The majority of people in North America do not know who The Tragically Hip even is, or were. This is because The Tragically Hip never made it big in the USA, it being the dream of Gord Downie to be a household name there. He said somewhere (probably in Egos and Icons) that until they made it big in the States, the band was illegitimate. I picked up an anecdote from the CBC’s Cross-Country Check-Up (the show they did about him on the Sunday after his death) about how unpopular the band was in the country that counts. While the band was doing a sound check in LA, a woman was able to walk right in and listen to them practice. Nobody else was there; no paparazzi had bothered to show up; no security was necessary; no fans had the band staked out. On some other CBC show, I heard that an American magazine of the artistic sort was remembering, not Gord Downie, but someone called ‘Dan Gordon.’
The band is more popular up north than down south. But even though the band has been well-liked by some Canadians, it was never as popular in Canada as it has been made out to be since the news surfaced in May of 2016 regarding Gord Downie’s terminal case. This, from the CBC’s Cross-Country Check-Up: A choir member on stage with him in Toronto in 2002, which was long after the band had become ‘popular,’ didn’t know who he was or even who the Hip was. Again, from the same show, same episode: Gord walks into a bar in BC and asks a barmaid to play some ‘Hip’ for him; the bar didn’t have any of his music; the barmaid did not recognize him; and she didn’t know who he was even after he told her that he was Gord who had brain cancer. As moderately popular as he was, he had somehow got it into his head that everyone should know that he was Gord who had brain cancer. When your entourage becomes your world, you think that you are as big as your entourage says you are. To some credit to his popularity, this barmaid had listened to some Hip songs in the 90s, she said, and had been to a Hip concert once. She had never become an ardent fan, though, as her story shows. Quelle surprise that these two stories got past the call-screener! The CBC seldom allows opinions that cross the leftist narrative—the narrative being, on that day, that the great Gord Downie, the ‘Indigenous Rights’ champion, must be unequivocally praised. These two embarrassing anecdotes got past the call-screener by accident, no doubt. Even these, however, were surpassed by a third—the one about the man who had bought some flowers for his sister, only to be asked by lord Gord if the flowers were for him. Once we begin to be large in our own eyes, all pretty things approaching seem to be for us. Is this not the instinctual reaction of a sinfully proud nature? After this flower faux pas got broadcast all over the radio and into the easily offended ears of Downie’s fawning fans, the host began to distrust the call-screener, and proceeded to overreact. One caller, obviously intending to end with a coup de grace in favor of Downie, began to warm up by telling the radio listeners why his wife was not as enthusiastic as he was about Downie’s band. Suspecting the worst, an intervention was adverted to at the station, and, CNN-like, the line went dead, and the paean (and for me, the pain of hearing it) was prevented. That paean was ‘looking for a place to happen.’ Probably it still is. It is a wonder that the CBC did not have the prime minister on as a guest in at least one of the several hours that they devoted to Mr. Downie. After all, in spite of how little Trudeau and Downie knew one another, the PM did eulogize the semi-celebrity as if they had been bosom buddies, even with tears running down his face. Usually his tears are theatrical. But who are we to judge? The most telling anecdote about how well he was known concerns the CBC newswoman who referred to him as ‘Troy’ or ‘Trey’ Downie, obviously confusing him with the better-known Trey Gowdy, the American politician. If a CBC mainstreamer knows Trey Gowdie more than she knows you, you are probably not that well-known in Canada.
I submit proof that Downie’s band has not been widely known and celebrated, not to put him or his band down, but to show that our nation’s broadcaster, the debauched, more than billion dollar a year CBC, is somewhat to blame for propagating ‘artistic works’ that cannot bear critical scrutiny. The CBC does this for novelists and musicians, or for anyone who can perform a trick or two and at the same time be an ally with the CBC in the interest of socialism and degeneracy. Though musicians are all for making as much capital as they can, you will never hear a musician on the CBC speak favorably of capitalism during an interview. Pop musicians are, generally, godless leftists; conversely, famous composers of classical music have been committed and outspoken theists, if not outright Christians. The CBC is an atheistic corporation whose aim it is to magnify postmodern meaninglessness. Their door is shut to anyone who performs above the dregs unless that person has, or pretends to have, a meaningless worldview.
