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Wednesday 9 September 2009

Mercury Prize Winner Speech Debelle: we told you so!

Posted by Tahirah

In an earlier post, Lady V told you guys to keep an eye on Speech Debelle.

Obviously with good reason. Underdog Speech Debelle has snapped up the Mercury Prize for album of the year for her debut Speech Therapy. What I love about the Mercury Prize awards is that while the coveted prize is quite prestigious, they stay away from the pretentiousness of most awards and go for what they consider talent rather than who has the biggest buzz (remember the year Dizzee Rascal won?) - well, they REALLY went against the buzz this time as Speech Therapy has sold around 3,000 units, meaning it hasn't charted in the UK and it's the lowest selling album ever to win the award.
I've got a feeling that's all going to change now and I think we'll be hearing her name a lot more very soon!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Tahira,

I am pleased that Debelle won the Mercury prize and she definatley earned her title.

You mentioned that this is the first time that Mercury Prize had made an artist win based on their talent as opposed to the buzz. Apparently this is not the case, as on the Wright show this morning, one of the guests mentioned that there was an unknown country singing group that had won this award and went on to be very popular in their genre of music.

The Mercury Awards, is an award that seems to know that talent far surpasses the Hype.

Luscious :-)

Tahirah said...

Hey thanks for commenting Luscious! Ahh I didn't mean for it to come across as me stating she was the first person Mercury Prize has chosen not based on hype but on talent - what I meant was, Speech Debelle is definitely an example of their practice of choosing talent over hype!