B.C musician wishes for more genres in the Global music category

A black and white photo of three musicians standing in front of a tree. Ruby Singh stands in the middle of his band members The Future Ancestors.
Ruby Singh stands with his band members The Future Ancestors. Photo courtesty of Christine Cofsky.
Teryn Midzain - CIVL - AbbotsfordBC | 14-07-2023
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Ruby Singh, a descendant of the land of five rivers and the moon itself, is nominated for Global Artist of the year in this year’s BreakOut Western Canadian Music Awards, this fall.

Singh is thrilled about the nomination and that the work he does with his close friends and artists is resonating in the industry.

“It feels absolutely great," Singh said. "It's always an honor to have the work recognized, and the fact that people are taking time to listen to the record and it's resonating with people that really feels great.”

While proud of his nomination and the hard work his team put into the record, Singh is frustrated with the industry’s lack of diverse categories for artists who all get thrown into the mix of the tokenized “global” artist. Singh strongly believes that there is more that BreakOut and other awards organizations like the JUNOs could do to expand the ‘global’ genre of music as a whole.

“It frustrates, to be candid, the hell out of me that we can have so much imagination for all these other genres of music, but as soon as we step out of the bounds of North America, we're just gonna be like, 'Oh, global,'" Singh says. “I’m not going to lie. It's pretty annoying because that's the category I've always been kind of thrown in. Before it was global, it was ‘world’. It's an industry term, which of course if we look at who runs this industry and we go up into the industry, it's going to be what it is. I hate the term. I really don't like it. I think we can get way more specific and I would want people to kind of use their imaginations.”

Ruby Singh’s Vox Infold and Ruby Singh and the Future Ancestors are available on all streaming platforms.

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