The fact that four million Canadians tuned in to view Gord Downie’s final concert does not prove popularity on a large scale. Who will not tune in to see a terminally ill man do his final show? I wouldn’t, but who else would join me in that sin of omission? About thirty-two million Canadians, apparently. Maybe more had tuned in if maestro Downie had not wearied his fellow Canucks with his protracted political goodbye. Knowing that his end was near, this Bruins (not a Canadian team) fan soon blew it wide open that he had been radically—perhaps I should say rabidly—brainwashed by the myth that the Indians are under attack by white Canadian cowboys. Anyway, I think we can assume, based on how many Canadians bothered to tune in to his grand finale, and based on my less than immaculate, but nevertheless adequate, research, that, in Canada, the band has been unknown to most; moderately popular with some; and extremely popular with a segment.
Callers from this last clump—the longsuffering, steadfast fans—were the ones who were permitted to populate the phone lines on the CBC’s Cross-Country show on that memorable memorial day. These are those who, along with their prime minister, fancied Mr. Downie was their ‘buddy.’ These are those who, if Downie’s songs be considered (for that is what they principally know about him), set folly in great dignity, as it says in Ecclesiastes. Somehow the Universe—or the Creator—put something together at the end of his life, said one Indian woman about his ‘Indigenous’ endeavors. Because of his death, it was said that a daughter saw her dad shed tears for the first time. One caller stated his disbelief at the privilege of having lived on the same planet with him. Another one labeled him a historian. Yet another called for a state funeral. Many of the callers choked up. One caller didn’t know what to do except stack up compliments. “Gord Downie is the single most generous, passionately supportive, committed, loving person that I’ve ever encountered in my career,” he said. To become this attached to a person based on songs that make little, and sometimes, no sense, is fanaticism, which is always irrational, or at least, never rational enough. Once your praise is this jacked up, you have carved an image in your mind that little resembles the messed up, mortal man who walked the earth. Consider the following interchange that took place on the show just mentioned. Near the start of the program, the host got a man on the phone who knew Gord from the early days when the band members used to patronize his record store. The starry-eyed host asked the man what struck him when he met Gord Downie that first time. After a lot of stammering and a comment about Gord’s long hair, the man had to finally admit, “Nothing struck me.” This is the reality. Gord Downie was not a saint. He was not a god. He was not a demigod. He was not superhuman. He was not a hero. He was not royalty. He was not a dignitary. He was not a social justice warrior in any good sense. He was not a historian. He was not a poet. He was a prater with some vocal ability. The collaboration to create the lyrics that make up his repertoire of songs was, in the main, an exercise in folly. This verdict suits many, maybe most, musical artists of our day. This verdict is vindicated each time one of Downie’s efforts is subjected to scrutiny. His very last musical works are coming out now over the radio. I think that even his kindest critics must find fault with some of that. But the lyrics of these last works cannot be worse than most of what he produced in his prime. Here is what legitimate poetry looks and sounds like: “If only I might love my God and die/But now He bids me love Him and live on,/Now when the bloom of all my life is gone,/The pleasant half of life has quite gone by” (From If Only, Christina Rossetti.) These lines have rhythm and musicality. They have truth and depth. They can be understood. They remind one, and are on the level, of Aznavour’s Yesterday When I Was Young. The lines are better than anything Downie ever wrote. They are better, for example, than any lines from At the Hundredth Meridian, one of Downie’s most popular songs. From that song, what could these two lines mean?—: “Garbage bag trees, whispers of disease/And acts of enormity.” To compare Rossetti’s verse with Downie’s lyrics is fair because this man’s lyrics are being called poetry. If we were to get back to a 19th century standard of the written word, Downie, as a lyricist, would soon after be evaluated as: almost never known, now thankfully forgotten, except by very few. Would this ten word appraisal, by the way, not make a better lyric than most of the verses that Downie authored? “Almost never known/Now thankfully forgotten/Except by very few.” That’s not bad; I can hear that being sung.
