The Tragically Hip - The Music of Our Youth Etc.

Last week there was a posting on Facebook that confidently declared that Saturday night Canada would be shut down. It turned out they were talking about the possibly final Kingston concert of The Tragically Hip that night. Now, if I wanted to be nasty, I could say this was just a reflection of smug, useful narcissism of the generation that grew up on The Hip, as they know them. However, as a Baby Boomer, I think that would be a little like the stove calling the kettle black, or however that adage goes.

I have a dear nephew who has been to 10 or 11 of The Hip's concerts. I guess, for him, that was possible because he lives near a large enough city to be able to attend such concerts. I have to admit, and I don't feel bad for doing so, that The Tragically Hip were only a far blip on my radar. Sure, I have heard about them since at least the 90s. I remember some of my younger psychiatry resident colleagues at the time being all over them. It still did not inspire me to check them out. I was too busy studying and raising my family. I could not name a single song, nor recognize one, let alone hum one of the tunes.  Now, to some, that might almost smack of blasphemy. Read on.

My nephew's children are already starting school. I wonder how many bands starting out nowadays he knows and follows with anything like the loyalty he has for The Hip. I know from my experience and others that something happens to our affinity to music as we grow older. We tend to continue to favor the music of our youth, which is simply part of the larger phenomenon I think, of always looking back on "the good old days.", which others always remind us were not all that good, and we were not old yet.

To be sure, the final concert of The Tragically Hip was evidently viewed at least in part by some one third of Canadians, which is phenomenal. That probably surpasses how many people watch Hockey Night in Canada on a given Saturday night.  Again, I say shamelessly, I was not one of them. In fact, it has been years since we have had a TV, and I know I am not the only one who has given up on the Tube, as it used to be called when it was that. We never even got to a flat screen! We find our lives busy enough without TV. Nor do I think we are really missing much. Of course, if we had been interested enough, we could have probably watched it live streaming from somewhere. We do watch livestream news and the occasional other broadcast through the net. We close to binge-watched 4 seasons of Downton Abbey when we cottoned on to that show!

For me, the music of my youth was epitomized by singers such as Gordon Lightfoot, which of course is folk and not rock, or The Guess Who, if you want rock. I did attend a number of concerts by Lightfoot and met him personally on a couple of occasions, one of which helped me get in A paper in a ‘Can-Lit’ class at university around 1970. However, I did not get to a Guess Who concert until they were on their reunion to at which time our daughter was already becoming a young adult as she joined me in Brandon's Keystone Center.

With the advent of the Internet, I have sometimes checked out music on places like YouTube or Soundscape that I hear about on the news or read about in the papers and that sound interesting. Somehow that never happened with The Hip. Maybe it’s not too late. So, with all due respect to my nephew and those of his generation(s), I did a little research on the Internet and came up with the following for starters. Wonder what his favorite is:

1.     Bobcaygeon 1998

2.     Ahead by a Century 1996 - highest charting single

3.     Courage (for Hugh MacLennan) 1992

4.     New Orleans Is Sinking 1989

5.     Poets

6.     Nautical Disaster 1994

7.     Blow at High Dough 1989

8.     Wheat Kings 1992

9.     50 Mission Cap

10.  Looking for a Place to Happen

11.  We’ll Go Too

12.  38 Years Old

13.  Locked in the Trunk of a Car 1992

14.  Fiddler’s Green

15.  Little Bones

16.  Three Pistols

17.  At the Hundredth Meridian 1992

18.  It’s a Good Life If You Don’t weaken

19.  Grace, Too 1994

20.  The Darkest One

21.  Last American Exit

The Rolling Stones Top 10:

1.     Highway Girl 1987

2.     New Orleans Is Sinking 1989

3.     (Boots or Hearts)

4.     Fiddlers Green 1991

5.     50 Mission Cap 1992

6.     Wheat Kings 1992

7.     Grace, Too 1994

8.     Ahead by a Century 1996

9.     Bobcaygeon 1998

10.  My Music at Work 2000

11.  Machine 2016

Other notables for their lyrics, according to one site, +7 of the above two lists:

1.     The Dire Wolf

2.     The Bear

3.     Born in the Water

4.     All Canadian Surf Club

5.     Ultra Mundane

6.     A Beautiful Thing

7.     We Are the Same

8.     Problem Bear

9.     Fly

10.  The Lonely End of the Rink

11.  Skeleton Park

12.  Fireworks

13.  Looking for a Place to Happen

Below are the top 10 Tragically Hip songs as voted for on a CBC Music poll.

10. "Blow at High Dough" (from 1989's Up to Here) 

9. "At the Hundredth Meridian" (from 1992's Fully Completely) 

8. "Locked in the Trunk of a Car" (from 1992's Fully Completely) 

7. "Nautical Disaster" (from 1994's Day for Night)

6. "Courage" (from 1992's Fully Completely) 

5. "Grace, Too" (from 1994's Day for Night) 

4. "New Orleans is Sinking" (from 1989's Up to Here) 

3. "Ahead by a Century" (from 1996's Trouble at the Henhouse) 

2. "Bobcaygeon" (from 1998's Phantom Power) 

1. "Wheat Kings" (from 1992's Fully Completely)