Are the MOBOs still relevant?

Last night the MOBO awards were held at the SECC in Glasgow, rewarding producers and performers for their achievements in Music Of Black Origin. According to the Guardian today, the event was 'dogged by claims that top British and US performers were unwilling to appear because the awards were in Glasgow. Music industry figures said performers were put off by the location, the cost and the view that Glasgow is "too white".'

Is there a place in British culture any more for an event which fuels a debate around whether people in Glasgow are too white to host an awards ceremony appreciating 'black music'? Is it possible that there would be no such debate if the MOBOs stopped using self-limiting differentiators like, 'black music'? And what qualifies as 'black music' these days anyway?

When you look at the winners, you have to wonder whether this issue of provenance is becoming a bit outdated, and even irrelevant. The X Factor finalists, four piece boy band JLS, won the MOBO for best song last night for their single 'Beat Again'. Listen to it yourselves if you must, or save yourself the agony and just take my word for it when I tell you that it sounds like a male vocal version of ANY Lady Gaga track written ever. Is Lady Gaga's output black in origin, or were JLS simply being rewarded for (brace yourself for controversial opinion) being successful and black?

Likewise N Dubz, who won Best UK Act and Best Album - was there ever a more vanilla iteration of urban pop? They're like East 17 except one of them has a vagina.

Take drum and bass for example, a genre so fragmented it's no longer really true to claim that every extension of it is black in origin. A band like Pendulum, or an artist like Subfocus, have a sound which has evolved from drum and bass to incorporate elements of hair rock, euro electro and even chart pop - arguably NOT styles of music which are black in origin according to the MOBOs schema.

Conversely you could argue that every musician over the past 25 years has been inspired by a black artist even if they didn't know it - Michael Jackson.

Cultural signifiers and memes belonging to one niche genre of music are now so frequently co-opted, traded, adopted, and disseminated by cousins of that same genre, we're now in a place where the idea of 'ownership' of any one particular style is a slightly old fashioned one. Audiences are as likely to enjoy dubstep as they are Calvin Harris, who isn't sounding so very different from Dizzee Rascal these days.

At what point does music stop being derivative and just become really great music? How far can you credibly stretch the provenance issue before it becomes so wide it's no longer exclusive enough to self-identify as 'other'?

Wherever that point is, the MOBOs have reached it and have gone beyond it, which is actually an indication of huge progress in terms of the variety of breakthrough artists, the innovation in new music and more broadly, issues of racial identification amongst generation Y-ers. The MOBO brand needs to continue to recognise this while reflecting the fact that it doesn't matter where you're from, it's what you do that counts.

URL to original article onKnowledge's site here: http://www.kmag.co.uk/editorial/blogs/rinse_and_repeat/are-the-mobos-relevant