Our final Polaris Music Prize featured album is Drake's Take Care. It was a top pick on juror Anupa Mistry's ballot. Mistry is a freelance writer who has contributed to CBC Music, Exclaim!, and Spinner.ca. We asked her to share her thoughts on why Take Care deserves to win this year's prize.
Mistry argues that Take Care should win the prize because it's a "beautiful, careful and thoroughly Canadian pop record" that could alter the slanted perception of what "Canadian music" really is.
As Craig Norris and I discuss on the R3-30, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding the inclusion of Drake’s Take Care on this year’s Polaris Music Prize short list. It’s strange justifying this to detractors: Take Care is well loved by critics, fans and other musicians.
Still, there’s a vocal segment of Polaris observers who get particularly – troublingly – red-faced and sputtering when it comes to Drake. Is it because he’s popular? Well, it’s not as though Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs was escapable. You don’t like his personality? Sorry, Polaris doesn’t police morality, nor is it a Good Samaritan’s award. Hate rap? If so, as I outline in this piece on whether hip-hop can win the Prize, that renders the aforementioned aspersions on goodwill moot. (Also, get over it already.)
Take Care is a beautiful, careful and thoroughly Canadian pop record. It builds on an arc discernible from Drake’s earliest MySpace-released singles, this idea of the hip-hop/R&B auteur. Drake’s wingman, Noah “40” Shebib, is a sonic mastermind who renders the rapper’s nebulous and sometimes messy tropes into Monets – undeniably vivid, lush and pop-climate-recalibrating compositions. There is no lack of insane Canadian talent (that’s jobs created and provided) present on Take Care: singers the Weeknd, Divine Brown and Chantal Kreviazuk, harmonic mastermind Chilly Gonzales and top-echelon producers T-Minus, Boi-1da, Doc McKinney and Illangelo.
As my co-jurors outline in their rousing defenses of the other fantastic artists nominated, Polaris honours the year’s best “on-wax” record. That means, theoretically, no live performance or outside antics – no giddy personal encounters – should affect the decision the 11 grand jurors will make. Since that’s impossible, and since there’s a brilliant range of good writing about Take Care to convince you, let’s posit here that giving Drake the Polaris is straight-up good PR for this country and its musicians.
I’m speaking as an advocate. There is this pervasive slant, both in and out of the country, about what Canadian music is: indie rock-centric, rap-averse and predictable. I don’t buy any of it. The perception persists despite genre-eschewing albums like Caribou’s Andorra winning the prize, or Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: History getting nominated. And last year’s big Arcade Fire win reversed The Great Karkwa Surprise of 2010: that popular artists and non-obscure records could win. Even the big records nominated – Feist’s Metals, Grimes’s Visions and F--ked Up’s David Comes to Life – play, to me, with the accessibility and songwriting prowess of great pop records.
Drake’s Take Care should win this year’s Polaris Prize because it’s an excellent album. But it should also win because Polaris is an important institution, capable of altering the existing, parochial stereotypes of Canadian music, artistry and citizenship. Drake is one of the top pop stars in the world, content to shout out his city instead of acquiescing to America. It’s time to own what we’re good at instead of waffling in our toques, because to do so is telling the world, and ourselves, we can be the best.
What do you think of Anupa Mistry's argument? Should Take Care take home the prize? Let us know in the comments.
Related:
Our full CBC Music Polaris coverage
Drake, Cadence Weapon nominated, but can hip-hop win the Polaris Music Prize?