And then it wins, for God's sake. Great cover, but the award concerns the original product - and what a tame, anesthetised thing it is.
Young Blood isn't my favourite song ever, but you can appreciate its exuberance, the ferocious boldness with which it goes for 'youth anthem stakes'.
It has obvious strengths. Love Love Love has precious few, apart from its bland safeness in uncertain, precarious times. If you consider that a strength.
It's the crowning glory of a ceremony that plays it too safe when it's not playing it strange, that tips the balance from reverent (the tear-jerking elegiac performance from Lyttelton's The Harbour Union that observes the devastation wrought to that beautiful town, the recognition of Hello Sailor's legend status), to unpleasantly cosy.
We see Don McGlashan talk with a straight face about how we have laws that protect copyright and artists (what, the Three Strikes law?) to rapturous applause.
We see the night end not by celebrating our young and creative future, but by corralling half of it to line up behind the silver fox that is John Rowles, vacant, obedient and strumming.
Fun times, but we have a relatively brief musical past and a precipitous musical future.
Shouldn't we be shoring up our glorious, daring, and fleeting present?
- Volume
