Juno who that is?

As I write I've just finished watching the Juno Awards - for those of you outside Canada, the Junos are the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies or the Brit Awards - and I've come to a conclusion. Either: a) I'm getting old, b) my finger is not on the pulse of Canadian music culture or c) Canadian music culture has no pulse. I say this because I've spent most of the last couple of hours repeating the same word: who?

In reality the situation is most probably a combination of (a) and (b), and this is most certainly the case if anyone from Immigration Canada is reading. I guess gradually losing touch with youth culture is all a natural part of the ageing process and is consequently nothing to really worry about, and to be honest I'm more than happy with my generational orientation in terms of music, given what I saw and heard on stage tonight.

I think that the process of being out of touch works in both directions though. Young whippersnapper Alexandre Bilodeau, who won Canada's first gold medal at the recent Winter Olympics, presented the final award of the evening, and whilst the eventual winner was not that old, the generation gap was evident when Bilodeau opened the envelope and proclaimed, "and the winner is...Michael Bubble."

To his credit, Michael Bublé graciously collected his award without so much as a flicker of indignation although maybe, given his role in the closing ceremony of Bilodeau's Olympics, that was only right and proper...

Olympic autopsy (part two)

It's customary at the end of an Olympic Games for the IOC President, in his closing speech, to proclaim the Games 'the best ever', much in the way that the judges on American Idol always gush that 'this season is the best season ever,' no matter what the contestants do. Current IOC president Jacques Rogge was damning with faint praise though, commending Vancouver's Games as being 'excellent' and 'friendly' but stopping short of labelling them as the best Games ever.

I too was somewhat underwhelmed after the first week of competition but I was won over during week two, when each day seemed to provide incident, intrigue and interest in seemingly exponential measure, culminating in that closing ceremony. A flood of Canadian gold probably helped too, and it was the Canadian public's reaction to that success that was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the Games.

An increasingly common theme in the media here was Canada's 'rebirth' as a nation that was finally unafraid to wear its patriotism on its sleeve, Olympic success paving the way for a new brand of confident, unashamed tub thumping, the type in which Canadians had always been reticent to indulge. Many of the retrospective montages so beloved by television companies during or after any major sporting event have focused as much on the spectators as they have on the athletes, and one that I saw on CTV this week proclaimed that the greatest legacy of the Games may be that the cultural and political divides that have historically existed between the provinces may now become a thing of the past.

Now, whilst I would agree that the nation did indeed seem to come together during the Olympic period, I think it will take more than fourteen gold medals to wipe out 150 years of provincial differences. Time will tell on this issue, but even having said this, I have always found Canadians to have a great sense of national pride, and I hope that the effect of the Olympics has not been to create a new brand of American-style, in your face breast beating patriotism.

That would be a very high price to pay for ownership of the podium.