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

Tragically Hip songs play mostly in bars for drunken clients. It is easy to mistake hogwash for wisdom when the lights are low and the inebriated blood is causing impressionistic scenes and reveries to course through the mind: like “when one loses all sense of time and worry, and feels in harmony with the scheme of bigger things” (William Washburn Nutting, The Track of the Typhoon.) But take that phrase from Twist my Arm, the one about ‘grill sick crows,’ and subject it to a cold sober analysis, and then see what can be made of it. Let’s say that a grill sick crow is a crow that got sick from a piece of raw chicken that it picked off the top of someone’s unattended barbecue. Granting that, what has this ‘grill sick crow’ to do with the rest of the song? What has a ‘grill sick crow’ to do with ‘Jacques Cousteau’ or ‘memorized stairs’ or ‘springtime hares’ or ‘broken-down mares’? No one knows; and no one will ever know. Furthermore, has anyone ever seen a sick crow? Are crows not as tough as cockroaches? I grew up among crows. I’ve never seen a sick one, not once in my life, not even at the local dump where cancer-causing refuse is the crows’ chief staple. They don’t call a flock of crows a ‘murder’ for nothing. They’re tough. A person could replace ‘grill sick crows’ with ‘lovesick cows,’ and the change would not matter at all. It is because the song is nothing but a senseless tune—polished nonsense. The twang and the vocals are the polish. The words are the nonsense. The words are just filler for the tune. But why am I noticing Tragically Obtuse nonsense enough to criticize it? At first blush, it seems like profitless employment to muse on the imbecilic mutterings of a manic musician. But the profit we take from this critical employment is the knowledge of ourselves. When meaningless utterance is valued because of its connection to a groovy sound, the listener is on the level of a cow listening to a radio in a barn. We hum along unthinkingly; the cow chews her cud smilingly; we are on the same level. The cow cannot interpret what she hears; but she interprets as much as we do when a Tragically Hip song is what’s playing. Let’s suppose that a cow gives a certain amount of milk when Mozart is playing in the background. How much less milk would that cow give if made to listen to The Tragically Hip instead? This question is not an entirely facetious one. But I have no herd right now to use for the experiment. Leaving that intriguing question unanswered, therefore, though it is not unanswerable, I labor the point that we are thinking creatures, not cows; songwriters ought to give us insights to ponder, not crazy speech to puzzle over or to take mental vacations with. We will have to answer to God, each one of us, for how we have used these minds of ours—these minds that are part of God’s own image.