MUSIC FROM FAR AND WIDE: CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF THE JUNO AWARDS by Karen Bliss, Nick Krewen, Larry Leblanc and Jason Schneider (Key Porter), 176 pages, $40 cloth. Rating: NN
Reading this retrospective of the last 40 years of the Juno Awards feels a lot like sitting down and watching every single Juno broadcast in a row – without actually getting to enjoy any of the performances.
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It’s a very long list of winners and performances, interspersed every so often with innocuous anecdotes. Like the Junos themselves, it’s a bit cornball, occasionally amateurish, full of too much self-congratulatory music industry back-patting and only occasionally provokes a bit of misty-eyed patriotism.
It’s hard to say exactly who this book is intended for. Fans of individual artists don’t get much to sink their teeth into, and this isn’t really the place to get in-depth commentary on the Canadian music industry. There’s plenty of history, but it’s pretty dry and shies away from digging too deep into the dirt.
Past nominees and their friends might be the only folks who’d get much of a kick out of this, or maybe people who’ve been professionally involved in the awards at some point. To be fair, those two categories include a relatively large number of Canadians, but even they won’t find much of interest outside of the chapters that covered their own involvement.
You do get a sense of how hard the award organizers have worked over the years to adjust to the times and respond to complaints. Occasionally, the book successfully stirs up memories of significant moments, but even for music obsessives, it’s a chore just staying awake trying to wade through it all to get to the good bits.
