Caribou’s “She’s The One,” featuring Jeremy Greenspan of last year’s shoulda-been Polaris winners, Junior Boys.

Congrats to Caribou (Dundas, Ont-born, UK-resident Dan Snaith), the winner at last night’s gala in Toronto of the $20K Polaris Music Prize for the best Canadian album of 2007-08. It was the result I was expecting, although when Holy Fuck played their blissgasmic closing set in the night’s performances, I briefly hoped they’d snatch it. But the HF disc (LP) isn’t the equal of their live show, so da judges made the call.

You can still hear the show on Radio 3, I believe, or just go read the wide range of coverage and commentary all over the place. Judge Frank Chromewaves Yang’s memoir of his experience is my fave.

Polaris capo Steve Jordan movingly dedicated the night’s proceedings to the memory of Calgary record-shop owner, Mike Pleau of Megatunes, who sadly died this weekend at 54. While it’s easy to overlook now as they’re displaced by digital, Steve used the occasion to remind the crowd of how big a supporting role the retail stores have played in nurturing music culture across Canada, thanks to dedicated proprietors and staff like Pleau.

And if anyone has a transcript of Black Mountain’s kickass acceptance speech, post it in the comments please!

Last call is today for voting in the $5,000 ECHO prize for best Canadian song : I make my case for Veda Hille’s “Lucklucky” here, passionately, but with fellow nominees Wintersleep, The Weakerthans, So-Called and Sandro Perri, whoever wins will deserve it.

Various folks all over the ‘netses are handicapping the Polaris Prize today. You can listen to the ceremonies (with live performances by most of the nominees) on CBC Radio 3 tonight starting at 8 pm EST and I’ll catch you tomorrow for the post-game hangover analysis.

With all due respect to the Department of Culture folks (whose swing-riding-target plan is a great idea too), the video below shows how artists can intervene in politics, including arts funding, without seeming like whiners: Pool talents and make something smarter, funnier and more irreverent, pointed, charming and entertaining than anything professional politicos can dream up. The production values don’t have to be as slick as this. Just for background: The musician in this video is Michel Rivard of the popular Quebec band Beau Dommage, and the song he sings is a classic hit of theirs, “La complainte du phoque en Alaska” (The Alaskan Seal’s Lament). (How apropos for the age of Palin.)

While a bit of the humour here is cliched and inaccurate about the cultural problem in Ottawa (it’s not that they can’t understand French or recognize Quebec celebrities: the current Minister of Heritage is a francophone from Quebec), it will play to the intended audience, and symbolically it yokes the censorship and arts-abroad issues and nails the ideological deafness of the Conservatives. Encore! Encore! (Kids in the Hall and their younger heirs, call home - we needs yr skillz.)

My colleague Robert Everett-Green’s Globe and Mail essay today on what kinds of acts are and aren’t likely to win this or any year’s $20,000 Polaris Prize would have raised more of a stir if it had appeared on the front of the Review section on Monday, the day of the gala, rather than deep inside the Saturday edition. So let’s give it a swirl.

Robert’s main point is that the Polaris bias leans against pop-chart music and non-rock genres. I feel sure independent hip-hop will have its day - at least one such album’s been nominated each year, and I wouldn’t be super-shocked if jury-room talk led to Shad winning this year (though I doubt it). But jazz, R&B, notational music, dance, contemporary country (as opposed to rootsy/artsy country-folk) and other genres? Not hardly. It’s partly Canadian demographics - no matter how much the country’s changing, there are still many more musicians here who make rock and singer-songwriter albums, and so both by volume and through cultural reinforcement, odds are there will be more good ones in those genres.

Music-critic culture mirrors that reality, but also exaggerates it, because critical writing about popular music is more of a tradition in those genres. You can expect that to shift over the coming decades - but I’m not sure by how much.

Robert cites the UK’s Mercury Prize as evidence that this problem is endemic, but the Mercury’s record of rewarding excellence in pop and non-rock is much stronger, especially on its short lists - because it’s engineered that way (despite Britain likewise generating more rock/folk/etc music than other kinds). A Mercury jury is a small group with diverse specialties, and they make their lists not through big rounds of votes but by drawn-out group discussion - like an extended mix of the Polaris finals’ “Grand Jury” or, say, a typical book-prize jury.

