It’s the same every year. The nominations for the Choice Prize, Ireland’s equivalent to Britain’s Mercury Music Prize, are announced and we all have a little look and become dismayed for five minutes at the opportunity missed and soon move on with our lives because we all know it’s not really very important anyway. It feels like the arguments over the prize have lost some of their steam in the past few years, like less and less people care enough to really get angry about it. This is almost certainly a good thing. We’ve become desensitized to the annual blindsiding of adventurous and interesting music in favour of that which appeals broadly to many. There are sponsors to keep happy though and the €10,000 prize money doesn’t grow on trees. There’s PR campaigns to be paid for and a lavish bash at Vicar Street that needs taking care of. Business is business and if that means the Script get nominated, then so be it.
Last year I wrote a few words about the Choice and why it’s pretty irrelevant but we probably shouldn’t expect a whole lot more from it than we get. So I won’t repeat myself here. The bigger question right now seems to be, what can any prize of that sort aim to achieve? How can any artistic endeavour be judged on merit against another and awarded a prize at the end of it? How, in short, could the Choice prize be relevant?
The initial thing to understand about the Choice is that its foundational aim is not necessarily to pick the best Irish album from a given year, though that is often how it would seem and is often how it is presented. No, the aim is “ultimately, to select the album which best sums up the year in Irish music“. Now that is a very different thing to what the “best” album may be because if you are to simply sum up a given year in Irish music then it makes perfect sense to see people like the Script or Two Door Cinema Club or Imelda May on the shortlist. I mean, these are people who sell bucketloads of records and sell out massive shows. They are an indelible part of the Irish musical landscape and one cannot deny that.
If, however, we are to engage in the idea of critical thinking and independent thought, it may seem like none of these records really push Irish music (or music in general) anywhere new or particularly interesting. They are interesting more as product and social phenomenon than music and, while you will no doubt find the odd poptimist who will argue their case, most critics are likely to agree. This is not to say that there aren’t good examples of interesting music every year (there’s usually at least a couple of picks from “the underground”), like Adebisi Shank’s second album in 2010 or Tieranniesaur last year.
By the very nature of the aim of the prize, each album selected for the shortlist is tokenistic. They are there to try to create a rounded picture, an easy summation, of the past 12 months in “the Irish music industry”. It’s good news for the smaller acts who get nominated because suddenly they’re getting a whole load of free promotion and might walk away with ten grand. (They won’t be walking away with ten grand, trust me.)
So what is the alternative? One option would be to choose judges who display an inclination towards critical evaluation and allow them free reign. Choose people who can make arguments for the music they love and let them make them. Let people see their choices that go into the shortlist, let them give a reason why they chose them. Put it all on the website for people to read and think about and discuss with each other. The current approach is similar to throwing a ball into a playpen full of kittens. They’ll push it about until they get bored or hungry of find something else to do. Let critics make critical decisions, statements and justifications and you’re going to have real talking points. A dozen critics giving reasons why they voted for each album adds up, hopefully, to a lot of cogent and intelligent conversation about Irish music in the past year.
The eventual winner is somewhat less important than the process but a smarter system than the one employed last year will have to be found. A two-stage vote on the night made for a simple democratic process but also destroyed any chance the weirder, less familiar music had of winning. We can generally take it that adventurous music will annoy some people, it will confuse some people and it will elude others. (Cashier No. 9, for instance, have never confused anybody.) As such, it’s chance of winning a popularity contest is slim-to-none. In a year where half of the shortlist have been nominated before (with three previous winners included), the need to shake things up is clear.
If the Choice is to be relevant to Irish music in the years to come, it must actually engage in a dialogue. Rather than presenting a (consistently conservative) list for people to argue over, it needs to make the critical case for each of these albums and so for itself. We are desperately short on critical engagement with popular music in this country with reviews reduced to 200-400 word reinforcements of already-general opinions and articulate use of critical theory almost completely missing. By getting a dozen people who supposedly know their stuff to argue – in public – about, for and against our own popular music, we are bound to stimulate new opinions, to crumble baseless ones, and expose charlatans for what they are. The Choice has the cultural platform at this point to lead the way into a new public arena for critical thought. If it can do this, then it might begin to serve the music it currently seeks only to anoint.
