The Polaris Music Prize is celebrating 20 years this September, having given out the annual award to what is deemed the best Canadian album of the year, judged solely on artistic merit, since 2006.
When the prize launched, Canada had — and still has — the Junos, the East and West Coast Music Awards, and more, but nothing for artists who were taking risks, working on the fringes, or staying away from labels who might limit their creativity. That’s the gap that Polaris aimed to fill, inspired by the U.K. and Ireland’s prestigious Mercury Prize, which has awarded the same sort of honour since 1992.
“The idea was always that Polaris was the critics’ prize,” Liisa Ladouceur, a music journalist and one of the founding Polaris board members, said.
Those critics would make up the jury pool, which is still who decides on the Polaris long and short lists, though the long list didn’t come into play until 2008. But founder Steve Jordan and the new Polaris board wanted it to feel different than any awards show to date.
“We were very deliberate about wanting it to be an award show for people who didn’t really like award shows,” Jordan said.
Ladouceur called its inaugural year “scrappy,” and the grand jury — a group of 11 people from the larger jury pool — chose the winner after debating who should get the honour. The evening would end when they were done, which, after many years of nail-biting timing, is no longer what happens today. (The winner is still chosen by a grand jury, but it happens before the big night.)
“I think it’s provided a space to really champion that culture of music where having something to say matters, where craft matters. I feel like Polaris has been a home to that culture,” said Shad, a five-time Polaris shorlister.
As we celebrate the 20th year of Polaris, we’re looking back at five favourite moments from the institution’s annual honour.
All interviews are pulled from a Polaris Music Prize oral history, produced by Nathan Gill, that CBC Music aired in 2020.
After it was announced that Final Fantasy had won the inaugural prize in 2006, it was clear that the Polaris Music Prize was different.
“There was a real skepticism up until the moment that Owen Pallett was announced as the winner,” said Jordan.
“An obscure violin band from Toronto has beaten out some of the country’s biggest music acts to win the first ever Polaris Music Prize. Last night, a jury chose a group that few Canadians have heard of, called Final Fantasy,” read one of the news clips the next morning.
The “biggest music acts” at the time included Metric, New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and Wolf Parade.
Tanya Tagaq’s groundbreaking 2014 album, Animism, took home the Polaris Prize that same year, making the Inuk singer the first Indigenous artist to win (and beating out Drake and Arcade Fire).
“For a lot of the Indigenous community, our music is not paid attention to, at least not up until that point,” said Chantal Rondeau, a music journalist from Whitehorse. “And so it was a huge celebration to all of us that someone got recognized for their talent.”
But before she won, Tagaq took everyone’s breath away with a stunning performance of her songs Uja and Umingmak, all while a screen behind her scrolled through a list of 1,200 names of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
“People were crying, people were speechless, people felt like they had the wind knocked out of them,” said Jordan. “That’s just a moment I won’t forget.”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor wanted next to nothing to do with Polaris. But the band’s album Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! won the prize in 2013 anyway. Afterwards, they published an open letter that made it clear they didn’t think they needed another awards show.
An excerpt from the letter, which you can read in full via Pitchfork, with original formatting:
3 quick bullet-points that almost anybody could agree on maybe=
-holding a gala during a time of austerity and normalized decline is a weird thing to do.
-organizing a gala just so musicians can compete against each other for a novelty-sized cheque doesn’t serve the cause of righteous music at all.
-asking the toyota motor company to help cover the tab for that gala, during a summer where the melting northern ice caps are live-streaming on the internet, IS F-KING INSANE, and comes across as tone-deaf to the current horrifying malaise.
“I thought it was great because I think that that’s the spirit of the thing,” Shad told CBC Music. “It’s really celebrating something genuine that can still happen in music, you know, people really having something to say and a point of view. And like some important words I think for the music industry in general.”
By 2016, a decade into the Polaris Music Prize’s existence, a Black artist still hadn’t taken home the trophy, and there was almost never more than one Black artist on the short list each year.
“I think the first couple of times I was nominated, like I was probably the only hip-hop artist nominated or one of two usually would be the only Black artists on the list,” Shad said.
When jury member and music journalist Del Cowie had championed rapper Shad’s album TSOL on the 2010 grand jury, he hit some unexpected barriers.
We were, and I think quite correctly, criticized at the beginning for being way too white, way too indie rock.
“What I did find, I have to be honest, while debating the Shad record was that I wasn’t actually debating the merits of the Shad record,” Cowie explained. “I was debating the merits of this genre of hip-hop itself, which was quite frustrating.”
“We were, and I think quite correctly, criticized at the beginning for being way too white, way too indie rock,” said Jordan.
Six years later, Cowie was back on the grand jury championing another album he loved: Kaytranada’s debut record, 99.9%. Polaris had been actively working to diversify the jury pool for years, to allow for more records to have a chance at the prize.
“To be quite honest with you, I was surprised that it won,” said Cowie. “He was the first Black artist to win the Polaris Prize. And not only that, he was a Black artist that was combining, in my mind, strands of Black musical history in a way that was distinctly his. I was just really happy for him that he won.”
Kaytranada has since gone on to become a world-renowned producer, with two Grammys under his belt.
In 2018, Jeremy Dutcher won the Polaris Music Prize for his debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, and his acceptance speech is referenced as one of the most memorable in the honour’s history.
“Canada: You are in the midst of Indigenous renaissance. Are you ready to hear? Are you ready to hear the truths that need to be told? Are you ready to see the things that need to be seen?” said the Wolastoqiyik tenor from Tobique First Nation, addressing the room.
Dutcher’s year came four years after Tagaq’s historic win, and momentum was building for Indigenous artists within the prize, but also in mainstream recognition.
“To do this record in my language and have it witnessed not just by my people but people from every nation, from coast to coast, up and down Turtle Island, we’re at the precipice of something…. This is all part of a continuum of Indigenous excellence and you are here to witness it; I welcome you.”
The album would go on to win a Juno Award the following year, and Dutcher would become the only artist to win the Polaris Music Prize twice so far, taking it home in 2024 for his followup album, Motewolonuwok.
