The Little Bar Band That Could
The Tragically Hip, In Violet Light (Zoe Records)

The culture wars of the ‘80s are history. Cultural Cold War is in. One year after the attacks a lot of people are wondering again whether the American media are merely informing us of the decline of irony, or actually creating it. Or if there was ever a difference. Recent articles in the New York Times have sirened the increase of innocuous goofy-family TV programming in the wake of 9/11, as well as the rekindled debate in academia between postmodernists and their blustery critics. We groundlings are informed of a cultural retrenchment of sorts – it seems that ‘irony’ is a luxury of more prosperous times! Are you a terrorist or a consumer? You’re either with us or against us.

If there’s a band that will weather the current cultural gales and render them moot, it’s the Tragically Hip. Turn off the damn TV and warm yourself in their bullish glow. The Hip’s new album, In Violet Light, and their recent show at House of Blues invoke Rainer Maria Rilke’s cautionary quip: “Do not let yourself be controlled by irony. If you feel yourself growing too familiar with it, turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.”

The Tragically Hip (or “the Hip,” as their fans refer to them) stake out the most dangerous terrain on any battlefield: the no-man’s land between the trenches. On one side, the embattled indie rockers, their supply lines of retail distributorship and peer-to-peer file trading slowly being choked off. The indie soldiers nourish themselves on boot soles and baby powder, and wait. On the other side, the fierce multinational war machine of commercial rock. The Hip could be the house band in that fabled South Pacific brothel, where both Allied and Axis soldiers are said to have checked their rifles at the door. Inside, their mutual thirsts (poker and Phillipine beer) would outweigh their ideological grudges for an evening of uneasy leisure.

A frontline bar band would have to be amazingly adroit. The Hip’s music is indeed a precarious balance between arena rock and bedroom poetics. But they manage to pull it off through sheer hard work and dedication to their fan base (which in other bands is sometimes confused with a mere vague contempt for major labels.) The Hip are purely entertaining where other pop music attempts to be escapist. They are unapologetically poetic. They spew sincerity without a soundcheck, when other entertainers would have a crew assembling the safety net of irony hours beforehand in the same corporate-named arena in which they both perform. Really, why does ‘sincere’ music have to be painful to listen to? Is it a mark of authenticity that you can’t play Cat Power for your co-workers?

Some time ago a friend of mine asked me what The Tragically Hip sound like. I think I said, flatteringly, “Kind of like if Elizabeth Bishop wrote lyrics for Bachman Turner Overdrive.” When I started thumbing through the CD booklet for In Violet Light, I almost laughed out loud, remembering my facetious description. The liner notes to this album specifically reference Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, and John Gardner, among other poet-icons, in pointed footnote. The strongest song on the album, an ballsy ballad called “The Dire Wolf,” is “inspired by Wallace Stevens,” but makes me think more of Elizabeth Bishop writing the lyrics for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (another Great Lake shanty). Tugged along a sweetly lunar melodic arc, singer Gordon Downie waxes:

Close to nowhere / and halfway across
but never more here / expanse getting broader
though bigger boats been / done by this water

Well, I guess Canadians like to write about water. They’ve certainly got enough of it. Texas would have already seceded if it had half the water Quebec has. I remember hearing a vignette once on This American Life in which some Canadian guy mused that a big part of the Canadian consciousness, the part that differentiated it from the American psyche, is that the average Canadian knows he will never see every part of his country, that there are still to this day parts of Canada that have never even been photographed, much less settled. To Americans, this is truly an alien concept, though it’s something felt by most of the other colonies. It’s a theme that teases through all of the Tragically Hip’s songs.

