The Mercury Prize is an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Previous winners include Portishead, Pj Harvey, the Arctic Monkeys, the XX, James Blake, etc.
2016 Shortlist:Anohni - 'Hopelessness'
Bat For Lashes - 'The Bride'
David Bowie - 'Blackstar'
Jamie Woon - 'Making Time'
Kano - 'Made in the Manor'
Laura Mvula - 'The Dreaming Room'
Michael Kiwanuka - 'Love & Hate'
Radiohead - 'A Moon Shaped Pool'
Savages - 'Adore Life'
Skepta - 'Konnichiwa'
The 1975 - 'I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it'
The Comet Is Coming - 'Channel the Spirits'
Skepta - 'Konnichiwa'
a little excerpt from the Guardian about the awards this yearIt has been a strange year for the Mercury prize: no one could find much to complain about in the shortlist.
In previous years, the shortlist has variously been upbraided for being too mainstream, not mainstream enough, too narrow or too tokenistic. This year, the solitary voice raised in objection seemed to belong to the Sun’s showbiz editor, angrily decrying the judging panel for failing to nominate Adele – despite her “sales, huge sell-out tour and international chart domination” – commercial success having long proved the most reliable indicator possible of any album’s artistic value.
Elsewhere, there seemed to be general agreement that the shortlist did a pretty decent job: so decent, in fact, that the field seemed open. It was packed with a pretty good spread of genuinely inventive music of varying stripes. Virtually anything on there could have won it – from Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool to Laura Mvula’s The Dreaming Room – without causing too much in the way of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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Equally, you don’t have to buy into the faintly patronising it’s-what-Bowie-would-have-wanted line peddled at the award ceremony to see why Skepta’s Konnichiwa won. It’s the biggest album yet to have emerged from grime’s remarkable commercial resurgence, and embodies a lot of the characteristics that make that resurgence feel uniquely exciting and vibrant.
It’s music that has succeeded independently of the music industry. Self-released, it makes few concessions to pop commerciality – the music on it seems more interested in placing itself firmly within a lineage of underground British black music than pandering to the charts – but nevertheless became a huge hit.
source2345
