic quality. Anyone who loves Nirvana has almost certainly worn a plaid shirt and wondered if we’ll ever have another Seattle.
But the infinite power of the Internet has changed local music scenes, at least enough to inspire a 2010 article in the Guardian to ask, “Has the internet killed local music scenes?”
Well, no. Local scenes may not be based on a specific sound in the way they used to be (like the grunge explosion), but they will always be vital and important. At least according to New Hands, a young, upcoming Hamilton band.
“There may be different scenes, but no one is working against each other,” said Pat O’Brien, the guitarist. “It feels like a community, basically.”
Hamilton’s diverse music scenes are about supporting bands, whatever they sound like.
“Young Rival have been really good to us,” said O’Brien. “They’ve given good advice about what not to do.”
“I’ve heard from them to never play in Regina,” said Spence Newell, the singer. “They played with Hollerado in Regina, and there were thirty people.”
“And that was apparently a better Regina show,” said O’Brien. “Like thirty people was a more significant crowd in Regina. Keep in mind that’s for Hollerado, a big Canadian act. And Young Rival does well too.”
Before New Hands were learning from big Hamilton bands, they were a high school Christian rock band called The Social Workers. Except not really.
“We went to a Catholic high school, the three of us,” said Ben Munoz, who plays guitar and synthesizer and occasionally sings. “We invited Gordy Bond, our drummer, to jam, and he was kind of reluctant about it, but he came anyways. Someone said we were a Christian rock band as a joke, and he thought it was real. Obviously he realized really quick that we’re not a super religious band.”
The New Hands of today sound like the soundtrack to a late night in a city far in the future. They combine elements of the moody post-punk bass and drumming of New Order with the effortless cool of the Strokes (back when the Strokes were effortlessly cool). The addition of Bond as the drummer was an important part of New Hands developing their sound, and on September 16 they had another defining moment as a band. They sold their first song.
“This is hilarious,” said Newell. “On Bandcamp, we’ve always made our music free, and finally when we released ‘Whichever Way You’ll Have It,’ which is still free, the two songs we released beforehand, ‘This I’ve Heard’ and ‘Tulips,’ we made cost 99 cents. And then someone bought our music, for the first time.”
“We didn’t know the person,” said O’Brien. “He didn’t buy both of our songs, though. He just liked one.”
“So we got 15 cents out of it,” said Newell. “We each made 3 cents.”
“We got fifteen cents from it?” exclaimed Munoz. “Holy cow, they’re scamming us.”
“It was nice, at least,” said Newell. “It’s a good feeling.”
New Hands will soon have more songs to add to their Bandcamp page. Over the next few months they will slowly be recording their first album, which they hope will be finished by early 2013.
Like most music nerds, I spend a lot of time reading album reviews. I started really reading them around the time I got Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People. I bought the album thinking it would sound like Coldplay, but it didn’t sound anything like Coldplay. It sounded weird, but I liked it, and I read as many reviews as I could so that I had a way of explaining to my parents and friends that this album made of strange sounds was actually really great. I looked to music critics then, as I do now, as an example of how to talk and think about music.
I think there’s some kind of magic in a really good review. A critic can make you feel an even deeper connection with a work you love or they can make you laugh along with them as they scathingly cut something down to size. I love great reviews, but I was never really able to identify the mysterious ingredients that make a good critic.
Then I came across a New Yorker article entitled “A Critic’s Manifesto: The Intersection of Expertise and Taste.” In the article, Daniel Mendelsohn explains why critics are important and what it takes to be a good one. He brilliantly condenses his argument into one equation: “Knowledge + Taste = Meaningful Judgment.”
Mendelsohn writes that the role of the critic is to explain the narrative of how they arrive at a judgment, and this is where knowledge comes in. Knowledge comes from being immersed in an artist’s work and being able to explain how a work fits into a larger context. Critics should aim to use their knowledge to explain to the reader how they arrived at a judgment and how a work can be approached and understood in the same way they do.
The next part is taste, which is a little trickier. Taste is a personal and subjective feeling, and the critic should fully understand their taste so that they can most honestly and clearly explain their reaction to a work.
Mendelsohn writes that knowledge and taste come together to give a review significance, allowing the critic to explain why art means something or nothing.
In honour of the review, this week we present an ANDY that’s full of them. We hope you think it’s good, but that’s for you to judge.
