Downie taught us where to look

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2017 (2381 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

That morning, I woke up as I always do. I lay in bed long minutes, thinking about the day ahead, as I always do. I picked up my phone, glaring too bright in the sallow morning light, and looked at my notifications, as I always do.

Something was different this time. Something wasn’t right. A 2016 column I wrote, about the live broadcast of the Tragically Hip’s last show, was suddenly being tweeted dozens of times. I lay there, confused, puzzling out why.

Then I knew. Before I read a word about it, that is how I knew.

Oh, Gord, we knew this day was coming, but we weren’t ready for you to leave. What you gave to us at that last Hip show, that liquid primal scream, will linger in my memories for a lifetime. But that wasn’t what defined you.

That morning, the streets of Winnipeg sounded like you. No doubt, the streets of Calgary and Toronto and your hometown in Kingston, Ont., sounded like you too. Hours after you left us, you still sang to us from passing cars.

Snippets of songs, stretched over decades, rang out of windows like an organic mix tape: “That’s when the hornet stung me… we live to survive our paradoxes… the selection was quick… pictures of our parents’ prime ministers.”

Gord, you taught me something, and it will be remembered. It is a part of my experience of this place now, like long horizons and mosquitoes and the whiff of burning crops in late September. Something that calls me back to home.

You taught me where to look. It’s because of you that I’ve always known.

 

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What is remarkable about Gord Downie is that he happened at all. In an obituary for Downie, New York Times writer Simon Vozick-Levinson correctly noted that his position in the Canadian psyche has “no parallel” in the United States.

“Imagine Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Michel Stipe combined into one sensitive, oblique poet-philosopher, and you’re getting close,” the obituary continued, which is a good start, but by its own admission doesn’t go the distance.

Yet somehow one voice, his voice, became the noise that animated so many parts of Canadian life. Teenage bush parties. A first hockey game. Nights in university dorms, a cold beer at the cabin, a long drive across the Prairie.

Over the last year, countless articles have tried to pinpoint exactly how Downie’s legacy came to be what it is; many were heartfelt and brilliant, but still didn’t quite capture the whole story. And in truth, it slips through my fingers too.

Perhaps that’s because he defied the boxes we build for entertainers. He was always an unexpected rock star, shunning the charm and swagger typical of lead singers; he put parts of himself on the stage, but never bared all.

The same goes for his lyrics, too. The most literal of them — Bobcaygeon, for instance — were still bitten by twists. The most oblique were shattered mirrors, pieced together at unsettled angles, each shard giving only a partial view.

Listen to a song like It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, and the mind can’t quite grasp what it’s hearing. But the guts, somehow, already know. Downie had a way of reaching into existential mists, and pulling out defining words.

And if it’s hard to understand quite how Downie and the Hip became what they did, it’s even harder to imagine — in this era of social media, fragmented audiences and brand management — that it could ever happen that way again.

In the days of Spotify and Instagram, who would make national icons of those kids from Kingston?

Yet an icon Downie was, and that’s how he left us. The prime minister, tears running down his cheeks, spoke for several minutes about “our buddy Gord.” The flag atop the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill was lowered to half-mast.

In Kingston, flowers bloomed on a bench underneath the proclaimed Tragically Hip Way. In Washington, D.C., a Seattle fan left a bouquet at the Canadian embassy. Downie’s face beamed on digital signboards across Canada.

As for me, on a walk across the provincial legislature grounds, my thoughts turned to his lessons.

Last year, as the Hip’s last hurrah rolled across the nation, some folks — not fans — engaged in good-natured online discussions about Downie’s Canadian inclusions. His lyrics, one person told me, always seemed like “pandering.”

And it’s true that Downie peppered his songs with references to our stories. But that alone is not pandering — though perhaps it’s telling that the mere mention of something like the Toronto Maple Leafs feels that way, to a Canadian.

Americans, after all, put their own mythology to music all the time. The United States, one historian told me once, has always been more comfortable telling its stories; Canadians are less familiar with being the subject of our own gaze.

More importantly, Downie’s lyrical position was not a wink to nationalist affections; it was always a focused stare, a question. Wheat Kings, after all, is not a tribute to Canadian greatness, but a meditation on Canadian injustice.

The opening line to Fireworks can seem like pandering (“If there’s a goal that everyone remembers…”), but only if one ignores the chorus (“Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish, when you don’t let the nation get in your way”).

When that song broke across the airwaves in 1998, shortly before my 17th birthday, it was a revelation. I didn’t know much about the 1972 Summit Series at the time, but I knew the song showed me a new layer of being Canadian.

That was the first time I realized our stories were worthy of examination. Young eyes that once turned to New York and Los Angeles began to look to Manitoba, to canola fields and the Jets and the Red River Resistance.

This was the gift that you gave me, Gord. You taught me to write what I know. You taught me that the story of these lands deserves to be told — and at a time when my Canada was a drab photograph, you taught me where to look.

Farewell on the journey, then. You gave us a gift. Now it’s time to go home.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca