In an era of non-combative music criticism, the Polaris Prize nominees have known no war | Canada Voices

The annual Polaris Music Prize will be awarded at Massey Hall on Monday evening. The shortlisted nominees for the honour bestowed to the year’s best full-length Canadian album are mostly unknown.

Of the 10 contenders for the $50,000 prize, only one, the Sudanese-Canadian urban-folk artist Mustafa, has received much in the way of mainstream coverage. The Toronto-born musician/poet released 2024’s Dunya on a well-known U.S. label, Jagjaguwar, and he now lives in Los Angeles.

Mustafa’s relatively high profile works against him – Polaris increasingly leans to the dark horse. I thought Mustafa would win the prize in 2021 for his debut EP When Smoke Rises, but I doubt he has much of a chance this year, even though he probably deserves it. But go ahead and prove me wrong, Polaris.

The Polaris came to mind when an article by Kelefa Sanneh for The New Yorker excited the music press. In the piece, titled How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge, Sanneh wonders what happened to the classic rock critic, once known for being crankier than the average listener but now much less acerbic as a rule.

Part of it has to do with a decreasing number of staff music journalists in the mainstream press. Freelance music writers, whose livelihood is tied to accessibility to the artists they cover, can’t afford to offend record labels, promoters, publicists and the musicians themselves with scathing reviews.

With his new album, Mustafa tackles rage and forgiveness. Just don’t call it therapeutic

That said, with the way music is consumed today, it is doubtful that bad reviews serve any purpose when it comes to most artists. There was a time when, if an act released a new album, fans might only hear one or two of the new songs on the radio. An album review in Rolling Stone would let people know if the album was worth purchasing or not.

That kind of utility is no longer required. Who pays for music in 2025?

Back to Polaris. It is quite possible that the nominated artists (other than Mustafa, who receives widespread attention) have never been subjected to a harsh review. In an era of non-combative music criticism, the Polaris shortlisters have known no war.

Despite the handwringing over play-nice music writing, the trend is not new at all. The entertaining pans of Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Dave Marsh and The Montreal Gazette’s Juan Rodriguez went out with shag rugs and gas rationing.

The shift from savage reviews to supportive ones happened in the 1980s, when music editors began seeing reviews as consumer information, as opposed to pop-culture critiques.

“There became an inclination to review popular groups even if they had relatively little artistic worth, because it would be something the readers would want to know,” says veteran music journalist J.D. Considine. “And editors would try to make sure the major records were reviewed by people who would review them sympathetically.”

Polaris Music Prize shortlist includes Mustafa, Nemahsis

Considine is a former Globe and Mail music writer who also worked for the Baltimore Sun, Rolling Stone and Blender. He remembers a changing of the guard at Rolling Stone. In 1992, Considine gave Bobby Brown’s Bobby two out of five stars: “An overcalculated, under-inspired attempt at pop one-upmanship.”

Brown’s irate record label publicist threatened to go over the heads of Considine and reviews editor Anthony DeCurtis to voice a complaint with the magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner.

“We shrugged it off,” recalls Considine. “Anthony told me not to worry, because Jann didn’t even know who Bobby Brown was.”

Nothing happened. But in 1996, Jim DeRogatis oversaw Rolling Stone record reviews when he famously harpooned Hootie & the Blowfish’s Fairweather Johnson. The negative review was spiked by Wenner and replaced with a more favourable assessment.

Asked if Wenner was a Hootie fan, DeRogatis later replied, “No, I think he’s just a fan of bands which sell eight and a half million copies.” When DeRogatis went public with the story − quickly dubbed “Hootiegate” by the press − he was relieved of his position.

“DeRogatis was the last adversarial record-review editor Rolling Stone ever had,” Considine says. “He looked at his job there as a means of knocking artists down a peg.”

That is considered dinosaur thinking today. But even if it wasn’t, this year’s eclectic list of Polaris nominees, including Bibi Club, Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Marie Davidson, Saya Gray, Yves Jarvis, Nemahsis, the OBGMs, Population II and Ribbon Skirt would be safe.

A lot of the music is quite good. I’m a fan of Jarvis’s funky All Cylinders and the OBGMs’ punk rock epic Sorry, It’s Over, in particular. Some of the other albums are not so great, but none of that matters, because these are all low-profile artists. Knocking any of them down a peg serves no purpose whatsoever.

The Polaris Music Prize Concert and Award Ceremony takes place Sept. 15, at Toronto’s Massey Hall. Info at polarismusicprize.ca