"Why not talk about what you like, and just let stuff you don't enjoy pass without comment?...
Why not be positive and affirming, rather than negative and critical - about any kind of music? Self censorship has nothing to do with free speech, its just good manners not to inflict your dislikes on others, and possibly insult or upset someone....
If you use pejorative terms about something as subjective as music, you only make yourself seem narrow-minded. ....
It's never necessary to be nasty about any kind of art form"

Hope you don't mind the selective quoting here Tom. This is something I feel quite strongly about, and I was tempted to start a whole new thread, because it's about a lot more than these awards. Namely that I think it's totally wrong – and a failure of critical nerve that's very symptomatic of music writing today – that moral language like "nasty" and "pejorative" creeps into the business of assessing music. I note it's never the other way round: commentators are never described as "saintly" or "altruistic" for giving musicians good reviews. And I've never heard a musician vociferously complain about receiving a hyperbolically good review, that they considered overstepped the mark.

I mean, do you think magazines should never give bad reviews? (Because comments on message boards are much closer to online reviews on blogs than they are to pieces on Newsnight – they're opinion, not fact). Mags should just not review things that they think are bad? That would be rubbish. It would suck all the meaning out of a good review, for one thing.

And, if the goal was to spare a musician's feelings, well it would end up having the same effect anyway, cos it would be painfully evident why there was a deafening silence answering their every release. In fact, i would find that far more frustrating than a total drubbing. Believe it or not, there are people out there making music who couldn't give a toss whether a review is good or bad, whether someone likes it or doesn't, they just like being part of the fray...