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CANADA ROCKS

Is Canada now better at rock music than the USA? David Bennun weighs them up ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

There are many startling aspects to the seven-piece rock band Arcade Fire. there’s the way they arrived, perfectly formed, to claim a place among the finest exponents of their art. There’s that splendidly apt name, which evokes images of slot machines chiming and tinkling as the blaze consumes them. There are their fierce, insistent songs, fit to accompany the danse macabre of what they patently consider a looming dark age. Their tremendous debut album was entitled, just in case anyone missed the point, “Funeral”.

But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is their origin. Arcade Fire come from Canada, that safest and most staid of nations. And one cannot imagine them having come from anywhere else—because nowhere else is there an act that sounds quite like them. It’s true that Texas lays claim to their singer and songwriter, Win Butler, who was born there and has been working his way north ever since. But Montreal is their literal and spiritual home.

Canada: the subject of, and punchline to, so many condescending jokes. The default gag is that this cute adjunct to America thinks it’s a real country. As a spoof headline in the satirical paper the Onion once put it: “Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Government, Laws”. It even apes such definitively American features as dollars and rock groups. Both of which are rivalling—sometimes even surpassing—their US equivalents. Just who is the joke on, now?

The ranks of distinctive Canadian singers and bands making a name abroad have grown swiftly through the 2000s. The pace-setter was Nelly Furtado, whose first album, “Whoa, Nelly!”, an ingenious amalgam of folksy pop and hip-hop, is as invigorating today as it was on its release in 2000. She went on to be a major R&B star with her sleekly modern third album, “Loose”.

As CD sales plummet and the music business scrambles to replace them with downloads, the bestselling album of 2007 on iTunes, according to Billboard, came from a Calgary-raised singer, Feist. At 32, she is a veteran of the Toronto group Broken Social Scene and ex-collaborator with the filthy-minded electro-provocateur Peaches. Feist outdid them all with “The Reminder”, a set of tracks so varied, tuneful and spirited that it has more life in it than some acts manage in a career.

The New Pornographers, from Vancouver, displayed a similar flair for melody on their captivating 2005 breakthrough, “Twin Cinema”. Some of its finest moments owe much to the guest vocalist Neko Case, who though American-born is, thanks to her immersion in Canada’s musical life, very much an honorary Canadian; indeed, she has been thus described by Canadian national radio and by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada. In 2006 Case produced the quite magical country-inflected solo album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood”—one of the most haunting works of its kind since the release 20 years ago of “The Trinity Session”, by the then notably rare Canadian exports Cowboy Junkies.

No such rarity value now for Toronto’s wry, theatrical avant-gardists the Hidden Cameras, whose self-described “gay church folk music” made them the first Canadian signing to the adventurous British label Rough Trade, former home of the Smiths. Nor for evident Smiths fans the Dears, a Montreal band whose intense, at times overwhelming sound revealed them as far more than mere acolytes, and whose latest album, “Missiles”, is all the more powerful for being sonically stripped to the bone.

It underlines the strength of Canadian music that even the acts one may not much care for possess original qualities. Rufus Wainwright’s show-tune style tends to strike people as either lushly sophisticated or annoyingly self-satisfied and melodramatic, but he has forged an idiom unarguably his own. To be disliked for your own attributes is very different from being disdained for your poor imitation of somebody else’s.

Chances are that few will have been more taken aback by Canadian music’s triumphs than Canadians themselves. Their pop culture encompasses a trait largely unknown south of the border: self-deprecation. Then again, for a long time, Canadian music fans have had plenty to be self-deprecating about. It’s four decades since a generation of Canadian titans—Neil Young, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen—last emerged; and their achievements ultimately did more to bolster American folk-rock than to create a durable identity for Canadian pop.

Since then, wave after wave of excitement and innovation—punk, post-punk, indie, hip-hop, house, techno, grunge—has surged back and forth between America and Britain. Generations of Canadian hipsters have gazed enviously at those two countries, and groaned in embarrassment as their compatriots instead embraced progressive rock and its geeky offshoots. Asked to name a globally successful and recognisably Canadian band, until recently most non-Canadians might have cited Rush, the stupendously overblown pomp-rockers. Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Avril Lavigne and Nickelback have conducted their blockbusting careers as undercover Americans.

But just as it did for British pop in the early 1960s, all that outward scrutiny, that eager consumption by ambitious, dissatisfied youngsters of the fresh and thrilling from abroad rather than the second-rate and derivative at home, is paying dividends. There is no particular Canadian sound. Even as media ubiquity shrinks our world, the sheer geographical vastness of Canada makes such a thing improbable. What we are seeing—and hearing—is a new-found confidence. Canadian acts at last have the wherewithal to make music without a sense of obligation or apology; and without the ingrained assumption that a Canadian artist must either pander to the United States or settle for being at best a local hero. Pound for pound, no other country’s music scene is punching harder.

The rise of Canada as a force in pop music coincides with the relative decline of its domineering neighbour. So dominant has American pop been since the advent of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s that the unsatisfactory term “world music” is applied to anything that cannot trace its roots back to the Mississippi delta or the Appalachian mountains. But lately the us mainstream has been commandeered by the hollow efficiency of “American Idol” contestants and the formulaic repetitions of a once-vibrant “urban” (ie, black) genre; while its supposed alternative scene is clogged up by the hysterically overwrought “emo” sound. By its own superpower standards, American pop has slipped into the doldrums, with the most interesting bands—TV On The Radio, Okkervil River—struggling to be heard over the babble of mediocrity. It would be a nice irony if those disparaging jokes were now made by people whose favourite singers are Canadian.

Picture credit: Arcade Fire, by RETNA

(David Bennun is a rock critic for the Mail on Sunday and author of "British as a Second Language", published by Ebury.)