Brit Awards Top Grammys for Irrelevance

Technically, yes.. but we'll have to wait another year to find out...

By Thee Creeper

That sawing sound? It's a thousand music critics snoring loudly as they drop off in the middle of reading the list of nominees for the 2012 Brit Awards.

Okay, so admittedly they are, of necessity, English-centric in nature, which means that a lot of us can dismiss a bunch of the nominees right off the bat. I mean, who the heck are Ed Sheeran, Emeli Sande, Jessie J, Chase & Status, Professor Green, Pixie Lott and The Wanted? But it's a sad state of affairs when a country with a legacy of generating cutting-edge music dating all the way back to the ‘60s winds up with a roster of nominees that makes our own Grammys look positively Pitchfork-esque (and I say that with the assumption that everyone realizes that as recently as 3 years ago the Grammys were still considered a joke, a place where musicians went to preemptively bid for "legacy artist" stature, also known as "putting themselves out to pasture").

No, by and large, as you can quickly surmise by scanning the list of nominees, the Brit Awards have become more conservative than the Tea Party - which makes the handful of genuinely credible, non-mainstream artists that did manage to get included stand out all the more prominently. That said, our hunch is that these deserving nominees will not go home with trophies on Feb. 21 when the awards ceremony is held at London's O2 Arena: Laura Marling, Kate Bush (British Female Solo Artist), Arctic Monkeys, Elbow (British Group), Noel Gallagher (British Male Solo Artist), The Vaccines and Anna Calvi (British Breakthrough Act).

(We should add PJ Harvey to that list as well, although we have to note that the BLURT-beloved icon is up for the "Mastercard British Album of the Year" award, for Let England Shake, and as more than one punter has pointed out in the past, being nominated for an award with the name of a credit card as a prefix leaves a bit of a taint.)

As for a bunch of the other categories that delve into international artists, those are, likewise, extremely mixed bags. We love us some Feist, Bon Iver, Foo Fighters, Ryan Adams and (for the moment at least) Lana Del Rey, but the rest... zzzzz....

Decide for yourself by checking out the Brit Awards site.