BRIT Awards.... and Bruce Springsteen....

Right, well as many of you will know the nominations for the ever prestigious and classy BRIT awards were released yesterday. Now, it's fair to say that I don't know who most of them are (well most aside from the British Group and International Act nominations), but I am fairly certain that comparatively few are actually worthy of awards. Well, my feelings about most modern music have been made clear in my previous posts, so it probably comes as no surprise, dear reader, to find out that this will be a scorn-filled comment about British music... oh and then a bit about how tremendous Bruce Springsteen is, because I don't want to end on a sour note.

I won't discuss the British solo artists/breakthrough categories because I don't really know much about any of them and the ones that I have heard more than a handful of times don't exactly fill me with hope for modern music, so the less said the better, I should think. The Breakthrough Act can be summarised thus: Florence and the Machine (red hair and Lungs, not as bad as some of the others), Friendly Fires (don't know), JLS (a sort of reality waxwork Boyz II Men), La Roux (quiff, massively overrated single) and Pixie Lott (hot pants, strange name).

The Best British single category is also a sadistic denunciation of the 'industry', dominated as it is by Simon Cowell's shiny-toothed crap-pop mafia. Then there's that woman, you know the one from Strictly who isn't a proper judge, a Taio Cruz- whatever one of those is and a deeply unholy union of Tinchy Stryder and N-Dubz (probably of case of collective IQ actually diminishing as a result of them all being in the same room at the same time).

This year's BRIT awards feature a number of special '30 year' categories to pad out the ceremony a bit, but these aren't any less contemptible than the other categories really. Looking at the 'Albums of 30 years nominations' there can surely be no greater indictment of the British music industry. In a sea of overrated bollocks, my pick is the classic (Lloyd Woolf won't like this bit) Brothers in Arms by head-banded, fingerpicking, guitar-oriented rock merchants Dire Straits. It reminds me of the happy times when was music was made properly by people with at least one actual music- machine a piece and a vast array of colourful headgear.

The 'Performance of 30 Years' category is just as much of a curio, with yet another interesting lineup. Perhaps the winner here should be the Who's performance in 1988, which due to time constraints, began when Rick Astley was halfway to the stage to collect an award. Ironically dear old Astley (of internet meme fame) felt partiuclarly let down by this (but perhaps not given up, run around or deserted).

(It should be noted that the only bit of BRITs from the last 30 years that filled me with anything approaching hope for mankind was that year the Darkness swept to victory and the time that the Arctic Monkeys took the piss out of the BRITs School kids)

So international awards, what do we have here? Well there's the Breakthrough act featuring Lady (or Madam, as Jason Isaacs once called her and he's not far off the mark) Gaga, Daniel Merriweather, a kind of edgy Australian Michael Buble who collaborated (and I mean that in the 'Drastamat Kanayan collaborated with the Nazis' kind of way) with annoying, mid-Atlantic music-botherer cum producer Mark Ronson. Then there's Animal Collective, a sort of crap whiny American Kraftwerk, whose video for My Girls is somewhere between epilepsy and amoebic dysentery. Jonathan Overend couldn't make me like it and neither can anyone. Listening to them is a bit like watching one of those awful American teen comedies, I genuinely can't bear it for more than a few seconds. There's also Empire of the Sun, who really were not as good as their album cover suggests and Taylor Swift, who frankly deserves to win (will Kanye have another pop? We just don't know...) being the least offensive of the lot.

The International Male is often the strongest and this one (with the exception of Eminem and Jay-Zed) follows suit. Buble is a reasonably inoffensive Canadian crooner whose most recent album was one of the more bearable offerings of the year, Seasick Steve is a man bringing a flavour of Delta Blues to the mainstream- a noble pursuit- and finally a true legend, the one, the only Bruce 'the Boss' Springsteen. No doubt the Boss will be in attendance for this momentous nomination in arguably the 11th or 12th most prestigious music awards in the industry.

On a serious note, Springsteen's musical achievements are hugely extensive and put every single other nominated artist to shame. From his humble beginnings and first two albums of experimental, hammond organ and guitar-led multiverse (a term coined by music scholar Rikki Rooksby) featuring the upbeat 'Blinded By the Lights', the brilliantly harmonised 'Rosalita' (in which the seeds of the classic E-Street Band sound are sown) and the epic 9 minute 'Kitty's Back', Springsteen found the 'sound' that would make him a superstar on his third (and one of the all-time greatest) album Born to Run. Here the style of the first two albums was mixed with sheer exuberance, despair, stadium-rock levels of rousing choruses and crashing crescendos to critical and popular acclaim alike and since then Springsteen has never looked back. He's constantly reinvented himself and refined his sound from the emotional double album 'The River' and blue-collar Bible 'Born in the USA' to introspective solo offerings like 'Nebraska' and 'The Ghost of Tom Joad', he has never failed to deliver and following this year's Working On A Dream and an astounding Glastonbury performance at the grand age of 60 he's well worth the award. With live shows upwards of 3 hours in length and tracks to please every corner of the listening public, Springsteen is a true hero of music and his contribution is astonishing, eminently listenable and unforgettable. Boss, I salute you.