Fit for the pit

There are few things punks enjoy more than arguing over what or who is or isn’t punk.

If nothing else, In Too Deep: When Canadian Punk Took Over the World — a new book documenting commercially successful Canadian musical exports of the early Aughts, with varied ties to the punk world — should prove to be a spirited conversation starter.

Just how far that conversation goes will depend on how crusty the punks involved in that conversation are.

If one grants that the artists featured in the book — such as Gob, Sum 41, Billy Talent, and Napanee, Ont.’s very own superstar Avril Lavigne — are at least influenced by punk, if not dyed-in-the-darkest-denim punk themselves, then one might consider this well-researched book a welcome addition to a growing list of Canadian music histories focused on relatively contemporary subjects. Overall, In Too Deep provides an insightful look at the music industry in Canada during the early days of the 21st century, and how online innovations such as file sharing, message boards and MySpace impacted the industry, for good or ill.

While chapters on Billy Talent, who gained massive popularity in Europe, and Alexisonfire, who broke out in the American hardcore scene, cover much the same ground as the chapter detailing their careers in Michael Barclay’s Hearts on Fire: Six Years That Changed Canadian Music 2000-2005, they do make for solid introductions for readers unfamiliar with either group or the punk scenes from which those Ontario bands emerged.

Similarly, while devoted fans of any of these groups may or may not come across any information they were unaware of beforehand, those without much prior knowledge are provided insightful snapshots of the early histories and the big breaks of all nine artists profiled.

Organized and written in much the same manner as Dan Ozzi’s Sellout! — which detailed the DIY-to-superstar trajectories of American punks such as Green Day, Against Me!, My Chemical Romance and more — In Too Deep is a very readable, if only passingly critical, overview of the artists involved and an overlooked era in Canadian music history generally, where homegrown groups of misfits certainly made major international commercial splashes and commensurate influence on many big name mainstream artists coming up today.

Commercial and mainstream, of course, being the operative words. In wrapping up the chapter on Sum 41, Bobkin and Feibel state that the group “became Canada’s first internationally acclaimed punk band,” although the statement isn’t qualified beyond a list of sales achievements, and that the band’s songs appeared in a number of Hollywood films.

There are many Canadian punk bands, both predecessors and contemporaries of the artists profiled here, who may not have had the sales numbers to go up against Sum 41, but whose artistic and cultural impact is much more profound.

Bobkin and Feibel do pay some lip service to these contemporary groups, with brief but well-placed “Further Listening” sidebars throughout, which feature critically acclaimed local heavy hitters such as Propagandhi — whose debut How to Clean Everything is credited by Fat Mike with establishing Fat Wreck Chords’ signature sound of the ’90s, a style credited by the authors to have influenced at least half the bands featured here — as well as Toronto’s Fucked Up, among others.

But the legacy of groups such as DOA and Teenage Head are given just brief nods in the introduction, while punk pioneers such as SNFU and Nomeansno, who spent decades in the punk trenches and influenced countless bands along the way (and to this day), aren’t given any ink at all.

Which just goes to show, you can’t please everybody all the time — especially not punks.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and the author of Missing Like Teeth: An oral history of Winnipeg underground rock 1990-2001.