"We Are the Same" by The Tragically Hip
I was dragged into loving the Hip by circumstances beyond my control. I drove to hockey every week with an appropriately named 'Gord' and was forced to listen. At first I really disliked it, but eventually it broke the grip Alice Cooper, Motley Crue and Guns had over me. I grew up listening to the Hip, in both senses. This newest album is an extension of that process of growing up with the Hip.
"We Are the Same" is not an album my 20 year old self could have appreciated. The band has moved beyond bludgeoning themes of life and death with overt metaphors of serial killers and the girl who got away. This Hip are subtle, sublime and exacting in their exploration of life's struggles. There is still passion and wonder and an interest in those grand themes, but they have come to understand the significance in the details. Gord and the boys tell stories that connect to my life using brushstrokes like Monet, not the broad Pollock-esque frantic colour strokes of youth.
It is an interesting experience to grow up with a band. Too many bands call experimenting with new genres (think Zooropa)growth, or consider consistency of sound a virtue--because it might be financially--and re-produce new material. And of course, the Hip aren't the only band to change and grow more subtle in both their lyrics and instrumentation but there aren't a lot that are given the chance to try. This album is sympathetic to fraility, where once the band only explored and exposed those frailities--something I am more than passingly familiar with. This is an album for grown ups, for people beyond the white and black world of youth, without becoming cynical and jaded. It is joyful and moving and delicate in its spirit.
In other words, me likey.
Ahhhh. The Hip. World famous in Canada.
ReplyDeleteHey Buddydudeguy, comment on previous post: words to hate. How about the use of the word "workshop" to describe a bunch grad students and professional academics sitting around talking. I get that writing and presenting papers is a kind of work, don't get me wrong. And asking and answering good questions isn't easy either, fortunately good questions are few and far between as most people can't relate to other people's work outside of the terms of their own project. But this ain't workshop-type work. So in what sense is a conference a workshop? The appropriate word is most often - shock horror - "conference," when the only thing holding the event together is that the people presenting are disciplinary peers, and next most common event would be a symposium, for when the papers are held together by the latest fad, e.g. risk, security, emotions, and a host of words coined by Foucault and Deleuze, and so on and so on.
In no sense are these events "workshops".
Again we have the confusion of the ideas with stuff. Ideas are a combination opinion, rhetoric, facts, reasons, and so on, and stuff is a combination of elements found on the periodic table.
No matter how hard philosophers try, ideas will never become things. Knowledge isn't power. It doesn't matter how hard you try and convince yourself that, somehow, because you're smart you must be powerful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Knowledge is knowledge. Power is power. In fact, if anything, ignorance can make you stronger than knowledge. Think about it, is their anything more ignorant than religion? And what does religion do? It gives people the strength to face the pain of life. Religion makes you stronger and more powerful. The fact that it's just a bunch of fairy tales, tied together in a loose narrative and recited without a sense of humour or irony, i.e. not true, doesn't matter.
Or, in a less offensive way, "Today, I made a fairly terrible bookshelf in my workshop using leftover wood, while listening to the CBC Radio program Ideas." Did the people on Ideas host a workshop in which they made bookshelves? No, they did not. They talked and I made stuff.
Craft, Writer, Workshops, are all ways in which grad students use the ambiguity of language to misrepresent their work and make it sound like something it isn't. I fear they fool only themselves. People who labour in workshops actually tend to have a lot of respect for people who present at conferences, teach classes, and write books for a living. They have little time or patience for bullshit, however. Grad students should return that respect to people who labour in workshops, and stop pretending they're are making useful stuff when they talk at symposiums. Stop fucking about with the language, please.
What!?! Ideas aren't things. Are you reading Marx again? Next thing you will tell me is that thinking about radical politics isn't the same as engaging in radical politics.
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