Brunettes in Belgium, part one: something about our local music awards
What with the Grammys being apparently close to happen or having been held by the time this is posted on Listology, I'd like to share a few info about our own "grammys" for the french-speaking community of Belgium.
In 2004, various entities, mainly Le Conseil de la Musique (a public association whose goal is promoting franch-speaking belgian artists), la Sabam (the belgian "author rights" society) and RTL group (private-owned radio station Bel-RTL and private-owned TV-channels RTL-TVi, Club RTL & Plug TV) decided to create musical awards much like the Grammys but only for the french-speaking community of Belgians... These awards are called "Les Octaves de la Musique" (the musical 8-note series, whatever is the correct word for that in English, I do not know).
These are the results from the first two years...
Octaves 2004
Breakthrough of the year chosen by professionals: Casimir Liberski
Breakthrough of the year chosen by the mainstream audience: Silvano
Octaves 2005
Best Classical music artist: Celine Scheen
Best Jazz artist: Slang
Best artist singing in french: Jeronimo
Best artist in the "New musics (rock/electro/hip hop)" category: Soldout
Best concert or musical of the year: Hollywood Porn Stars
Special award from the Jury: David Cohen
Album of the year: "Humeur" by Vincent Venet
Artist of the year: Ghinzu
Special award from the Jury: Sophie Karthaüser
Honorary (lifetime achievement) Octave: Robert Wangermée
Bel-RTL audience choice award: Matthieu Bioul
comments:
as you can see these awards are still pretty much a work in progress and have close to zero coverage in the news here except for the private-owned radio& tv channels who are actively implied in organizing the event...
On a purely personal level, I must say I don't find the mix of mainstream commercial artists and high-brow classical music artists very clever... But hey, our french-speaking belgian community is one of the zaniest places on earth you will ever find... we did create the artistic movement known as "surrealism" and believe me, we live it everyday... just one example for fun: The US (about 250 million people, if I'm not mistaken) have One (count him, that's one) Secretary of State for Health... The french-speaking belgian community (that's 4,5 million people when you are very generous) have four elected people (they're called ministers over here) in charge of Health (that's one for the french-speaking community, one for the Walloon region, one for the Brussels-capital city region and one for the whole country of Belgium and that's not counting the one for the Flemish region and the one for the german-speaking community)... feeling the headache coming on ? I have countless examples like these but I'll save them for later...
Anyways, the 2006 Octaves de la Musique, who promise to be ever bigger and ahhem better, will take place on June the 21st 2006, nominees to be known at the start of the month of June.
Thank you for reading.
