The Tragically Hip: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

They're popular in Buffalo.

holds up hand

I'm British and I like them. Mind you, when I saw them play in London a few years ago I felt like I was the only British person in the audience.

Probably a bunch of beefy thirtysomething dudes with sports shirts on screaming "WOOOOOOOOOO! FUCKIN A!" making up the Canuck contingent, yes?

I find this interesting. Anagram, if you don't mind playing 6 questions:

How did you first hear them, what was the first album (&/or singles) you heard from them, and can you articulate their appeal to you?

Well I'm hardly an expert on their back catalogue, there are just a few songs I've heard of theirs that I really like. And of course I didn't discover them for myself, there was a Canadian involved – a girlfriend who made me a mix CD which included "Bobcaygeon". I treasure that song, it has this beautifully loose, loping quality which I love and the lyric kind of moves me in a strange way as well. So then I got the album it came from, Phantom Power, and the other standout track on that was "Fireworks" which I think is a blazingly powerful song. The only other album of theirs I have is Fully Completely and off of that one I adore "Wheat Kings" for its forlorn acoustic guitar and the note of bruised longing in the guy's voice.

Am I the only person who hears a resemblance to REM, especially Document-era? The first time I heard Downie's voice I thought I was listening to Stipe, they sound so similar. The lyrics may not be as enigmatic but (especially on a song like "Fireworks") they share this tumbling wordiness that I like. And there's a crunchiness, a kind of swagger to a lot of Hip songs that puts me in mind of REM sometimes.

Probably a bunch of beefy thirtysomething dudes with sports shirts on screaming "WOOOOOOOOOO! FUCKIN A!" making up the Canuck contingent, yes?
from what i've seen, yes. but it's always fun to yell "play some fuckin' hip" at a show.

They do sound a lot like REM.

Does anyone who's not Canadian give half a cardboard shit for these guys?

(Full disclosure: I'm canadian and I have ambiguous feelings 'bout them; the above is a serious question)

My husband is a really big fan.

new hip record coming out october 2nd, now for plan a

http://www.thehip.com/images/TTH-NFPA-CVR_500.jpg

01. At Transformation
02. Man Machine Poem
03. The Lookahead
04. We Want To Be It
05. Streets Ahead
06. Now For Plan A
07. The Modern Spirit
08. About This Map
09. Take Forever
10. Done And Done
11. Goodnight Attawapiskat

first two singles are bangin':

http://soundcloud.com/the-tragically-hip/streets-ahead

http://soundcloud.com/the-tragically-hip/at-transformation

also i love that last downie solo record. hope abandoning bob rock to his toys has done them good

Listening to Road Apples for the first time in a while. They really perfected that Athens-not-Athens sound for a while, yet I feel like a tourist when I'm listening to them. They definitely have US fans, but they should've had many more.

downie is my favorite lyricist

I've never paid close attention, but phrases definitely jump out at me from time to time.

well for instance in "at the hundredth meridian"

a raven strains along the line of the road
carrying muddy old skull
the wires whistle their approval
off down the distance.

or this line in "throwing off glass" which reminds me of the character charlotte douglas in a book of common prayer

and just like after she heard
the word "iridescent"
and everything was iridescent for awhile

Ooh, I like that one.

gord downie was recently diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. they're going on one last tour

i'm inconsolable

"one last tour" is probably an exaggeration/mischaracterization but they're determined to make the upcoming one their "best one yet" and I can't stop crying

very sad news

Wow. Very sad.

Wow did I suddenly realize how much I took this band and this man for granted

the new album (produced by kevin drew) is prob going to be great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgXphurrsE0

ofc i am having a really tough time listening to this song right now

also i completely missed that gord released an album with the sadies in 2014, guess i wasn't searching for gord solo album news. it rocks

i don't think i ever went out of my way to celebrate gord as a lyricist in this thread except to say he's my favorite, but i legit think he's one of the best of his generation. he's the writer whose work taught me how words can interact with each other rhythmically. the lyric sheet to day for night and his solo album battle of the nudes specifically are invaluable to me, and i return to them still when i'm trying to remember how i'd ideally like to form phrases (the lyric "I love your paintings, don't take your colors away / I've grown more fearful of them every day" from "vancouver divorce" drops into my head more or less all the time, also i can't think of anyone who wrote better specifically about divorce/estrangement)

ach, this made me really sad this morning.