The Polaris is in its politely Canadian way much more democratic. Hundreds of people are involved. Which is great in itself, but means that critics who favour jazz or gospel or R&B or even pop are outweighed. Voters in the majority may conscientiously check out the non-rock recommendations but it’s unlikely to be where their passion is and where the consensus ends up. Thus: In being very inclusive of working critics and other “taste-makers” across Canada, the Polaris paradoxically becomes somewhat exclusive musically.

The Polaris organizers have a tough choice: Do they go way beyond “tweaking” the jury pool, and deliberately rig it to be much more musically balanced, which would require it to be a lot smaller, but could have the virtue of really considering contenders outside the habitual boundaries? Or do they shrug and accept that the Polaris is gonna represent roughly where Canadian critical consensus tends to lie, hoping that (partly maybe thru the reflection the prize generates), that said consensus gradually will evolve into something more ecumenical and flexible?

The Polaris folks aren’t the only ones ever to face this dilemma: Robert Christgau has talked about the way that for many years he and his fellow editors tried to recruit more hip-hop writers and other non-rockistas to vote in the annual Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics’ Poll. But despite their enticements, not many of the rap-and-etc. critics (and fewer and fewer jazz writers, for that matter), ever cared to take part. It didn’t seem that relevant to them - and the result was that P&J became even less relevant to them and less true to the general state of American music. It was a referendum on what music was most important to a certain slice of the music-listening public, useful to those who broadly shared their biases and not so much to everybody else.

Then again, the Village Voice - let alone the Polaris Prize - didn’t create the demographic and cultural divisions that sculpt tastes. How far should they go in order to correct for them - at the price, perhaps, of excluding a lot of competent jurists who really care about something like P&J or the Polaris?

My bias is that I’d like the Polaris to be a compelling, dramatic event; like a lot of stuff in Canada it’s at risk of getting dull. And personally if the solution meant I didn’t always get to vote - because if there’s one group that must be over-represented in the pool, it’s straight white male print journalists from Toronto - I’d say “fine.” But the issue isn’t weakness of acumen or intent among the current jury and organizers. As usual, it’s a bigger social imbalance.

Footnote: It’s unfortunate semantically that Robert uses “college radio” to describe the nominees. It rings like “sophomoric,” which is unfair to the musicians (they’re bland as a group, perhaps, but not individually). And college radio could probably disappear tomorrow and the Polaris wouldn’t change. College charts serve as handy statistical backup for Robert’s point only because the people who run stations (and compile those charts) are generally a younger subset of the sorts of liberal-arts-educated people who are likely to end up as music critics later in life. Most college stations play a far broader range of music, thanks to their myriad specialty shows - but fewer of those specialty DJs get into the list-making, meta-critical tasks, probably because it’s not where the social/cultural capital lies for them. (They often do a lot of promo and organization of live shows/club nights.) If the Polaris shortlist looks like anybody’s playlist, in fact, it’s CBC Radio 3’s, and that station parallels the combination of institutional embeddedness and liberal-arts taste (”classroom” taste, as Frank Kogan has put it) that knits together the majority of people eligible to vote for the Polaris.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing some of you at Monday’s gala. (Shh, don’t tell Stephen Harper.)

Louis Menand’s essay on Lionel Trilling’s life and work in this week’s New Yorker is a great pleasure, a circumnavigation ’round the great liberal critic through his neuroses to his fiction to his shifting relation to “Hebraism” to his disappointments to the fine balance act of his prose and of course to his politics (late-life neocon, or no?). Apparently Trilling had as many modes of feeling guilty as the Hold Steady has ways of describing driving round getting drunk on a Saturday night - or more, including his guilt about having once said Jack Kerouac could not write a great novel given his accessory role in the David Kammerer murder (!): a silly claim, sure, but I was surprised Trilling gained enough respect for Kerouac to bother regretting it. As always with Menand (cf. The Metaphysical Club) it’s not so much the storytelling as the afterglow - a great appreciator of sentences, Menand always tries to return the favour:

For books, including the Great ones, are social products “all the way down.” They do not come from some place outside the system, and they do not represent an independent alternative to the way things are. They are among the things that are, even when they belong to what Trilling called “the adversary culture” - even when they reject conventional ways of thinking and behaving. The adversarial is part of the system; it helps to hold the other parts in place. Responsible liberal people feel better adjusted for having an appreciation of art and ideas that are contemptuous of the values of responsible liberal people. It helps the world seem round.

