Reaction roundup: Feist takes home the 2012 Polaris Music Prize

Reaction roundup: Feist takes home the 2012 Polaris Music Prize

(Image: Dustin Rabin)

Yesterday at the Masonic Temple on Yonge Street, Broken Social Scene alum Feist walked home with this year’s Polaris Music Prize for Metals, her fourth studio album. She overcame the competition from a buzzy shortlist that included Japandroids, Handsome Furs, Fucked Up, Cold Specks, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Drake, Kathleen Edwards, Cadence Weapon and Grimes, the Montreal phenom behind Visions and many people’s favourite to win. The prize is awarded to the best Canadian album of the year, based solely on “artistic merit,” and a carries a purse of $30,000. Below, a roundup of who said what before, during and after the big night:

• Predictions for this year’s winner were all over the place. When the National Post’s Jon Dekel picked Grimes, for example, he added that he thinks previous Polaris winner Fucked Up made the year’s best album with David Comes to Life. Noah Love called it a process of elimination, picking Grimes because bands like Cold Specks and left-field-favourite Yamantaka // Sonic Titan are too low-profile, adding that he thought Japandroids’ Celebration Rock and David Comes to Life were better records. Of course, Drake’s Take Care clobbered them all in terms of sales.

The Globe and Mail’s Brad Wheeler wrote that after Feist performed “The Bad in Each Other,” he was pretty much convinced: “It suddenly seemed unthinkable that her Metals would not win.”

• Feist’s reaction to her win was pretty entertaining: When her name was called, she immediately crawled under a table. She also blew a kiss to the awards themselves, saying the experience was “like getting the Valentine from the right boy” (she also pledged to donate some of her winnings to stop the mega-quarry).

• One tweet nicely captured the way that Feist’s win was both inevitable and something of a dark horse:

• The losing artists reacted with the usual good grace. Our favourite reaction came from Kathleen Edwards: “Thank you [Polaris Prize founder] Steve Jordan for creating an award for those of us who don’t want to march in the shit parade.”

• On Torontoist, Chris Dart argued that the Polaris’s community spirit symbolizes everything that’s right with music in Canada: “If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind that the Polaris Music Prize has replaced the bloated mess that is the Junos… this year’s edition… put those doubts to rest.”

• The one artist to show not quite as much grace was Drake, who teased fans and event organizers with will-he-or-won’t-he hints of a surprise appearance that continued even after the broadcast had started. In the end, he stayed away, prompting Jordan to merely quip, “He missed a great show.”