I got a sense of this idea while living in Australia - the way in which even city dwellers display a kind of deference I couldn’t understand as an Yank: a gesture, a sense of being nature’s guest, unwelcome, but still a guest. Aussie music is the same way, too - there’s always this ghost of a question: What can it mean to be a Terrarian when you’ve only set foot on 25% of Terra? This is why songs about nature are lucid dreams when dreamt by an Australian band like the Go-Betweens (pastoral remembrance in “Cattle and Cane”), or our Northern neighbors the Tragically Hip (the obscured, Ophelia-like baptism of “Membership”), but mere “imagery” when presented by Americans like R.E.M. (“Cuyahoga,” a song more industrial than littoral).

Give these urban Canucks their due - Toronto’s a hell of a lot bigger than Athens, and closer to Lake Erie (as well as the rest of Terra). Yet the vastness of the Hip’s homeland echoes throughout their modest urban hymns, and provides the context for their musical globetrotting. There have been plenty of woodsmen and plenty of aesthetes. The silent few were both. Thoreau was even rarer – he had connections in the big city. So do the Hip. The truest diaries of frontier rejoin the soil shortly after their authors, unread. A few make it back to libraries in the capital and living room speakers everywhere else.

Not to slander Georgia’s finest. These days, both Athens GA and Walden Pond are tourist attractions, replete with hippie-punk beggars. But we shouldn’t fault R.E.M. for inventing lame indie rock anymore than we should fault Thoreau for inventing the hippies. That’s an a posteriori judgment. The Velvet Underground may have launched a thousand bands, but it’s an unsung mark of genius to have inspired 50,000 poseurs for every genuine heir to the throne. Which R.E.M. did, and which The Tragically Hip are. The ripples that R.E.M. created were picked up by true aesthetes across the pond and across the border. Aesthetically speaking, the Hip are to millennial Canada what R.E.M. were to ‘80s America, and what Radiohead sort of is to the U.K., depending on the weather reports.

These bands all have something in common: they helped reinvent the Anthem. Through perspiration and inspiration, they reclaimed the rock anthem from ‘70s dust-smokers and translated it to a savvy audience with a lot less time on its hands. This was no mean feat – look at the colossal steps these bands had to make in their respective countries to get there from previous Anthem Bands:

Grand Funk Railroad --> Loverboy --> R.E.M.
The Guess Who --> BTO --> Tragically Hip
The Who --> Frankie Goes to Hollywood --> Radiohead

These amazingly modern bands will all receive posthumous Nobel prizes for their quantum leaps in the field of the Humanities. These groups discovered the Pocket Anthem: a galvanizing little tune that lies somewhere between a mantra and a reveille for their lonely crowds. A national anthem for the expatriate. The quasi-title-track from the Hip’s last album, “My Music at Work” (from 1999’s Music @ Work), is a perfect example of the Pocket Anthem.

The scene is the kitchen in back of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. This time, it’s a dishwasher’s thoughts arranged for BTO, massive barre chords threatening to crush either the thoughts themselves or just the misery caused by them, we’re not entirely sure. “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 / my music at work.” With dishpan hands, she sarcastically muses on the title of someone’s future dissertation about her life: “I call it ‘Olga Waits: / The Cloud That Entertains / the Dim Possibility of Showing Some Restraint.’” This is a song R.E.M. could have written in the Green era if they had only kept their politics personal and found some room in the practice space for poetics alongside the Marshall stacks.

The lonely crowd at The Hip’s recent House of Blues show was a marvel. The band’s Pocket Anthems became real ones. It had honestly been a while since I had seen a sweaty audience sing along with their idols in such beer-soaked rapture. It was genuinely moving, and made me remember those wild Naked Raygun shows at the Cabaret Metro back in the day. This was a couple of years before Michael Stipe disambiguated himself and then people stopped singing along altogether.

The gesture of enthusiasm that I’m accustomed to seeing at shows is what I call the Sublime Lunge: dudes nodding along to the music, and then, oomph, ducking and squinting to a particularly tasty slice of chords or something. By contrast, the audience at HOB was like a political rally in 1938 Berlin – an inscrutable combination of abandon and utter obedience. People weren’t just singing the lyrics, they were actually -fucking- the lyrics. It was shameless and pathological, the world’s largest public peepshow. Revelatory. Sometimes the craziest shows are the ones where the band sounds precisely the same as they do on record.