Nolan Matthews,
Senior ANDY Editor
Forget Butterbeer. Harry Potter’s favourite drink is actually Coke.
In 2001, Coca-Cola paid 150 million dollars for the marketing rights to the first Harry Potter movie, which allowed the company to put Potter-related images on their products.
To make it seem like the partnership was really about promoting literacy rather than luring kids to sugary drinks, the BBC reported that Coca-Cola also donated $18 million to organizations that help kids learn to read.
As much as Coca-Cola claimed their actions were motivated by noble intentions, promoting literacy might have been a deeper level of marketing. Coca-Cola increased the number of kids who recognized the Harry Potter characters on their products and who begged their parents to then buy them.
“There are questions about what corporate interests do and how they can drive a particular book towards popularity,” said Sarah Brophy, a McMaster professor in English and Cultural Studies. Beyond the captivating world and relatable characters, there are all kinds of things (like Coca-Cola promotions) that went on behind the scenes to make Harry Potter as popular as it is.
We all know J.K. Rowling’s single-mother, rags-to-riches story. But why do we know it?
“One of the ideas of the theorist Pierre Bourdieu is that in the production of literary celebrity, value and success, there’s a need to disavow the economy,” said Brophy. “So you pretend that you’re not interested in the practical, commercial concerns, and that allows you to retain your authenticity and legitimacy as a writer. The people who are really successful are those who are really savvy about those practical and strategic concerns.”
The fact that J.K. Rowling’s own story is so well known is evidence of her (or her publicist’s) marketing know-how. But even better evidence is her billionaire status.
“That rags-to-riches story also maybe masks the issues that we face in our society with the struggle that it takes to be an artist or a writer,” said Brophy.
“In an age when we are talking about austerity measures, one of the things that comes under scrutiny is arts funding. There’s a risk that if we focus on these stories of wild success, and wild economic success, we forget about the real struggles that many writers go through.”
Brophy suggested that J.K. Rowling’s level of success can affect the entire publishing world, influencing which books get promotion. Maybe we have Harry Potter to thank for the popularity of Twilight and The Hunger Games.
All of this focus on the commercial aspects of Harry Potter can seem a bit cynical and dismissive; ultimately, people love books because of the writing and not the marketing. But the marketing still affects how we see the writing, even if we try to resist it.
“How do you disentangle commercial success in the value of a piece of literature as art?” said Brophy. “I would say it is impossible to disentangle those things, particularly in our era of media adoptability, cross-promotion, etc. I think it’s important to think about how value is always being negotiated and to think about not only the global cultural reach of these texts as giving them significance, but the fact that they become focal points for cultural debates.”
The true magic of Harry Potter, after all, is that we can’t stop talking about it.
Tim Potocic has the job of being one of the main organizers of Supercrawl, and it’s a huge task for a huge event. Last year, 50,000 people attended the festival, and this year’s expected attendance was around 75 000.
Planning Supercrawl for so many people was a year-long job for Potocic. And as that year of organizing was whittled down until just one week was left before the event, the panic set in.
“I had late nights that weekend before, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” said Potocic. “It’s pretty panicked. I wish we were more organized.”
After Thursday, Potocic’s experience planning Supercrawl starts to sound more familiar to any student who has left a massive assignment until the day before it’s due.
“When I got up on Friday it was full-on,” said Potocic. “I didn’t get home until seven in the morning on Sunday, and I only slept for two hours on Friday night. And that’s the way it is. You just run on adrenaline because you know there’s an end. We know the street has to open up at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning.”
Even by forgoing sleep, Potocic didn’t really get to see much of the festival he was responsible for.
“This is the first year I’ve actually been able to catch one set of one band,” said Potocic. “I saw Change of Heart. They are reuniting to do very few shows, so I needed to see it.”
Before Change of Heart and the huge crowds, Supercrawl began four years ago as something much smaller. Potocic has been there since the very beginning of the idea.
As one of the founders of the Sonic Unyon record label, located just off James Street North, Potocic has always been part of the monthly Art Crawl, but he wanted the event to grow, to really push it and see what it could do.
“We got a big group of people together, there was at least 20 people in a room,” said Potocic. “We said that we wanted to close the street, because we thought it should be closed anyway during the regular monthly art crawls, even at that point in time, and we thought, let’s try to do a street festival. That was literally in June. Then everyone sat around and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea.’ And we had twelve weeks to plan it, which is not enough time.”
With the initial plans approved by the city, the next problem was deciding what to call the event.
