Just this morning, by way of acknowledgment of Downie’s passing, a Canadian TV writer on Twitter posted, simply, a stanza from the Hip song “Another Midnight”: “Perhaps we’re an election day / Pumping hands and kissing all the babies / Ain’t no time for shadowed doubts or maybes / Is there another way? / Or we’re a stolen Cadillac / Racing for a roadblock in the distance / Flashing by a lifetime in an instance / Can we take it back?”įor my money, Downie’s greatest lyrical achievement - and one of the greatest ever, anywhere - is the 1993 song “Fifty Mission Cap.” The song is built around the story of Maple Leafs defenseman Bill Barilko, who disappeared without a trace on a fishing trip, only to be found dead 11 years later in the Canadian wild, the victim of a plane crash. It’s hard to call him the greatest lyricist Canada’s ever produced, given that country also gave the world Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, but he’s in their company, which says enough. They didn’t, and Canada didn’t, and I’m confident both are happier for it to this day.īut back to Downie. audience and part of me worried that they would - and Canada would lose them for good. Part of me feared the Hip would fail to charm this captive U.S. I watched that episode with a combination of pride, trepidation, and dread. I remember vividly an appearance by the Hip on Saturday Night Live in 1995 - the show was hosted by Dan Aykroyd, a Canadian who had passed through the international membrane and who, legend goes, advocated to Lorne Michaels (another osmotic Canadian) to invite the band to appear. In this, they also felt quintessentially Canadian - that cloying suspicion that something is not quite validated until it’s earned the approval not just of Canadians but of fans south of the border as well. The Hip are big in Canada, which sounds a bit like a lame joke, but it means that Downie always belonged peculiarly, and uniquely, to Canada.įor a long time, the book on the Hip was that, unlike Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or, God help us, Nickelback, they couldn’t quite break through in the States. Try to imagine Stipe if Stipe was beloved in every corner of this country, red state and blue, but practically nowhere else around the world. But that doesn’t quite get it - and by “doesn’t quite,” I mean, not at all. If you don’t know him, a comparison is hard to conjure: My mind goes first to Michael Stipe, because Downie was a similar brand of weirdo poet, an off-kilter stage presence, and a famously awkward dancer. Even as a nonfan of the music - and these are songs that now rank with the national anthem on evergreen playlists of Canadiana - I respected, and even revered, Downie. They were, in the parlance, hosers - unabashedly Canadian and, ironically, not particularly hip, nor particularly interested in being hip.īut Downie. I liked a few songs, I loved one song in particular, but in general I always found them to be a little too bar-band for me, not as edgy or alternative as their Stateside grunge counterparts, or even other emerging Canadian bands of the era like Sloan. I can’t go any further without confessing: Back then, I was not a huge Tragically Hip fan. In their later years, they graduated into a kind of venerated touring ensemble, sort of like the Grateful Dead, but the apex of their impact was in the early ’90s. The Hip (they are only and always referred to in Canada as the Hip) formed in Kingston, Ontario, in 1984. Downie, who died last night at 53 after a protracted and public bout with brain cancer, was the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, a band that is iconic in Canada and mostly known outside of Canada for being iconic in Canada. It may seem hyperbolic to say that no non-Canadian can truly understand the importance of Gord Downie, because it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
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