Nelly Furtado: Canadian

“Say It Right”; ‘Loose‘ (2006)

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Canadians At The 2007 Grammy Awards:

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Nelly Furtado: is nominated in the Best Pop Collaboration w. Vocals category for her collaboration with Timbaland.

Neil Young: is nominated in three categories — Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song for “Lookin’ For A Leader” and best Rock Album for his record “Living With War”.

Michael Buble: has been nominated in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category for “Caught in the Act”.

Sarah McLachlan: was also nominated in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category for “Wintersong”.

Diana Krall: picked up a nomination for “From This Moment On” in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category.

Walter Ostanek: the St. Catharines-Ont. “Polka King” and Fred Ziwich were nominated for “Good Friends Good Music” in the Best Polka Album Category… this guy has been nominated for thirteen Grammy Awards and has won three. Canada: Polka Capital Of The World, and proud of it.

Bonus Track — The Juno Awards: The Canadian music awards are called “The Junos“. They used to be ridiculously, stupidly, uncool. They started to get better… and a little more “with it” back in 1990 when Vancouver-based “Sons Of Freedom” won Most Promising Group of the Year. SOF were so fucking cool. They were part (beta version) of the ‘pre-Seattle-style’ metal-grunge movement. Before SOF I think Anne Murray won every award in every category every year for thirty-seven straight years. But SOF poured water on her and were duly rewarded after she melted. Then they put out another album and disappeared into the weirdness that is CANCON.
Over the past decade Juno organizers have turned the evening into a concert with an occasional thirty-second speech by a laughing “hey, look what I did” musician who knows how silly it all is… basically the artists usually have a lot of fun. The event is also held in a different city every year. It’s a lot more fun to watch now than it was then. Definitely a lot more fun than The Grammy’s… watching people, who really aren’t artists or who have anything even remotely interesting to say, jabber on for three hours is not a good time. The musicians that seem to be celebrated by The Grammy’s now, at least the new crop, are ‘artists’ only in the loosest sense of the word. Like how the guys who paint over graffiti can be considered ‘artists’. They have to stop treating the event like it was the Oscars (the “Joe Strummer Tribute” was pretty fucking cool though)… they make the performances seem like separate events from the awards. They take ‘musicians’ who perform in clubs, arenas or football stadiums and put them into a setting best designed for opera and have them perform in front of a hundred hired rythmn impaired speed-freaks in The Pit and three thousand uninterested “colleagues”. Then there’s the five minute commercial breaks… The Juno’s, if my memory is right, are now done live in an arena where the stage is basically at audience level. It’s a concert. Because they’re musicians.
MuchMusic used to have the best music award show, the MuchMusic Video Awards (MMVA‘s)… at least until they started allowing the “Lindsay/Paris/Britney” types to show up. Now it looks like everyone who attends was painted with the same palette of high-shine gloss selections of beige. MuchMusic had a definite Canadian character until they got rid of Moses Znaimer, now the VJ’s are clones, children and boring. If you’re in Canada and you want to see what MuchMusic used to be check out the Quebec-French version, MusiquePlus. The American equivalent of the MMVA’s would be the MTV Awards, which are just silly-stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if next year they had an award for Fastest Meth-Fueled Weight Loss. Great Britain has “The Brit Awards” which come fairly close to The Juno’s, but when you’ve got Oasis and Robbie Williams et al trying to outcool each other while George Micheal strikes new and ever more remarkable poses in the corner, it just sinks into parody. The nominees this year are fairly young and heavy on ‘The New’ so maybe this year will be different. But, of the bunch of them, The Juno’s are the most fun… and they sure as shit beat out the Canadian Television Awards, “The Gemini Awards”, which actually aren’t even televised live anymore.

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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.

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