The ARIA Award nominations, and the winners a few of the off-Broadway categories the TV stations don’t want to televise such as best art work (a category which had no women worth considering apparently), world/classical/jazz, producer and engineer, were announced on Tuesday.
There were a few issues you could say. Here’s a wrap of some of them via the tweets I occupied myself with as the morning wore on. There’s more to all of these, and some other areas for later discussion, but it’s a start.
Interesting news at @ARIA_Official noms. No women made adult contemporary (whatever that means) music worth noting last year. Sexist? Us?
As well as not making good adult music, it seems women can’t engineer or produce. But hey, there’s always catering ladies! @ARIA_Official
More things learnt at @ARIA_Official noms: women don’t play in groups or make dance music. Number of women in best group&dance categories? 0
A question for later: if you put Latin in your album title is that enough to have your album categorised as “world music”? @ARIA_Official
You make genuine non-western fare? Why would you bother entering @ARIA_Official “world” category to lose to ska or smooth bossa album? #oud
2017 has genuinely fabulous albums from @jencloher & @hollythrosby. @ARIA_Officialnoms? 0. But it’s ok girls the Pete Murray album got one.
How do @holyholymusic not get a single nomination in @ARIA_Official? Yet Peking Duk get a best group nom? Weird world.
The thing with @ARIA_Official complaints - continued absence of women, bizarre omissions, odd category wins - is it's only partly about ARIA
The @ARIA_Official Awards reflect the industry as much as its oft stupid rules. The people standing next to you at a gig or conference call, the people making signing & playlisting decisions, the people who can't find a woman to promote to the MD role, the people like ... you & me
They, we, are the ones who keep producing nomination lists like today's, who have barely changed in 30+years of the ARIAs, who may as well exist in the dinosaur land we see in the#ClassicCountdown episodes at the moment.
Look who is running the joint. Look who is enabling them. Don't have to ask my god how did we get here; we brought ourselves. @ARIA_Official Awards are just the end result.