Baffling Brits go all Hinda Hicks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/10/baffling-brits-go-hinda-hicks

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It's hard to divine much that you don't already know about the state of music from this year's Brit nominations. In contrast to the Mercury prize, the Brits simply reward success. The nominations underline what's been going on in the charts: Emeli Sandé's debut album was the biggest-selling of last year by some considerable margin, so she gets three nominations; Mumford And Sons continued to be huge on both sides of the Atlantic, therefore so do they; in a pretty grim year for new British indie bands, Alt-J's debut album An Awesome Wave bucked the trend, shifting nearly 160,000 copies, and they have three nominations as well.

They occasionally stick a leftfield nominee in there to suggest they're choosing from a slightly broader field than just the year's biggest sellers but only the most dementedly optimistic fan of acclaimed singer-songwriter Cat Power really thinks she has a chance against Rihanna and Lana Del Rey for best international female.

Elsewhere, as is traditional at the Brits, the nomination for best British female gives the impression that there aren't actually enough successful female artists out there to make up the shortlist. In the 90s, they were legendarily given to baffling nominations – Joan Armatrading is a great singer-songwriter, but she was hardly setting the world alight in 1995; in 1999 an R&B singer called Hinda Hicks was up for a gong – as if desperately trying to make up the numbers.

But this year – after 12 months in which even the most casual observer of the charts might have concluded that British female artists were very much dominating things – they've gone one better by nominating someone who's not actually alive: Amy Winehouse.

That's about as controversial as an event which used to sell itself – at least to its TV audience – as a hotbed of unpredictability and controversy gets this year.