(Menand is off though in his claim that taste disputes no longer come with moral stakes - it didn’t end in the Sixties, Louis. And I don’t just mean those Sixties-by-other means, the “Culture Wars.” Sure, no one sane today feels so invested in pitting Theodore Dreiser against Henry James, but that is mainly due to - even aside from revisionist views of both writers, from their long-deadness, from et cetera - the conflict many people who read anything remotely like Dreiser or James assume they have with people who play Halo. It’s a false opposition in many ways but still. And then what about clashes in gaming culture between shooters and role-players and Sims-fans, let alone music-fan disputes? Menand may be too generationally removed to credit that these too come with underlying philosophical conflicts, however much they go unarticulated - they lack only their Trillings.)

Meanwhile, for fun and catch-up, there’s Canuckistan’s Michael Barclay’s thorough and thoughtful multipart punter’s guide, continuing to Friday, to the nominated albums for the Polaris Prize, which will be awarded Monday, complete with handicapping and shoulda-beens. (He kindly cites yesterday’s Zoilus post while touting Veda Hille’s longlisted but not shortlisted This Riot Life.)

I’d second most of his calls even though we often get there by different ear-ways. (I’d be less generous with some nominees). Have any bets? I’m guessing a Caribou-Weakerthans split, with a possible election-season run up the yardline by Holy Fuck. Though I don’t have much more than an idle interest.

With less than a week left in voting for the $5,000 SOCAN Echo Prize for Canadian songwriting, I’d better get around to fulfilling my promise to make my case for why, of the superfine roster of nominated tunes, Veda Hille’s “Lucklucky” deserves your (daily) vote between now and the Sept 29, 4:59 pm deadline.

First go over to the prize page and listen to it and its worthy rivals.

“Lucklucky” is only the overture, in many ways, to one of the year’s very best albums, a suite of songs about finding one’s faith in the basic livability of life challenged by the cruel undertow of random fate and mortality, and looking within the lexicons of religion, of nature, of culture and psychology and more for some ways not just to survive but to flourish, to turn onions into tears and tears into water and water into wine. It shares some of these themes with other nominated songs: As Bertolt Brecht, one of Hille’s heroes, wrote, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing… about the dark times. ”

But this song goes further than any of the others in its appeal to the depths of resources we have to meet those doubts and darknesses: The very randomness of human life, it tells us, as its various elements keep swirling around one another, is its blessing - the way that our minds relentlessly organize absurdity into sense might be ridiculous, but the way life sorts itself into a narrative (whether true or fiction, i.e., ultra-true) is a precarious and fragile grace. “There is the place you know/ There is the place you don’t know/ Curtain number 1, curtain number 1 (you are blind, blind, blind)/ This is where I did this, this is where I did that/ It took 30 years to draw this map.” The theme of geography, of Vancouver, the place that matters only because it is the place you happen to have lived your life, has been prominent in Hille’s recent music. And yet, is it the territory or the representation that counts? “Now do you see/ the city or the map of the city?/ The city or your life in the city?” The real, the desert of the real and the oasis.

So far, fairly standard contemporary psychogeographic, poetic and art-rock sets of ambiguities. But what happens next, in this relentless what-happens-next machine of a song, is that an anthem unexpectedly, balls-out (if Veda will forgive me the phallogocentric turn of phrase) springs from the introspection, as if out of a psychic break, a satori, an epiphany: “You need the air! You need the freedom! You need to pit yourself against the hardship of the world!” Horns, choral voices, booming drums, hints of the church-music influences to come later on this record but also echoes of 1967 Centennial Canada anthems, Bobby Gimby’s revenge - not nation but land, urban plan, trees that you piss against (another less cultural way of making maps) and paths you beat as a cause worth fighting (even yourself) for - thunder-perfect-green-mind.

“This is where we are! Are you ready? What was, what is, and what shall be! City of destiny (you are blind blind blind), city of destiny… Grab your coat and your popular music - we’re takin’ it to the streets!”

