11/28/2023 0 Comments Tragically hip gord downieHere, the outspoken environmentalist appreciates the world around him, and expresses a desire to hang on to every part of it, while also encouraging his millions of listeners to do the same. “Wayward ho! Away we go It’s a shame to leave this masterpiece With its gallery gods and its garbage-bag trees”Ī song about explorer Jacques Cartier’s discovery of our home and native land, Downie’s lyrics feature plenty of references to Canada’s beauty. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.He ended up, as a result, being the sort of person who could hold a whole country rapt for an evening, the prime minister in the balcony clearly almost losing it himself several times. Downie, unlike pretty much every other famous musician the country ever produced, all those Neil Youngs, Drakes and Joni Mitchells, never left for the States. It was sweet and it was perfect and it was exactly the kind of naked open emotionalism that we generally abhor as a country, leave to the places who are more boastful of their accomplishments, more easy with the notion that life is about winning and excellence than we are. It was whatever the opposite of toxic masculinity is, and everyone we could see was as undone by it as we were. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/ShutterstockĪnd, because it was the last time, we saw each member of the Hip walk to Gord, embrace him, kiss him gently on the lips and step back away from the lights. The Tragically Hip’s fans pay their respects. Wheat Kings is about a famous exoneration case in Canada, a man who was convicted and spent “20 years for nothing, well that’s nothing new, besides / no one’s interested in something you didn’t do.” There is a line in Fireworks that goes: “You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey / And I never saw someone say that before.” In what is arguably the Hip’s most famous song, Courage (For Hugh MacLennan), the famous chorus goes: “Courage, it couldn’t come at a worse time.” That said, the subjects of Hip songs were not by any stretch of the imagination national triumphs. Their songs about (mostly English) Canadian things were a somewhat comforting soundtrack. They rose as a band in a period of Canadian history – the mid-1990s – that saw us almost lose the country in a referendum on Québécois independence. They speak from a particular set of Canadian experiences. It’s sometimes said that the Hip are a white-guy thing, and they can be. People who could not get a ticket gather in Springer Market square to listen to the Tragically Hip in downtown Kingston, Ontario. There was something weirdly private and personal about being among so many people, something that seemed worth protecting even with all the cameras in the room. But saying that they were owed the respect we would have accorded fellow mourners at a wake. In front of us was one young couple, he in T-shirt and jeans, she in a floral jumpsuit, whose adorably enthusiastic singing and dancing would have gone viral had we recorded them for posterity. His occasionally nutty dancing skills were rivaled by the audience’s. More than once he turned the microphone on the crowd, who happily sang the words back to him. Downie, looking thinner than we’d ever seen him but unafraid to change into a series of glittery jumpsuits, obligingly performed just about everyone’s favourite songs. We were emotional, too, about what was about happen, which was that a dying man was going to entertain us. We were also with the people watching outside in Kingston’s Market Square, and with the people watching on television across the country. We both thought it was weird, the uniformity of the crowd, because as to the Hip, as to the singing of nearly every word of every song, we were one with the people there in every other respect.
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