Is Canadian Music Real?
I have to say, I can’t see the appeal of The Tragically Hip. Gord Downie sounds like a Canadian Michael Stipe ripoff to me, and the music just makes me think of a pub band at Tir Nan Og—and to be fair, any pub band in Kingston almost certainly has more than a few Hip songs in their repertoire, which may be why I make the association. I’m not shaming anyone for liking the Hip, of course. They’re a Canadian institution at this point, and they’re one of the few major Canadian bands to make their national identity a central point of their musical character, and that’s certainly paid off for them in record sales. I think that part of my distaste for them might be just that though: their self-embraced status as unabashedly Canadian icons. I really never thought much about the Hip until I moved to Kingston and I started seeing Gord Downie’s name and lyrics plastered everywhere, with photos of the band in every other restaurant downtown. For basically as long as I can remember, I’ve had a distaste for most things branded “Canadian” (unless the branding is “Canadian Maple” baked beans. For a tasty maple snack, I will grant many an allowance), and music is one of them. Honestly CBC, I’m never going to check out Tyler Shaw, please stop
The idea of being a Canadian nationalist has always perplexed me, and I don’t think I’m necessarily being a contrarian by saying that. Sure, there was always that weird kid at school who was obsessed with joining the army, was the world’s biggest Hip fan at 9 years old, was always wearing some kind of Canada merch and knew way too much about famous boats of Canadian military history, but that kid was still an anomaly—at least where I grew up. I could never put my finger on why I felt such a disconnect from Canada as a kid, especially watching so much American media where the idea of “America” seemed so prevalent in everyone’s minds, and where devotion to one’s country seemed like a default state of being (I didn’t discover N.W.A. until I was a teenager). The comparison between Canada and America, especially our politics and media, is in many ways definitive of Canadian identity, and has been definitive for as long as the two nation-states have been neighbours. Even as I write this article, Google Docs is trying to correct “neighbours” into “neighbors.” No, I don’t want to change locale to British English, curse you Google!
Canada feels a bit like a question half-answered to me. A self-defeating thesis that can never be what it claims, because the basic premise is built on a vague untruth. We make schoolchildren paradoxically refer to the dictionary definition of a settler state as “our native land” in the national anthem, and I just can’t wrap my head around that. It’s just all so clearly bullshit, exemplified for me by the recent removal of a John A. MacDonald statue in a park causing an uproar over “erasure of history,” while the gobbling up of millennia-old woodlands to build more parking space is just “an unfortunate economic necessity.” I see you Joni Mitchell.
There’s a general uncanniness to the idea of being Canadian. First of all, in spite of the Canadian government and media’s most desperate efforts to create it, there’s a general lack of a shared cultural identity compared to our closest cultural neighbours, Britain and the USA. We love our iconographic stereotypes, but sometimes the joke about Canada just being maple syrup America feels a little too real to be funny. But all the same, we need to be different—and for political and emotional reasons we need to justify Canada’s existence as an entity separate from the United States, or as a country at all—so we cling to our universal healthcare and our BeaverTails as if they’re the only substitutes for an interesting national history that we have. I feel obliged to say that I’ve known the uncanny feeling my whole life, having one parent born in Canada, and one parent a first-generation immigrant (obligatory mention that we’re all immigrants). My dad is an artist who specializes in Canadian landscape paintings, and so I’ve been surrounded by romanticized imagery of Canada my whole life, but it’s always just been that to me: a nice painting for rich white people to purchase. Maybe it’s because my image of Canada is based on the templated, box-mix Ontario suburb I grew up in, or maybe it’s because half of my family lives in the Philippines, and to them, Canada has never been home. Regardless, however I feel about it, my passport says I’m Canadian, so maybe it’s worth figuring out what that means to me.
Artificial and arbitrary as much of its mythology may be though, Canada is certainly a unique nation. The other side of the coin of disparateness is that there’s a lot of diversity to draw from. In terms of music, Canadians are outsiders by default. Not just to American music (the dominant music culture in this continent), but also to ourselves. Music in Canada, though it doesn’t carry the same prestige as American music, is as diverse as the people. There’s an entire world of Indigenous music traditions—not that I’m claiming Indigenous music as “Canadian music,” but it is a central piece of the sonic makeup of this land—, there’s the Celtic-infused folk traditions of the east coast, there’s the internationally influential Caribbean-influenced pop and hip hop scene in Toronto, the country and folk music of western Canada, the indie scene in Montreal, and innumerable other traditions that have roots from all over the world.
All of these things are Canadian, because “Canadian” isn’t really anything. I admit that asking a question like “is Canadian music real” is a bit of provocative nonsense, but I think that Canada could use some provocation. No, I don’t hate my country, and yes, I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been born into by being Canadian, but I also find it more than a little delusional to be proud of the fact that a couple hundred years ago a bunch of racist Europeans laid claim to 10 million square kilometers of already inhabited land under the pretext of nationalism. I can’t see that version of Canada ever being much more than a joke to me. But that being said, I see the lack of distinct national identity as less of a weakness than as an opportunity for growth. Maybe the way forward is to let go of the superficial parts of being Canadian— to reject patriotism and look to the mosaic of real people and cultures that make up this country. I think it’s up to all of us, especially artists and those who will define culture, to look at Canada not as what John A. MacDonald thought it should be, but as it is, and what it could be. And if that means letting go of “Canada” as an idea altogether, so be it.
A playlist of some classic Canadian artists:
Header by: Aglaia Joithe
