PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION II

The most intelligible, graceful lines that I could find out of the dozen or so songs of the Hip that I read, are these, “Twenty years for nothing, well, that’s nothing new, besides/No one’s interested in something you didn’t do.” I have had to conclude that even this song is vague. Even Wheat Kings, which is supposed to be about wrongfully convicted David Milgaard, is not really about that unless someone tells you that it is. This is quite unlike Stompin’ Tom’s Big Joe Mufferaw, which is, without a doubt, about a French-Canadian lumberjack from the 19th century. The day after the lead singer’s death, the host of Ontario Today, a CBC program, invited fans to phone in to voice their thoughts on Downie’s death. The guest for the show was Alan Cross, a music journalist. During this one hour eulogy, whether by host, guest, or callers, Downie was extolled for having been elliptical, evasive, obtuse yet accessible, intentionally obtuse; and for having stated, in his songs, ‘different things to different people.’ The Bible would call him a prater; and his songs, prating. The apostle Paul, in order to see as many souls saved as possible, made himself ‘all things to all men,’ which is similar to being ‘different things to different people,’ but he made sense. In all seriousness, the guest told the radio audience that musicians like Gord feel more deeply than the common man; and that they, unlike the rest of us, can articulate what they feel. Do those lyrics that I quoted exhibit depth and articulacy? In Egos and Icons, Downie says that his lyrics are ‘user-friendly’—for listeners to deal with, not him. Then he complains, “That’s not good enough for certain people.” Obviously the lyrical quality of his songs has been an issue. It is a vulnerable scab. But it’s a scab that deserves to be picked at. He says this about one song in particular, which, I suppose, he would say for all the rest: “Even if you just sort of get a sense of the mood or the landscape or a character in it, or even if it just takes you off somewhere else so that you’re not even listening to the lyrics by the end of the song, then it succeeded; it just functioned as a sound.” A song that is no more than a sound should not be good enough for any thinking person, though—not if we care about the use of our mind. On a site called Song Meanings, fans are invited to opine on what songs like Twist my Arm and Little Bones mean. It’s all just guessing and speculation. No one really knows what songs like those mean. Members of the band have no idea. Even Downie himself didn’t know. No one knows what lyrics like these, from Poets, could possibly mean: “Spring starts when a heartbeat’s pounding/When the birds can be heard above the reckoning carts doing some final accounting/Lava flowing in Superfarmer’s direction/He’s been getting reprieve from the heat in the frozen food section.” On some level and to some degree, even a singer who is part of society’s moral meltdown should communicate something. If the lyrics of Tragically Hip songs are assessed in order to form some idea of the band’s excellence or lack thereof, it has to be said that one of the chief characteristics of their body of work is meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is a good synonym for postmodernism. Substitute the word ‘meaninglessness’ where the word ‘postmodernism’ is used today, and there is a fairly accurate, concise definition of that enigmatic word. Postmodernism is the philosophy that life has no meaning, that meaning should not be looked for, and that meaning itself is meaningless. Meaning, today, especially in the pop music sector, is as outdated as an abandoned outhouse. Coherent disclosure, furthermore, is prized about as much as what the outhouse was once full of.