Godspeed You! Huge Downer

Crazy times: Godspeed You! Black Emperor won the Polaris Prize, which celebrates a Canadian musician each year (they’ll run out soon, having already been through Caribou, Arcade Fire and Feist). Now Godspeed may be going on tour with Nine Inch Nails, but they are not prepared to accept life in the big gross leagues and the kind of hoopla that accompanies $30,000 prizes at this point twenty years into their life as a band. So they said this:

-holding a gala during a time of austerity and normalized decline is a weird thing to do.

-organizing a gala just so musicians can compete against each other for a novelty-sized cheque doesn’t serve the cause of righteous music at all.

-asking the toyota motor company to help cover the tab for that gala, during a summer where the melting northern ice caps are live-streaming on the internet, IS FUCKING INSANE, and comes across as tone-deaf to the current horrifying malaise.

So apparently not everyone is ready to cozy up to a #tasteful #brand. Almost everyone! Just not quite. Anyway, ❤ ❤ ❤: “us we’re gonna use the money to try to set up a program so that prisoners in quebec have musical instruments if they need them.”