been listening to the hip nonstop for the last six months

jamming to their songs while driving to and from work

thinking of gord's family now

If you're not Canadian, you can't appreciate how huge a story this is here--maybe not Bowie/Prince level, but close. Not a big fan, but I love "Fireworks" and "Music at Work."

for a canadian to be bowie/prince level (world) famous, they would have to play down their canadianness

bryan adams, celine dion, neil young, drake, etc, though far more popular in the world stage, would not unite as many canadians

That's what I meant--how they seemed to tap into something deep in the Canadian imagination that would puzzle anyone who isn't Canadian. (And even puzzles me to an extent, although I feel it when they sing about Bobby Orr in "Fireworks" or in something like "Bobcaygeon.") When Q-107 used to do their big holiday-weekend countdowns, before they started playing Simple Minds, they'd be dominated by the usual names--Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, etc.--and right alongside them in number of songs placed would be the Tragically Hip. It's something that would make no sense to anyone not here.

i got into the tragically hip bc i heard sarah polley's version of "courage" in the sweet hereafter and thought the phrasing the chorus was kind of asymmetrical and interesting; it took me a while to decide i liked it. was also attracted to the dedication in the title. made it feel like poetry, which it was.

then a little later i moved to canada for 10 months, which'll do it. it was right after in violet light came out, so "silver jet" and "the darkest one" were on muchmusic all the time. on some kind of retrospective music video show i saw "nautical disaster" which revealed to me immediately how deep the band got.

speaking of "courage," i love when gord organizes his songs around a quote, especially this one which is almost entirely a john cage paraphrase

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIwb2NrYZ98

also it is extremely funny to me that in the first post on this thread sund4r called fully completely "fumbling towards ecstasy"

This all makes me wish they had ever meant anything to me, but I must confess as a lifelong Canadian they have never resonated with me for some reason. Still, this is obviously just the worst news.

a woman who was very special to me loved them

so a lot of memories (in general as well)

Didn't realize they'd played Saturday Night Live; this is another one I liked, "Grace Too." Spooky song that I always thought might be about a serial killer or something ("They'll be no knock on the door").

http://music.cbc.ca/#!/blogs/2014/10/Throwback-Thursday-The-Tragically-Hip-on-SNL-1995

I was thinking that "Fireworks" would be in the running for my favourite song ever by a band I spent years hating. Their early records struck me as so affected--you can see some of that in the SNL clip, although it works in the context of that song. "Fireworks" just roared (and chimed) past all that. The whole Bobby Orr verse is brilliant, and "I never saw someone say that before" reminds me of Bo Diddley singing "You should've heard just what I seen."

i love the parallel construction of that song re: the verse about hockey and the verse about the cold war, and how fixations and tensions in both are diminished when exploring a connection with someone else. it's a song about scale and perspective

I remember that SNL appearance in 1995 really well for some reason. There was a lot of the usual "who cares if Americans don't get the Hip, they're ours" talk, but people also argued that the Dan Akroyd appearance hurt them because it emphasized that they were an uber-Canadian phenomenon, which is almost an explicit invitation for Americans to ignore them. In other words, instead of trying to give the Hip a celebrity rub, complete with Canadian flag waving, they should have introduced them like any other band and let their music stand on its own merits.

True: Fell asleep one Saturday night in 1995. Came to just as the Hip were playing their first song on the show. Was in a fog. Getting my senses together. Had never heard them before. Immediately enchanted. Went out the next day, Sunday, and bought Day for Night, the album they were touring/promoting. Have loved them ever since. Gord Downie is my favorite vocalist/lyricist.

also it is extremely funny to me that in the first post on this thread sund4r called fully completely "fumbling towards ecstasy"

Not going to defend my 14-year-old posts for very long but I meant Fumbling Towards Ecstasy! Girls were always singing along to that Sarah McLachlan album as well as "Wheat Kings" by the Tragically HIp.