“We were batting names around, and I was like, ‘Well, its going to be super! Let’s call it Supercrawl,’” said Potocic. “It’s a dumb name, really. We’re specialists in dumb names, so it kind of fits. I mean, Sonic Unyon is a weird, dumb name.”
So with the name decided, the organizers rushed to get everything else finished under the impossibly tight timeline of a couple of months. Instead of happening in September, like the other Supercrawls, the first was pushed to October to give the organizers more time. And when that time was up, Potocic and the other organizers prayed they would be lucky with the one thing they couldn’t plan.
“It poured rain,” said Potocic. “But we still had thousands of people out with umbrellas, and we were like, ‘Huh, thousands of people came out and it was pouring rain, so clearly there’s a need for a street closure festival style-thing, so let’s start working on 2010 right now.’”
Since then, planning future Supercrawls has taken all year, and that means Potocic hasn’t really been able to catch his breath even though this year’s event has just ended.
“I’ve already had two conversations with two agencies that are good friends of mine about what we’re going to do next year,” said Potocic. “We’ll really need to have our wish-list of top five acts that we’re looking at to headline potential stages locked in before the end of the year.”
Though Potocic is responsible for organizing the big stuff, that’s only part of what allows Supercrawl to happen because, ultimately, the whole James Street North community is involved.
“That’s the key to making Supercrawl and art crawl and James Street North as amazing and vibrant as it is, because it is a community initiative,” said Potocic. “We do a lot of community outreach to make sure that we’re not taking liberties that we shouldn’t. I mean, there will always be critics, but we try our best to reach out with the limited staffing and resources we have to run something like this.”
Next week, part two of this article will look at what the critics are saying and Potocic’s response. Hint: it has to do with gentrification.
Nolan Matthews
The Grey
Starring: Liam Neeson
Directed by: Joe Carnahan
The Grey is a movie about survival, and its got most of the stuff that we’ve become used to seeing in survival films.
There’s a plane crash, a remote and inhospitable location, and an unlikely group of survivors, but I guess faulting The Grey for having the characteristics of its genre is like criticizing a science fiction movie for taking place in space.
In any case, it’s hard to shake the feeling that so much of The Grey feels familiar, but there are wolves, so at least that’s something new.
A plane crash happens early on in The Grey, and the scene is actually the movie at its most affecting. The crash is disorienting, intensely physical and entirely gripping, but the rest of The Grey is unable to maintain the same level of exhilaration, and the movie becomes hopelessly bleak.
The only moments of relief are quickly interrupted by the arrival of the human-killing, computer-generated wolves.
Liam Neeson, playing the main character Ottway, is a hired gunman who works in Alaska to protect local oil workers from wolf attacks.
After the plane crash, the oil workers make up the surviving crew of seven, but they don’t go much beyond the archetypes of the family man, abrasive nihilist, or soft-spoken intellectual.
The crew is only kind of likeable, and so I could only kind of care about them. Even when the film gives some illumination into a character’s past, they tend to die shortly after, so greater character depth comes with the price of predictability.
With the crew being underwhelming, the responsibility then falls to Liam Neeson, who actually does a pretty good job.
While The Grey dulls some of the typical Liam Neeson magic, he gives a passionate performance that can be captivating, at least before both he and the film fall into melodrama towards the end.
Though trailers for The Grey might’ve given the impression that the film is action-packed, it isn’t the mindless guilty pleasure that the trailers hinted it could be.
Instead, we’re left with a film that mostly focuses on the feelings of helplessness of the survivors, and the wolves are not so much an excuse for an action sequence but an embodiment of pure paranoia.
In aiming for big emotions, The Grey succeeds, but the movie has an almost complete lack of subtlety.
Still, the extreme hardships presented to the characters make it hard not to feel drawn into their fate, though the film isn’t really interesting enough to give its dramatic messages about questioning the purpose of life, and the importance of fighting for that life, much weight.
By the end of the movie, its unrelentingly miserable tone becomes a struggle to get through, and instead of giving the plight of these characters extra weight, it just feels like a bit much.
All of the emotion of the film reaches its peak in the final moments, and it’s in the ending where The Grey throws its first surprise.
The ending is quite possibly totally unsatisfying, but it’s also thought provoking, and it’s too bad the film didn’t take more chances like it.
Despite being about the fight for survival, The Grey ends up feeling a bit lifeless.
