A great song’s greatest attribute is how it hints at more. | | | | The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie reaches for the sky at the RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest in Ottawa, July 17, 2015.
(Mark Horton/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “A great song’s greatest attribute is how it hints at more.”
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| | rantnrave:// A short aside, to start today, about the great nations of CANADA and the UNITED STATES. July 1999, ROME, N.Y. The ill-fated WOODSTOCK 99 festival. The TRAGICALLY HIP has an hour-long slot on Saturday afternoon. The band is from KINGSTON, ONT., two and a half hours away by car, which may make it the closest thing Woodstock 99 has to a local band. Lead singer GORD DOWNIE tries singing "O CANADA." It doesn't go well. The crowd drowns him out with "THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER" and reportedly throws rocks at the stage. The Tragically Hip is *the* quintessential Canadian band—U2, PEARL JAM, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN and REM wrapped into a single, heart-on-its-sleeve guitar-rock entity whose hometown is a single, sprawling, ice-cold collage of IRELAND, SEATTLE, NEW JERSEY and ATHENS. It is beloved coast-to-coast, which is not at a given in Canada; it's kind of rare, in fact. It's beloved across generations. It is not beloved across borders. It has not cracked the US market and never will. No one will ever be able to explain why, though perhaps this snapshot moment on a sweltering afternoon in upstate New York will serve as one potential indicator. Borders can be unforgiving. The heart of the band is a family man, an experienced fisherman and a rabid hockey fan who paints stories with novelistic sensibilities about everything from his favorite sport to dark moments in history to whatever else socially conscious poets notice as they go about their working days thinking about, oh, Canadian novelists. He tells stories about people, and the people of his country adore him for it. The last album Gord Downie will record in his much-too-short lifetime is a solo album, INTRODUCE YERSELF (due Oct. 27), in which he processes his own coming death with "detailed love letters addressed to friends, family members, old flames and other key figures from his life." In the past year, he also released SECRET PATH, a multimedia project (album + novel + film) telling the true story of the death of an indigenous Canadian boy. Like DAVID BOWIE before him, he used his remaining days, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, to keep working, telling stories and processing his own life and death. He used every moment he was given. The Tragically Hip's final concert, in August 2016, was simultaneously a national celebration and a day of mourning. Prime Minister JUSTIN TRUDEAU was there and a third of the population watched on live TV. Reacting to Downie's death in tears on Wednesday, Trudeau told the world, "We are less as a country without Gord Downie in it." MusicSET: "Gord Downie Was the Poet Laureate of Canadian Rock"... A light diversion on a dark day: This intoxicating online piano, playable with the Q and A rows of your computer keyboard... Born and raised and giving back: In honor of his 90-year-old father, JOHN MAYER has established a college scholarship fund in BRIDGEPORT, CONN., where dad was a high school principal... RIP also AUGUSTIN MAWANGU MINGIEDI and VOODOO RAY. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie spent three decades as the literal voice of Canada—and not just because he liked to sing about hockey. His songs captured the soul of the Great White North. And in his two-year battle with cancer, he recaptured the country's heart. | | |
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