In the year 2011 the Juno Awards suffered a mild mid-life crisis and got a new haircut. Tired of being the usual passé industry backslap, the Junos went city wide: meet-and-greets, celebrity athletics, special audio tours at the AGO, a blowout concert weekend — all culminating with Sunday night’s presentation ceremony, all with the Juno signature, all with corresponding corporate sponsors.
As an average Toronto urbanite, I love block parties. I love multi-venue festivals that carry on late into the night, and any other excuse to drink whiskey and make out, so Junofest — see the advert in [enter alt-weekly] — should be a pretty swell time. But being an average Toronto urbanite, I have also a nose for authenticity, and earlier this week, as I wandered through the AGO’s collection of Canadian art — now complete with the effusions of Canadian notables — I began to speculate whether Junofest’s 100 bands would ever have a chance to win the award they represent.
The best business plan I can think of is marketing to everyone. 2011 is the Juno Awards’ 40th anniversary, which apparently means painting the Juno tag on everything: a retrospective concert series, a charity hockey game, a charity basketball game, a garden show. Altogether, though, “Juno Week” feels like an imposition: the public is relegated to the tier of the festival that panders to the masses; meanwhile the doors are locked come the Sunday ceremony. It is only natural, since the Junos have always existed for the purpose of mythmaking, of inventing the stars they applaud, and myths go translucent when you look too close.
2011 is the 40th anniversary of the Juno Awards, and so what? You can effectively celebrate an anniversary in five-year intervals if it boosts revenue. And the Juno Awards actually began in 1964 as the RPM Gold Leaf Awards and only changed their name in 1971. It isn’t even a proper anniversary.
Maybe the music industry’s doomsayers were right. Perhaps the ceremony’s new “street” style hints that the outmoded award show format is taking on a new form in its post-modern afterlife, or more particularly, maybe it is evidence that the Junos have been transubstantiated into strange new reaches of post-modern corporate branding.
The Juno Awards have always been a brand of sorts: the product for sale is Canadian celebrity. Historically, the Juno Awards have been the Grammy Awards for holders of Canadian passports — that is, a way of creating a star system in the interest of the Canadian consuming public. The Junos came about as part of a two-fold program: in the mid-1960s, Canadian music industry professionals started to create their own market rather than move to LA. A series of organizations — CRTC, CBC, CRIA, SOCAN, etc. — appeared to promote a new invention called CanCon; the Junos happened specifically as a way of defining this “CanCon,” Canadian content that somehow exhibits its quality through its Canadian-ness.
The clause of “Canadian-ness” creates a problem of definition. The empirical requirements for Juno eligibility are certain — artists must be Canadian citizen and must have lived in the country for at least six months prior to the nomination period — the trouble is existential confusion: in honouring artistic achievement that is uniquely Canadian, there must be something among the nominees uniquely Canadian in nature. That is to say, artists must share a common inspiration in the same way they carry the same passport. It is a difficult argument to sell, but it’s better than to say you were just in it for the money…
Of course, things may stop at the markets, but they certainly don’t end there. In a recent article about Charlie Sheen in the Daily Beast, Bret Easton Ellis touched on some of these subtle anxieties of celebrity. He summarized the distinction he summed up with the dichotomy between Empire and Post-Empire celebrity: the “Empire” is the ideology of the star system. The Empire is dead and wasted. It doesn’t speak to the masses anymore, and it rings with falsehood. When a recording of Jane Bunnett (whom I’ve never heard of anyway) gushes about all of a paintings “vibrant colours, light, dark,” or when Canada Blooms features a garden inspired by Sarah Harmer’s “strong personal feelings towards nature,” there is something in a fundamental state of discord. It’s for charity, but it rings so untrue that it is beyond humanness, beyond kindness.
The event makes Sarah Harmer and Jane Bunnett look vapid; Gord Downey is grandiloquent enough to carry it, barely; oddly, the fanfare looks good on Drake, but perhaps it goes to show how vapid and frivolous Drake has been so far, universal as bread. Thus, the cynical side of the Juno Awards becomes evident: it is hard to play along with Juno Week without feeling like you’ve been sold something — or more correctly, feeling like you’ve been sold nothing. The tragedy of Juno Week is its own solipsistic lunacy.