Anyway, I actually never bothered to actually look into entire Hip albums on my own until the late 00s, probably because it never seemed necessary, but they had a pretty solid catalogue, I grew to realise. Music @ Work was p cool. This is sad news; best wishes to Downie.

lol i was wondering if it was intentional. i also love that mclachlan album

There was a character on Oz that looked to me like Gord Downie (the lawyer, I think, who bites the head off another inmate's penis). He/they also resembled certain portraits of Beethoven.

I was thinking that "Fireworks" would be in the running for my favourite song ever by a band I spent years hating. Their early records struck me as so affected--you can see some of that in the SNL clip, although it works in the context of that song. "Fireworks" just roared (and chimed) past all that. The whole Bobby Orr verse is brilliant, and "I never saw someone say that before" reminds me of Bo Diddley singing "You should've heard just what I seen."

― clemenza, Wednesday, May 25, 2016 5:46 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya the first songs i heard by the hip were off their first album and they seem affected because, as performers, they were still searching for an image and style and trying to appear comfortable with them

up to here (their first album) is a totally different album from phantom power (where fireworks is on), and it's a band with 9 years of performance experience. gord's intonation and style became much more natural and he had already matured as a performer

and fireworks is about as canadian as they get i would say?

idk I feel like there are a lot of contenders

As I wrote upthread, I must be one of the few British people who like this band. This Canadian girl I loved made me a mix CD with "Bobcaygeon" on it and I've been playing that song, "Wheat Kings" and "Fireworks" on repeat all day and remembering how much I loved her.

this is a very good article by the way

http://www.tsn.ca/fully-completely-1.494972

personal stakes
will get raised and get raised
till your story gets compelling
if you lacked the sense
or were willfully dense
is forever in the telling
the surface is green
and the dark interweaves
in a lonely iridescence
it's terribly deep
and the cold is complete
and it only lacks your presence
and nothing else

and fireworks is about as canadian as they get i would say?

For me, although I guess they had many other songs just as Canada-specific. I played it for my class today (hitting mute for the obscenity), but first I had to set the context by playing a YouTube clip of Henderson's goal. Not one student out of 25 knew about the goal or the series. They're 12, and about three-quarters of my class is Indian or Pakistani. I said, "Look, you just have to know about this to be truly Canadian." What was nice, though, was that when I asked "What does he mean by 'We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger'?", one guy was able to explain that.

Was just listening to "Music at Work" (the song) which holds a special resonance after working in a Toronto Office that did indeed pipe in 97.3 EZ Rock "My music at work" for many of the years that I was there -

"Everything is bleak
It's the middle of the night
You're all alone
And the dummies might be right
You feel like a jerk
My music at work"

GOT THAT RIGHT

Is it just me or does Gord deliberately ape Morrissey with those lalalas?

The Bruce McCulloch directed video is perfect too.

im not familiar with that song/video, will check it out later.

obviously ticket scalping sucks in general but there's something especially awful about these final hip shows selling out in minutes and tickets going for thousands on the resell market.

ya gord kind of does that moz thing

matt murphy did something slightly similar on a few tracks as well

Gord's birthday today.

i was wondering why i felt so bad

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-covid-19-kills-nine-infects-34-staff-at-bobcaygeon-nursing-home/

there's a dream he dreams where the high school's dead and stark
it's a museum and we're all locked up in it after dark
the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister
hung with pictures of our parents' prime ministers

new gord solo album is awesome, i prefer it to the more sketch-oriented introduce yerself. a lot of the lyrics share lines with man machine poem songs so it feels like the gord solo version of that record. the production's kind of obnoxious with vocal effects and instrumental shifts but i am here for it bc it reminds me of battle of the nudes

the "new" tragically hip "album" (aka EP-length collection of lost songs) is good, if you love road apples it'll hit the spot

Well, the medicine man started seeing red
You think the snake just dreams up the poison in his head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXPTu_lqgXU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTsm1fM59Lc

This is kinda amazing -

https://www.straight.com/movies/weird-connection-made-between-folk-horror-and-hip

I honestly had been wondering about the name of that album a few weeks ago!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6bRuOyJTVo