So here’s a woman who’s been quoting the likes of Carl Sandburg and Brecht in recent albums, suddenly citing the Doobie Brothers. Just as in her side project with (surely pseudonymous?) singer Patsy Klein, The Fits (which can’t really be understood except live), which mental-rolodex-flips-and-somersaults through homespun medleys of novelty tunes, children’s songs, Broadway numbers and other throwaway sparks of cultural lightning, “Lucklucky” revels in its church-of-subgenius way in echoes of other texts and tunes, with not just a “nothing human is alien to me” catholicism of spirit but a sense that without the alien, without absorbing into its flesh all that is opposite itself, this song and its singer can’t survive. This is where we are, loving the alien, amen.

You head toward destiny, still blind, blind, blind. But just keep heading. The inanimate landscape you never bothered to love is somehow animate, animate perhaps in dialectic, busily loving you for your passage through it, remaking itself in your imag even perhaps as you make too heavy a tread, the scars self-conscious beasts leave behind. In the end if you’re searching for yourself, looking within is barely a scratch on looking around.

It’s not a matter of whether or not we’re lucky to be alive, but the revelation that without being alive, that question would be senseless. And so to be alive is to be a creature of luck, a fluke, a fate-being. We’re born luck-y, as we’re born bloody and smelly and rhythmic and loud.

It’s a prayer, it’s a path, it’s a joke, it’s a victory march, it’s the most Canadian (Northrop Frye School) song I’ve heard all year and yet the most worldly, it’s an ecological anthem, it’s change you can believe in and it’s a mathematical constant. It’s a summation of all that’s come before in Hille’s music and a preparation for the songs that follow it on This Riot Life, which take that question of the magic of everyday life and knock it every which way for proof and a vitality damn few artists ever uncover. It comforts as it confronts, and I find myself singing it under my breath in moments of distress at least a few days a week. You may find something similar happening, but it will be dissimilar because it will happen in your city, on your map of the city (even if that city is in the same location as mine).

And finally, since after all this is the kissing-babies time of year, with the estranged-twin election campaigns going on in Canada and in that country not so many miles from Vancouver, Hille’s already won because today (Tuesday), she celebrated the arrival of her first child, Anders, with her husband Justin (of Vancouver rhythm’n'indie band No Kids, incidentally) and stepdaughter Saoirse - a healthy six-and-a-half-pound addition to the mass of this riot life, born on the birthdays of both Bruce Springsteen and John Coltrane (!), crashing in blind, squawling and o so lucky.

So think of that $5,000 as a baby bonus, and go cast your vote for a song that votes for you right back - a small act of mutual, crazy, improbable but necessary faith.

Norman Whitfield. (Listen.)
Mauricio Kagel. (Watch.)
And, belatedly, Richard Wright, who wasn’t to blame for this turning into that.

Also a reminder to T.O. readers of David Wallace that there’s a silent memorial tonight in Trinity-Bellwoods at 9.

Thanks to Jon Caramanica’s insightful Celine Dion concert review in The Times the other day, I learned that Celine appeared with a 16-year-old Filipino singer, Charice Pempengco, “who came to her attention through an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show,” one of several Charice (as she’s known back home) has done on U.S. teevee (the Ellen show, too), complete with weepy family drama. Celine’s very popular with Filipino audiences, so it’s a savvy hookup, typical of her global-audience-connecting strategies, but I’m sure it was also an immediate identification with a fellow unnatural-pipes-bearing teen star and singing-contest winner from a relatively unrecognized part of the world. (Along with Celine’s devotion to the cult of Oprah and its in turn to her.)

I’m most struck by Charice’s version of Mama, a wrenching sentimental song (what else with that title?) about migrant work - a major issue for Filipino children whose mothers go off to raise other people’s children overseas. There are heartbreakers like, ” ‘I’ll be home in three years time’: / Mama it seems like forever/ You’ve been gone since I was 5,” although the one that really gets me is, “They say you were a good teacher/ In the same school where I can’t survive” - a whole novel of details compacted into two lines, never elaborated in the rest of the song.

The tune was originally by Smokey Mountain, an early-’90s group that was an unusual hybrid of protest music and boy-band pop - named for Manila’s infamous Smoky Mountain waste-landfill-cum-shantytown, and costumed to fit the part. Knowing nothing at all about Filipino music (except what Tom Waits has tried to tell me), I’m not sure how common that sort of blend is there, but it’s certainly not one I’ve stumbled across elsewhere … kind of Up With People with a twist of Down With Global Capital.