Broken Social Scene - I’m Still Your Fag: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSV71HNsbb4
Sitting in my apartment, we were drinking. I was 20 years old. I put You Forgot It in People on the stereo. Adam turned to me at one point during “I’m Still Your Fag” and said, “What is he saying? I’m still your fag? What does that even mean?” So we switched the CD.
At 20 years I was living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, going to an arts school I resented and didn’t want to be in, living with two people I loved dearly but felt estranged from. I had started taking vocal coaching because I had recently got my hands on a 4-track tape recorder and found out that I was a terrible singer. I was writing but I knew I was no good. I had no women in my life and my weekend refuge was a dance bar. I didn’t have much. I was still transitioning from High School into University, still seeing my High School friends every day though I lived in a different city entirely. I wasn’t progressing, I had plateaued.
Through my teenage years I vainly regarded myself as the music friend. I didn’t know anyone else who played guitar until I was about 18 years old. I was the first of my friends to hear about bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes. I worked in a record store. No one cared about my music friend status, usually, because all my friends only wanted to listen to rave, do drugs and dance. I didn’t care for all that, I wasn’t so disaffected and the beats seemed vapid. There would be no Bob Dylan of rave and I knew that. I don’t know if I could put it into words then but I knew at that time that Canadian music was terrible. It didn’t speak to me, there was no soul. What did we have? Our Lady Peace, I Mother Earth, Econoline Crush, Sarah MacLaughlin. (I make an exception for The Tragically Hip, who I still feel relevant.) I lived in a part of the country where what good Canadian bands existed rarely came and when they did we didn’t know. I didn’t much care for Canadian rock posturing, the references to hockey and the prairies, the niceness of it all. It was boring.
I bought You Forgot It in People at a record store in Fredericton in 2003. I don’t remember why, where I heard them, what compelled me, which song or whatever but for whatever reason I picked it up. And it changed my entire perspective. Suddenly my Matthew Good Band CDs became obsolete (though, in all fairness, The Audio of Being is a pretty great album). Within the year, all I listened to was Canadian music; I still have a mixed CD I made around that time with Metric, k-os, Death From Above 1979, The Stills, The Dears, Matt Mays, Arcade Fire, the only non-Canadian represented within 21 songs was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Briefly, here’s what turned me on to You Forgot It in People: It plays like a great mixed CD with different singers, instrumentals, songs that are fast and songs that are slow all paced well. The lyrics are subversive and desperate even when sung low. There are sounds in the background that I don’t know how they were made, and still some sounds surprise me. The production quality might be considered low-fi but to my Muchmusic trained ears it sounded different and better. They didn’t show their faces in the videos and I could barely find photos of these guys online; it didn’t matter what they looked like. It was the music.
And then, through that album, I found out about Feist and Apostle of Hustle, Metric, Do Make Say Think and the rest. I’ve moved deeper still since my induction into Timber Timbre, Parlovr, Jordaan Mason, The Sleepless Nights, Muskox, Maylee Todd and the rest. They talked about their friends bands in interviews, at shows; there was community and love. I remember watching Metric perform “Dead Disco” on TV one night and Emily Haines delivered a manifesto in the middle of the song, “When will we be ready for something to change? When?” Canadian music had become revolutionary for me. There was a revolution happening.
And my friend chided me for “I’m Still Your Fag.” I was ready to progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment