“I got a BRIT award… I got a BRIT Award… No surrender!” Jason Williamson, ‘McFlurry’ – Sleaford Mods

Following the BAFTAs, the Oscars, and the ‘anti-establishment’ NME’s Bratz, it’s ‘awards’ season again! Who’s worthy? Who’s got a noose? For the 35^th BRIT Awards we’re gonna need a sackful.

Originally, the BRITs were a celebration of the sales figures of the Britannia Music Club, mail order paid-on-the-drip acquisitions of the ‘hottest’ releases and a progenitor of passively prescribed tastes like an analogue Spotify: ‘If you like THIS then you’ll LOVE this’.

As if in answer to the recent debates regarding ‘working class’ and ‘street’ music, here’s a plethora of gatekeeper sanctioned, mammon dictated, creative-wasteland ‘turns’ straight from the stage school, with their own ‘unique ‘interpretation of ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’; always and sincerely  making it their own.

Replacing professional tub-of-lard-as-compere James Corden, will be the piss-weak Vic and Bob, with their work-shopped anarchy, strangling time with their ‘off-the-cuff’ stage-managed patter. Expect the blunt and bland, the safe, staid and scripted to death replete with the forced laughter of incontinent attendees happy-clapping like born-again Christians at Easter.

According to its chairman (or the PR gonk paid shitloads to compose such drivel), the BRITs ‘is a celebration of creativity so it’s fitting that our first appointments are Es and Willo, both of whom are synonymous with artistic excellence and have collaborated with some of the world’s most exciting and inventive acts’.  Now there’s two names that reek of secondary modern education, d’ya ken? This pair are orchestrating ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, its imagery and symbolism all designed to dupe, drug and disorientate.  Beware the politics of seduction.

And the (piss) artists? There’s manicured socialite Mark Ronson, Hertfordshire Delta raised George Ezra, scion of banking wealth Sam Smith, critics’ choice James Bay, who has ridden the critics’ choice wave since his release from the lab. Not forgetting ‘edgier’ fayre like 80s pop-harridan Madonna, who’s in town to (re)advertise her existence and her continuing irrelevance, jetting in to prop up this exhibition of privilege and spiritual decay, her authority angering antics a thing of the past, those black and white memories render her like Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond bemoaning the talkies.

The 1989 horror flick Society with its nefarious elites and their rampant capitalist thirsts is in full evidence at this celebration of business and profit, an illustration of the back-slapping that rewards the unit-shifting of the drab, dreary and the dross.

This event signifies a group of nations bound by elites and tablespoon-fed tit-bits of tat and empty promises, a celebration of the power-base that dictates and delineates the invisible power structure that lies behind society. A televisual happening for people who treat music as wallpaper, as a backdrop, oblivious to its history and once potent place in popular culture.  From enlightening and educational to edgeless and execrable.

Like countries that get the regimes they deserve, this says more about Britain NOW than it can possibly imagine.

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Kemper Boyd
@Dissapointon