It was a good pairing of band and venue. The Tragically Hip have been called “The World’s Greatest Bar Band.” It was a stroke of genius for them to do a tour of every city’s House of Blues, the Disneyland of bars, a lavish animatronic brothel. The World’s Greatest Bar Band should be nothing if not consistent. And WGBB really isn’t such a bad title to be stuck with (at least in comparison to other bogus rock titles like “Rock n’ roll’s poet laureate,” “The hardest-working band in Punk,” or whatever dumb-ass a deadline-pressed rock critic is liable to come up with). You may be a featherweight champ, but, hey, you’re still a champ, and that must mean something. The reference itself is telling: a bar is an intimate place, sometimes more intimate than our own living rooms. We don’t stand in line at 10 a.m. to buy tickets to see Bar Bands; we are taken by surprise when the beehive vibration of bar chatter is scattered to the four winds by some band whose name we never even catch. Some band that grabs our attention, relieves us from our beer-banter, disarms us with a drum beat beyond intellectualization and the sound of a shitty amp through a shittier p.a. The Hip channel this face-value experience.

It’s an experience we crave, because most of our entertainment is proscribed. Hollywood makes sure we know the ending even before we consider buying a ticket. This is doubly important in this life during non-wartime: folks want relief from ambiguity, fast.

At some point in the not-so-distant past, the Bar Band replaced Vaudeville in terms of no-refunds neighborhood entertainment. Notice how there has never been a good Hollywood movie about a bar band. It’s an aesthetic experience that’s hard to co-opt or ironize. Both institutions (the Bar Band and Vaudeville) have been around for a long-ass time, but the critical power of the phrase ‘bar band’ wasn’t invoked until it was adopted by progressive folks in the ‘80s in order to defend their embattled punk outposts. Yet the bar-band paradigm allowed punk its first guerilla contact, especially in England. Just look at Elvis Costello and the Attractions: pop band masquerading as punk band masquerading as bar band.

Here in the U.S., we associate Bar Bands with good-timey beer commercials, consensual sex on a pool table to a rowdy Bob Seger soundtrack. In Canada, as much as we liken the country to Wisconsin Heights, being a bar band means encountering true Good-Ol’-Blues-Brothers-Boys-Band-type scenarios. Last year Bridget Cross, the bassist of ‘90s indie-rock stalwarts Unrest, was beaten up and jailed for five months up in the Great White North just for having a beer with her non-white boyfriend in a local tavern. This kind of thing isn’t even a factor for American bands who can make a respectable name for themselves just doing week-long tours of Ohio. Up North, the dues are a bit steeper.

Now, am I to understand that I am supposed to feel superior to an indie-rock band that conquered the real wastelands? A band with the chemistry and modesty that enables them to play three chords where they might have played seven, comprised of the same five members still present and ready for duty after 18 years of parenting and taxes (even if they are a lot lower in Canada)? If so, then we’re actually allowing that glorious punk ethos to capsize completely, as these were the very standards upheld 25 years ago: brevity, camaraderie in drinking and art, one-for-all and all-for-the-song. ‘Entertainment’ in triple-quotes, if you must, or no quotes at all. Punk, after all, in its perennial claim as the raw essence of rock and roll, is really just a reassertion of Buddy Holly’s plaintive defense to a drooling producer. “But we arranged these songs so they sound good with just three people.”

I remember a twinge of disappointment during the Tragically Hip show about their not utilizing the enormous stage at House of Blues for some serious rock heroics. Then I realized that the World’s Greatest Bar Band must view the stage as a Moonwalk that has no purchase. Their music remembers having played in bars the size of the stages that they currently inhabit. The neighborhood Arena is comfy, but a long way from home.


posted at 2:06 AM