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Music

The Junos Were Actually Kind of Alright This Year

There is nothing wrong with applauding mediocrity.

Photo via Twitter

This article originally appeared on Noisey Canada.

The problem with the Juno Awards—applicable across the board to Canada’s music industry—is that they usually honor what feels like a members-only club of rock vets, singer-songwriters, and tokenist rapper picks. That seemed to change during the 2016 Juno Awards broadcast from Calgary with a show that championed the new, the currently popular, and… the cool?

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Yep, after years of institutional rockism, the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences made the choice to highlight three of our most-discussed music exports, even if two of them didn’t show up. Drake, the Weeknd, and Justin Bieber were nominated for nearly every major award, and their popular and critically adored 2015 albums all won at least once over the Junos weekend. Bieberveli won Pop Recording of the Year for Purpose and the Fan Choice Award, which he and his blond dreads accepted in a typically aloof, boxing-centric video message that was met with resounding boos by the Saddledome audience. The Scarborough native born Abel Tesfaye still won the most awards overall, including the crucial Album and Single of the Year awards, an impressive statement from an institution that historically doesn’t give a flying fuck about urban music.

What’s more important about these three is the gulf between their wider influence and how little Canada has acknowledged it. While much of mainstream Western pop has morphed into moody R&B or strutting cyborg disco over the past few years, Canadian music has remained staunch in its folksiness. Only now is this changing given that for once, we’re the ones responsible for these trends. Both of the dominant pop styles were originated or codified by Tesfaye and Bieber, respectively. Meanwhile, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late unofficially kick-started a “Cool Toronto” movement in hip-hop that’s even inspired American artists to sing-rap over syrupy-slow, 90s R&B-sampling beats.

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While the Juno nods for the Weeknd have come only after he made undeniable pop strides last year, that the bleak and unforgiving IYRTITL won Rap Recording of the Year over more accessible fare from k-osand SonReal shows how weird Drake has made rap (and of course, serves a testament to his massive popularity). It’s heartening to see quantifiable innovation rewarded on the largest scale Canadian music has to offer.

Even besides these content-hoggers, the Junos broadcast ended up not being lame for a large portion. Alessia Cara’s win as Breakthrough Artist of the Year was another notch in the R&B column, plus maybe an attempted rebuttal to the #JunosSoMale controversy that greeted the sausagefest of nominees back in February. A group of other young songwriters made up most of the night’s performers, all of whom turned in engaging performances of hits that anyone who turns on a radio right now could conceivably hear within the next few minutes. Shawn Mendes did “Stitches”, Shawn Hook did “The Sound of Your Heart”, non-”Shawn” Coleman Hell did “2 Heads” even though a sketchy live mix made it sound sort of like a “____ Shreds” YouTube video. All of these songs draw from the current vocabulary of pop music: folk, EDM, R&B. They are good representatives of this grab-bag era in the mainstream and as such, show that Canada isn’t stuck in its musical bubble and might actually be dictating things for once.

Elsewhere, the Weeknd defied his usual awards show performance routine of “Can’t Feel My Face” with a medley of Beauty Behind the Madness album track “Acquainted” and the Belly collab “Might Not”, bringing the Ottawa rapper himself and thunderous 808s onto the Junos stage. Perhaps the definitive moment of the broadcast was Kardinal Offishal and Brampton YouTuber/Vine star Jus Reign introducing the nominees for Country Recording of the Year, with both humorously lampshading the fact that country music is mostly irrelevant to their respective cultural experiences as first-generation Canadians.

That some of the night was pablum—Bryan Adams playing a song that wasn’t “Summer of ‘69”, a final battalion of musicians playing Burton Cummings solo cuts that weren’t “These Eyes” or “American Woman”—ultimately didn’t matter. These were the least rock ‘n’ roll and least conservative Junos yet, which is promising for Canadian music as a whole. There’s still a long way to go before they get everything right, but for now, this will do. The Junos didn’t suck, go tell your friends about it.

Phil Witmer is a writer from Mississauga. Follow him on Twitter.