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Image Lily Allen on Facebook
The Oscars aren’t the only awards show getting heat for their lack of diversity in nominations. Recently, Lily Allen expressed her frustration with the Brit Awards and their “blindness to black British talent” via Facebook. The post, which has since been deleted, suggested that the main problem with the Brits is that industry figures “don’t necessarily care about music,” and that “they vote tactically for their labels artists to win or so that their competitors at other labels DONT [sic].”
Naming Skepta, Stormzy, Jme, and Lady Leshurr as some of the talent that should have been nominated, Allen goes on to explain that these music industry figures don’t “even look at artists as artists when it comes to voting for these things.” Because Skepta, JME, and Stormzy are unsigned artists, Allen believes that “them being nominated or even winning poses a direct threat to ‘music industry figures’.”
Finally, Allen concludes with the idea that music industry figures will continue to “[throw] artists under the bus for personal gain” because “it’s not [only] a culture; it’s a religion.”
According to NME, Stormzy had also expressed his disappointment during an interview on Radio 1 earlier this year: “It was such a great year for grime and underground music… I thought maybe this year it might get celebrated […] You know when you’ve got that little bit of hope and that little bit of faith, and then they didn’t. I thought it was such a shame.”
The 2016 Brit Awards will be held on February 24, 2016. Currently in the lead for nominations are Adele, James Bay, and Years and Years, with four nominations each. Jme, Skepta, and Stormzy all had a productive 2015, with Jme having released the critically acclaimed Integrity>, and the latter two having dropped enormous singles in “Shutdown” and “Shut Up,” respectively.
