Local Music Awards.

My biggie with this is the teaching that goes on. The media is a mighty educator, and this, for me, is a pretty powerful case.

The low-down:
For four years running (2009 marks the planned 5th), Illini Media Company that runs the Daily Illini "student" newspaper and the 107.1 Planet "student" radio station has held a Local Music Awards (LMA) show. They have formed a group to nominate contestants, and held a voting on their online site, with the winners announced at the LMA between bands and pretty awful staff skits.

Since its inception, the LMAs have been met with uncomfortableness and resistance. These feeling have grown, with bands pulling out of the race and declining to accept awards in the past years. Last years show inspired a counter-LMA local music show nearly next door to the event. This counter show was tear gassed just before the band with the most vocal dissention to the notion of a music contest began their set.

Plans for LMA-5 are underway, with a nomination meeting held earlier this week. As an invited member of the nomination committee, I encouraged the committee to not nominate rather than nominate, bringing with me the dissenting voices of others from the music community in written form. After a discussion was held, the Operations Manager made it clear that a contest would be held, and voting would be happening online.

My take: In my opinion, this competition is teaching young people who want to be part of the local music "scene" (or any music scene) and who want to have fun to not dig musicians/artists who say they don't appreciate putting their work up for win/lose appraisal and sending it out to battle others'. It's teaching kids to look down their noses at artists who stand up for their work. It's teaching them to see local music and "music community" as only those left who will compete. (This has wider implications, as many the students who learn this most staff the student paper and radio station, and take part in disseminating this notion.)

By doing so, it's creating consumers, rather than involved participants, out of eager, energetic, brilliant, beautiful students.

Here's where I'm coming from on this: People don't participate in local music by voting. They participate in contest - in a game which they are able to use as a spectacle. They become bystanders in the horse race they orchestrate.

Well, I guess I feel the horses shouldn't be tamed.

And, if they are, the interests of young people shouldn't be channeled to sitting back and watching them do something they do not usually do in their natural state, and to calling this a celebration of them. It should go to getting young people interested, and finding ways to have them involved on an ongoing basis. This is participation. This is building. This is community.

I know they're gonna do what they're gonna do. But, while, in my opinion, the horses are most beautiful when they run free, if folks have never really seen them as such, how would they know?

Here's to keeping the horses from fighting the company's war. And to respecting the horses who rock the boat.