Song struck a chord

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This article was published 05/08/2016 (3382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let me make a blushing admission, one I’ve never before told: I always thought I’d get married to Fireworks.

When the song debuted in 1998, the third single from the Tragically Hip’s sixth album, Phantom Power, I was a 16-year-old on the cusp of my senior year of high school. I slouched through the world wearing Value Village bellbottoms and my best imitation of invisible; back then, life was something that happened in languid daydreams.

Few of those reveries fixated on weddings. A cascade of lace, a clutched bouquet, a poised procession of pink-cheeked attendants: these things jarred against the hunched and hesitant patterns of my body, and so they were summarily rejected. Still, sometimes my ear would catch a melody on MuchMusic, and its notes plucked the strings hidden in my chest.

Not many songs could do that, but from the first listen, Fireworks did. Oh, I still remember: lying on my back, toes curled into carpet, pressing repeat on a stereo that could hold up to three CDs at once. Despite all those tunes at my fingertips (a miraculous technological feat, at the time), after Phantom Power came out, I was obsessed with just this one.

“Fireworks, emulating heaven, till there are no stars anymore.”

As I listened to those lyrics, to the cynical bite of Gord Downie’s voice and those jangled chords, a scene began to form. This, I vowed, would be the song to crown my wedding. After the vows, after we signed the register, this is how we would step into married life anew: we would do it just as Downie sang, “believing in a country of me and you.”

True, this fantasy left some open questions. For example: is it appropriate to play a song that drops the F-word even before the dance portion of the reception? That problem, I figured, could be ironed out if the occasion ever actually came to pass. In the meantime, years crept by. I tucked the dream away where it could not be dented.

So it was in dreams that I first bonded with the Hip, and it was on the highway that I deepened that union. The song Wheat Kings became a vital soundtrack for those parts of the Trans-Canada east of Regina and west of Brandon, when all the world seems like fields of grain buffered by broken-down barns. An Ontarian band, playing out the Prairies’ heart.

Yeah, we’ve heard all that before. Much has been written about the Hip as standard-bearers of Canadiana, and I have given life to that idea, too. Nine years ago, in the midst of an ill-advised romance with an American, I prepared a playlist of 12 songs he must know before he could call himself an aspiring Canadian. Five of those songs belonged to the Hip.

So yes, when Downie announced he was living with terminal brain cancer, my heart broke, too. And I joined in the wave of adulation that followed, though the words often knotted on my tongue: these are ways of talking about someone that we usually reserve for after they are gone.

Yet in this long goodbye and this living eulogy, Canadians have been given an opportunity to decide what the Hip really mean. In that conversation, there were understandably a few contrarians: some critics pointed out, for example, much of the band’s national fervour is built on Downie’s tendency to name-check Canadian icons.

That assessment misses the mark, and not only because Downie himself has said he is not a nationalist. It is also the Hip’s references to Canadiana — Bill Barilko, Bobcaygeon, hallways “hung with pictures of our parents’ prime ministers” — are not made with a pandering wink, but with an undercurrent of caution.

In Fireworks, Downie’s lyrics find the character letting go of an identity built around Canadian hockey prowess and Cold War nationalism and building one anew as a partner. In Wheat Kings, the prime ministers’ portraits were two-dimensional images of state power, giving distant and uncaring witness to the injustice done to David Milgaard.

The message in those examples, subtler than the shout-outs but nonetheless sung clearly: don’t get too attached, leave no surface unscratched and put no unearned faith in anything but love. The deeper you delve into the Hip’s catalogue, the more you find those themes repeating. Downie’s words shiver with a lot of ideas but never unconditional loyalty to country.

Downie’s cleverness then, his unique talent, was he was somehow able to deliver it both ways. The Hip’s biggest hits were successful as beer-swilling Canadian anthems, even as they sprung from the cracks in our mythology’s foundation. His is not a simple mirror, reflecting a nation: it is a call to question what we are seeing in our own.

In a bittersweet twist, we never took that advice when it came to the Hip. We got attached. We made Downie a Canadian icon. Now, as we count down the uncertain number of days before his departure, that makes saying goodbye all the harder. I still haven’t heard Fireworks at my wedding — but at least I’ll get to hear it at this one last party.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

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