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.
#Gord downie last photo series
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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