The Australian music industry’s top award and the actual Australian music industry have a fraught relationship at the best of times, but at the end of the day, the sentiment behind the ARIA Awards is one that is necessary.
The Australian music industry and its artists should have a night to pat themselves on the back and celebrate all the hard work achieved in the year. How the ARIAs actually goes about this is of course questionable and often controversial.
“It’s only controversial if you actually put stock in the ARIAs,” you may scoff. But maybe we would put stock into the ARIAs if they were conducted in a way that truly represents Australia’s music scene and celebrated it properly.
A good start would be removing or at least toning down the focus on international guests. We’ve already spoken at-length about our issues with the Logies and their refusal to celebrate the other parts of the local entertainment industry.
But you’d think that a night meant to honour local artists would keep the spotlight on, y’know, local artists. Of course, we understand that producers need ratings, especially if we actually want to keep the ARIAs as an institution.
It’s not enough to just have the biggest Aussie music stars of the day on one stage, your average television viewer only wants to tune in if they can see Katy Perry or One Direction awkwardly take the ARIAs stage to present an award to someone they’ve clearly never heard of.
Fair enough. But how about just this once, as something special for the ARIA Awards’ 30th anniversary, we have a show where we don’t shoehorn a totally out-of-place international artist into the proceedings? Let’s at least try it and see how it feels.
The reason we bring this up is that despite the fact that the ARIAs are excited to celebrate their 30th birthday at The Star in Sydney on 23rd November November, News Corp reports that they’ve already put the feelers out to several international stars.
According to News Corp, Robbie Williams seems to be at the top of the agenda for organisers, as well as names like Pink, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Michael Bublé. Are these artists great? Yes. But they’re not Australian.
The idea is that Williams has a new record to plug in the lead-up to Christmas and previously appeared during the 2009 ARIAs, so why not let him hock his wares a second time around. Doesn’t it just make you want to sigh?
News Corp also reports that this year’s ARIAs will feature mash-ups of old and contemporary Australian acts, which admittedly does sound like the perfect way to celebrate 30 years of Australian music.
If only we didn’t have Robbie Williams sticking out like a sore, unwanted, and unwarranted thumb.
