Jesus Christ! Sonique is accepting her award for best female solo artists by thanking God and her fucking record company. I do wonder if she's doing it specifically to annoy me.

Okay. The Brit awards are crap. Everyone knows that. They may be allegedly voted for by 'the people', but the nominations are what count, and they're chosen by a bunch of industry 'experts', and thus they still have fuck all to do with the quality of the music, and everything to do with sales! sales! sales! They're judged on single sales, too, rather than album sales. But that's the point of the Brits; they're a way for the record industry to increase its sales, by inventing a soulless awards ceremony to give fake credence to their worthless artists.

No one really thinks the Brits mean anything, because their facade of democracy is pretty thin; I think everyone knows that the Brits are pretty much fixed, and it's really just the Top 40 with crappy presenters and a MasterCard sponsorship. I don't think anyone really expects decent bands to win anything. But that's not what irritates me, because I'm determined not to let the corporate world get on my nerves. What irritates me is the way that they always have one token decent artist in every category in an attempt to create the illusion that they might one day give an award to someone with, y'know, talent.

Every fucker know there's no way on this earth that P J Harvey is going to beat Sonique, because P J Harvey is talented, while Sonique sells a lot of records. Seeing as talent and sales so rarely go together, whoever wins is going to be shit. It's only by the sort of mass student action over the internet that bands like Belle & Sebastian can win. However, it seems the industry has wised up to that, and has stopped nominating as many good bands, or at least those with a large following. It's nice when a band with something to say get a chance to be in the limelight for a few seconds, but that doesn't alter the essential rigged-ness of the whole shitty operation.

But it's the duplicity of the Brits that pisses me off. If they were honest, and only nominated shite pop music, then at least it would be honest. But of course then the acts who do win wouldn't be able to pretend like winning a Brit was any sort of achievement. So instead of just dismissing the Brits as a load of commercial shite, I feel obliged to watch on the offchance that the one or two decent bands might actually win something, for a change. But do they? Do they bollocks. Instead I have to sit through Ant 'n' Dec's feeble attempts at humour, Geri Halliwell's pitiful ego trip, and a lot of really horrible clothes. Next year I don't think I'll bother.
 
 

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