Quote:
Originally Posted by Architype
I used to listen to CBC radio 2 all the time, but I got tired of so much Canadian music; after a while it just felt like a knock-off of something else.
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See, that's the thing. It
is. So why bother? We have the technology and the distribution systems allowing you to hear the good stuff. And life is short. It confounds me that anyone would feel the need to consciously seek out and listen to Canadian music "because it's Canadian" through some misplaced, tedious sense of patriotism.
Canada is not a musical nation. Literally
no one would care if you were somehow able to wipe the analog, digital and human memory banks free of all Canadian music from the last sixty years or so. With the notable exception of Glenn Gould. In some forty-plus years of Cancon regulations, how much really vital, good Canadian music standing on its own merits has actually been produced in this country? I can't think of more than a few artists of any quality that seem quintessentially Canadian without being forced:
Gordon Lightfoot
Bruce Cockburn
The Tragically Hip
Are there others? Shrug. The template is essentially a sort of easygoing blandness leavened with earthy, folky tones. It's never cathartic, beautiful, gut-wrenching, alarming or epochal because it reflects the country we are in. And when music made here pretends to those qualities, it just sounds like, as you say, a knock-off.