Godspeed You! Black Emperor Discuss Polaris Prize Comments

Few victors of a coveted music prize come out fighting quite like Godspeed! You Black Emperor did back in September 2013 when they picked up the Polaris Music Prize for best Canadian album. Shortly after their ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’ was crowned winner, the band issued a statement essentially saying they didn’t care, that they hated the idea of competition in music and that everything sucked.

The band suggested that ‘maybe the next celebration should happen in a cruddier hall,’ the most crucial point of their being that ‘organizing a gala just so musicians can compete against each other for a novelty-sized cheque doesn’t serve the cause of righteous music at all.’

Four months on and frontman Efrim Menuck has finally spoken out and clarified his comments, in an interview with the Kreative Kontrol podcast, the premise of which was supposed to be about Menuck’s involvement in the new Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra album.

When pressed about his comments, Efrim elaborated on the band’s desire not to win the award in the first place:

‘As a band, we said everything we had to say, honestly. The only thing I’d add to it is, it was the strangest thing to go into the day of the award show hoping that we would not win. I don’t know. We knew what we were going to say if we won… With Godspeed, it’s always like, the amount of years between us shooting our mouths off and getting into arguments — the more years that pass between those arguments, the better for us. It always feels like a losing proposition. But at the same time, you have to do it; you have to speak your mind. Contrary to what people might think about us, we’re not argumentative by nature. That Polaris thing felt like being at someone’s parents’ house for dinner and the friends of someone’s parents says something inappropriate and then you’re like, ’Oh shit, now I have to say, hey, what do you mean?’ That’s what it felt like to us.’

He also went on to say that the band had little say in being nominated, and that it would’ve been their preference to pull out of the process:

‘The deal was, to anyone who puts out a new record in a year, Polaris approaches the record label and says, ’Would you like to put these records up for nomination?’ Then the label can say yes or no. So Constellation said yes to this and didn’t ask Godspeed what they thought about it because they were like, ’Oh, this will be a nice thing.’… And so it was really late in the game when we realized, ’Oh shit, we could’ve just pulled out.’ But we were convinced that we were not going to make it onto the short list. When we did make it onto the short list, the band was convinced we weren’t going to win this thing. It was really towards the end when were like, ’Oh shit, we might and I guess we need to prepare ourselves for that possibility.’ It was a really strange process… You have to remember that Godspeed’s relationship with the Canadian music industry has been terrible from the beginning. It’s been antagonistic from the beginning so it wasn’t unreasonable for us to be like, ’We’re not going to get this thing. Why would they give us this thing?’ We said it in our press release: we feel like orphans in our own country. We feel fairly invisible here.’