Despite efforts to be more inclusive, this year’s nominations reflect an industry living in the past
January 12, 2023 4:00 pm(Updated January 13, 2023 2:38 pm)
When the Brit Awards announced in late 2021 that they would be getting rid of the gender split for Best Artist and Best International Artist, did they mean they would be dispensing with women artists altogether? You’d be forgiven for assuming so after a cursory glance through this year’s shortlist.
Of the 10 nominations across arguably the two biggest categories – Best Artist and Best Album – there is one non-male, or non-male authored, nomination (indie duo Wet Leg’s eponymous debut album). Across the rest of the list, from Dance Act to International Song, some variety trickles through, but it is still dominated by men. The scrapping of gendered categories was held up by the Brits as a step forward – they wanted the awards to be “as inclusive as possible”, said their chair, Tom March – and last year, at the first ceremony to implement the changes, women cleaned up, with Adele taking Best Artist, Best Album and Best Song, and Wolf Alice Best Group. But it was clearly a fluke. This year’s list can only be viewed as regressive.
It hardly needs saying that such a clear imbalance might be understandable if there were, in fact, no women to nominate. Yet the absences are glaring even to those with only a vague interest in pop music. Why is Harry Styles nominated for both Best British Pop Act and Best Artist, but Charli XCX, in my mind the most innovative pop star working today, and Dua Lipa, who won three times in 2021 and serves internationally as the poster girl for British pop glam, are squeezed only in the former category? The exclusions are not only a reminder of the deeply engrained sexism in the industry, but that far from looking ahead in UK music, the Brits seems to be constantly behind the curve.
Last year, the rapper Little Simz won Best New Artist – but she’s had an army of dedicated fans, and a repertoire of outstanding albums, since the mid-2010s. It’s not just a question of commercial success, either: in 2021 Little Mix won Best Group – the first all-female band to win in the history of the awards, including unquestionably era-defining bands such as Girls Aloud, Sugababes, All Saints and Spice Girls (all of whom were acknowledged by Jade Thirlwall in Little Mix’s emotional acceptance speech).
Are the Brit Awards hopelessly out of touch, or do they reflect the real tastes of the British public? This year’s list makes the answer unclear: ignoring the misogyny for a moment, it is in some ways a predictable A-team of super-hyped songs and artists, and in others a bizarre miscellany. The astronomically popular dance music producer Fred Again is listed three times – sure – but how did Elton John and Ed Sheeran’s cynical festive chart-topper “Merry Christmas” – a frightfully boring track whose only accolade was to knock a joke song about sausage rolls off the No 1 spot for a couple of weeks – make it into Best British Song?
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Though it may be surprising given their inconsistencies, the Brit nominations aren’t decided by a few white guys in a skyscraper: they’re chosen by the “voting academy”, a varied group of over 1,000 industry execs, from lawyers to producers. Ostensibly, every effort has been made to democratise the process; the genre-specific categories, once shortlisted, are put to a public vote to decide the winner. This is somehow even more depressing: there is no one person or group to rile at, no one sexist boardroom to smoke out. The fact is that even in a landscape rife with talented women, it is still the male artists who seem to cut through in an official capacity.
It’s not necessarily an indictment of those artists nominated to say this: many of them are outstanding and deserve the accolades. Stormzy’s inclusion as Best Artist is a welcome turnaround from a few years ago, when the awards’ main faultline was that they essentially ignored grime artists.
But it is a sad, shocking reminder that no matter what music women are making, it must always be played at double the volume of men’s to be heard.
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