2015 Polaris Music Prize Short List
Someone had to assemble the basic facts about the 2015 Polaris Music Prize Short List act all in one place, right?
It’s a public service.
Head over to AUX to prep yourself on Alvvays, Viet Cong, Braids and the other seven Short List nominees.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
The red arrow points to ‘Polaris2015’ trending second in Canada
There are a couple reasons why Risky Fuel has been unusually quiet in recent weeks.
The first was because Sarah and I went to the family cottage for our annual 10-day hideout/detox/escape/reason to photograph dead fish on the beach.
The second was, upon returning to the city, diving headlong into my responsibilities as the minister of propaganda for the Polaris Music Prize and its kinda-a-big-deal 2015 Short List reveal which took place on July 16.
The 10 albums on said Short List turned out to be a mighty fine cross-section of music well worth arguing over. More important to my professional vanity, however, was how hot we were with #Polaris2015 on the socials and the medias and such.
It turns out we were very hot. As in #1 hot. Well, #1 except for one thing hot…
A fucking Ant-Man promoted tweet.
Nearly four hours after the Short List was revealed on the 16th #Polaris2015 was still holding the #2 spot (see above photo), which, when you think about it, is an amazing coup for a few Polaris peeps like myself working behind the curtain and a bunch of Polaris jurors ranting about it on Twitter. We were even smashing the Emmys in Canada.
Anyway, back to Ant Man, the third stupidest Avenger behind only Gilgamesh, a guy with a cow on his head, and Demolition Man, a sadsack composed of leftover parts from discarded Wolverine and Daredevil action figures. Basically, all my Polaris efforts got crushed underfoot from one mighty Giant Man-like stomp by the Marvel-Disney Industrial Complex and this means I’ll probably never get the professional respect I deserve for my efforts last week.
I’m not bitter, but I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing that acts as a catalyst for people to become supervillains. So if somewhere, somehow, in the darkest reaches of the internet you start to hear whispers of a foul 01010 spirit named Twittroll, whose power is to hijack brand promo tweets with foreign language Baywatch fanclub Twitter mobs, well, it wasn’t me.
[P.S. I’m pretty sure I’m still going to go see Ant-Man.]
[P.P.S. If dorksticks like Ant-Man get movies, there should definitely be films based on way more awesome people like Alpha Flight, The Micronauts and ROM, Space Knight.]
Filed under Art, Films, Music, Shameless Promotion
Polaris 2015 Long List by the numbers
My benefactors at Aux let me unleash my inner numbers geek on the 2015 Polaris Music Prize Long List for a statistic-y feature.
The result was a document where I tracked the number of references to IKEA hotdogs amongst the 40 nominated albums (one), the number of appearances from F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters (one) and other fascinating data.
Check out the By The Numbers feature.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Polaris Music Prize Long List announcement
The 2015 Polaris Music Prize Long List was revealed recently in Halifax.
I did a bit of reporting and surface-level analysis on the 40 albums that made the Long List for the official Polaris site.
By the way, only two the five acts I voted for on my Polaris ballot made the Long List — Alvvays and Frazey Ford.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Holy Shad
Electro jam rockers Holy Fuck and smart rapper Shad got together recently to create a way-out project called The Legend Of Cy Borg, the story of tennis star Bjorn Borg’s vigilante brother.
It is… wild.
I wrote about this peculiar project for the Polaris Music Prize website.
You can hear the tracks, watch a related documentary and read the whole story by clicking here.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
Risky Fuel 
