![]() “I can’tĭraw, but I can trace,” Downie sang on “Lionized,” from Fully Completely. Because, of course, being cool means not needing others to tell you you’re cool. And if the whole school didn’t respond with a rousing, spontaneous slow clap to show their approval, that was all right. He saw the genuinely cool kid beneath our pugly, insecure exterior and he was going to make us see it too, even if it meant dressing us up, taking us to prom and making a big awkward speech about how special we were in front of ![]() Like a cross between Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop and the Fool from King Lear, he was equal parts brainy poetic iconoclast, mischievous punk andĬultural court jester. from “At the Hundredth Meridian” ( Fully Completely, 1992)īut Downie was like the innately confident, idiosyncratic art student who saw right through all that. It was as though we were the awkward, nerdy, anonymous outsider at high school who would get flusteredĪnd speechless when the most popular kid in school asked us for the time. With the rush of excitement that would come from hearing Canada or Canadians referenced in even the slightest way in American movies or television shows. Most Canadians of my generation are familiar This was a dynamic that bred in most English Canadians an inherent inferiority complex, a somewhat resentful adulation of all things American, and a secret unrequited desire for us to matter as much as them. ![]() The Tragically Hip on stage at Koko in London, UK. Were conditioned “to think of themselves as citizens of one of the world’s great powers.” As Northrop Frye once put it, Canadians were “conditioned from infancy to think of themselves as citizens of a country of uncertain identity, a confusing past, and a hazardous future,” whereas Americans The 1970s, I and so many other Gen Xers grew up with the distinct sense that Canada - English Canada, at least - was not a distinct society, but an ambivalent, amorphous, fragile culture with a tenuous grip on its own identity. Born into Pierre Trudeau’s nation-building exercise of Be it Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen,Īrtists who become the voice of a generation express the collective consciousness with an eloquence and profundity that elevates it to the level of high art without losing touch with the grassroots.Īnd Downie was indeed the voice of a generation. Observers have always been somewhat perplexed by the Hip’s paradoxical appeal that they are as beloved by high-minded intellectuals, who read Downie’s lyrics as literature on par with that of Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood and Hugh MacLennan, as they are by beer-swilling hosers who fist-pump their way through the band’s concerts, mouthing Downie’s cryptic lyrics every step of the way. from “Last American Exit” ( The Tragically Hip, 1987) I’m on the last American exit to my homeland.” I’m on the last American exit to the north land ![]() “You’ll watch the border offer you fame and watch you drown. Songs not only spotlighted Canadian stories, but did so in a unique, unconventional, often cryptic style that sounded like alien transmissions on US radio but still sold more albums in Canada than U2 or The Beatles. But they were largely perceived as cult figures whose unabashed Canadian-ness relegated them to the margins - quaint novelty acts in a society awash with Americanįor decades, to be a “successful” English Canadian music artist meant you were successful in the United States, which typically meant conforming to the homogenized tastes of the mainstream American marketplace. Granted, there had long been singer-songwriters who specialized in telling Canada’s stories to Canadians. Or at least that’s what people used to say, before Downie and the Hip came along. Our history is full of epics considered “too small to be tragic,” as The Tragically Hip’s It has been said that Canadians don’t tell our own stories or celebrate our own myths. from “So Hard Done By” ( Day for Night, 1994) “Interesting and sophisticated, refusing to be celebrated.” The Tragically Hip on stage at the Sasquatch Music Festival, George, Washington, USA.
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