A Record a Day.

[Friendly Destroyer]

There was a strange duality to canadian pop music in the 90's. In Canada there are Canadian Content laws that require radio to play a specific percentage of canadian music. In the 90's that percentage increased to 35%. Most of the percentage could be filled by canadian artists that made it mega-big with U.S companies (Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Alanis Morrissette...). Making it big and staying in Canada was not so easy. To many radio stations it was also not good business as most were not that popular. Instead they continued to hope for canadian talent to rise to the masses through the U.S market and then kill two birds with one stone by satisfying audiences with a hit and "the Man" with canadian content. But the increase to 35% could not be satisfied no matter how many times "Everything I Do, I Do it for You" was played in an hour, big problem. Another big problem was that no one was really itching to throw their monies into making radio friendly canadian music. Canada never had a real hit generator because super mainstream artists would always move to the U.S and matching studio money with advertising was hopeless with so much U.S media mixed into magazines, tv, and radio. So the majority of bands that were recording and making music in Canada were very ambitious people who were excellent at music and did it largely for the love. This was the stuff pressed to wax, this was the stuff that could be used. Soon enough top 40 count downs on radio and Much Music were littered with Moxy Fruvous, The Odds, Barenaked Ladies, 54-40, Age of Electric, The Tea Party, Crash Test Dummies (Pre GSHF), ect. Ambitious and slightly off-kilter bands began showing up in the top 10 out of lack of a major pop hit machine with canadian artists.

Now back to the strange duality. Most canadians are not even aware of Canadian Content Laws. So when you start to see "Enid" next to Montell Jordan or "Stuck in the 90's" following Mariah Carey you become brainwashed into thinking it's all the same stuff. Couple that with the idea that they were playing them all in heavy rotation in order to meet the Can-Con laws. The fact that most of these artists were making mind bending sounds and lyrically insane tunes became unnoticed. An outsider might have thought, "wow look at those canadians, they have decent taste in music, I mean look who they have showing up on the pop charts." Unfortunately it was not the case. These amazing bands became lumped into the same category as "Cotton Eyed Joe", Boys II Men, Sheryl Crowe and every other mainstream musician. They were on at frat parties, hockey games and high schools because it was (perceived as) popular, not because the majority of canadian music listeners had REALLY good taste. So the duality became that, incredibly talented and weird musicians made the top ten, but were not actually appreciated because of their talents and creativity. Their musical merit was out-shined by their forced proximity to Blackstreet and Puff Daddy.

[Horned Gramma]

Fascinating; that really is fascinating. And articulated very well. Do I understand correctly that if a Canadian band achieved success in the states and relocated, the material released after the move no longer satisfied any perecentage of the content laws? I had never heard of this before, although it does answer a lot of questions I've always had about why and how some pretty weird shit got big in Canada.

The upside, I guess, is that you guys got Fruvous on the radio. Incidentally, 'Bargainville' was on my roster for the week but I may push it back now.

[Friendly Destroyer]

As long as the artist is Canadian (or producer), they count as canadian content. It may seem like there was enough big canadian talent in the US to cover the 30-35%, but needing to meet that requirement each and every day would have been hard. Another thing to remember was that perhaps mainstream stations could count on the Bryan Adamses, but you also had rock and alternative stations who needed to fill the same quota. The, in many ways, easier rise for canadian artists on the "rock" and "alternative" stations also contributed to the cross over factor on canadian top 40 stations.

[Rusty]

This is copy/paste from wikipedia, but it's still pretty interesting( fuckin' Bryan Adams):

How the MAPL system works

To qualify as Canadian content a musical selection must generally fulfil at least two of the following conditions:

* M (music) — the music is composed entirely by a Canadian.
* A (artist) — the music is, or the lyrics are, performed principally by a Canadian.
* P (production) — the musical selection consists of a performance that is:
o recorded wholly in Canada, or
o performed wholly in Canada and broadcast live in Canada.
* L (lyrics) — the lyrics are written entirely by a Canadian.[1]

There are four special cases where a musical selection may qualify as Canadian content:

* The musical selection was recorded before January 1972 and meets one, rather than two, of the above conditions.
* It is an instrumental performance of a musical composition written or composed by a Canadian.
* It is a performance of a musical composition that a Canadian has composed for instruments only.
* The musical selection was performed live or recorded after September 1, 1991, and, in addition to meeting the criterion for either artist or production, a Canadian who has collaborated with a non-Canadian receives at least half of the credit for both music and lyrics.

This last criterion was added in 1991, to accommodate Bryan Adams' album Waking Up the Neighbours. Adams had collaborated with British record producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, and as a result, neither the album nor the worldwide smash hit single "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" qualified as Canadian content under the existing rules. After extensive controversy in the summer of that year, the CRTC changed the rules to allow for such collaborations. Other Canadian artists with long-time international careers, like Anne Murray, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne and Shania Twain, have used recording studios in Canada specifically to maintain Cancon status.
[edit]

[Friendly Destroyer]

To fully answer your question it can actually get pretty complicated. What counts as canadian content is based on a point system. I can't remember the scale, but basically the artist and producer were a full point. From there the points confusingly splintered as they were divvied up amongst "contributing musicians", sound engineers, and maybe even the studio custodian (maybe). So the loop holes were abundant in many ways.

edit-I was obviously late on this one

[Friendly Destroyer]

Thanks Rustneversleeps, I was working some serious memory muscles there.

[Rusty]

Hey, no problem. I worked at my local college radio last year(before being let go for saying 'fuck' accidentally on air). The CanCon rules are sometimes extremely annoying to work around, especially at a radio station that tries to hold a +50% Canadian content threshold.

[Horned Gramma]

This is nuts! I guess it goes hand in hand with the amount of funding for the arts you guys have, but that there was a point where not even 'Everything I Do' was Canadian enough for Canadian radio is just bizarre to hear about.

[Friendly Destroyer]

I kinda like the Can-Con idea, as Gramma pointed out it allows for great funding and can offer really great bands an opportunity (I am also a Canadian Junkie).

But I kinda hate Can-Con when bands are purposely produced and selected to sound like already popular U.S bands. This has grown two fold since 2000. Billy Talent, Simple Plan, Nickleback, Theory of a Dead Man, Three Days Grace, Default, Hedley... yucky!

[Rusty]

I like the radio, I really do , but I have recently sworn off my local rock station because every single hour I hear 1 nickleback song, 1 Theory of a Deadman song, 1 Billy Talent song, and 1 fucking 3 days grace/default/Hedly medley(even rhymes). How they can get away playing 10 bands that sound so similar, just because they are Canadian is ridiculous. This especially pisses me off when there are a ton of great Canadian bands that will never see the light of day because they don't fit this Nickleback mold.

[Horned Gramma]

12/16/10

Elvis Perkins - Ash Wednesday



If there isn't music that can make you cry then you need to listen to some different kinds of music. I'm not talking about sad country songs or a sense of loss when another one of Colin Meloy's disposable waifs dies tragically after an ill-advised tryst. I'm talking about that unexpected wave of emotion that suckerpunches you when a song strikes you in just such a way as to unlock your own feelings of loss or regret.

For a little while, 'Ash Wednesday' would seriously wreck me every time, to the point that it was no longer a sucker punch but a trigger that I could pull. There is an incredible amount of sadness involved with this record anyway, and it's a story that usually gets told up front like we do with that Girls album or Jeff Buckley's 'Grace'. Elvis Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates in the original "Psycho"), who died tragically of AIDS on September 12th, 1992. His mother, Berry Berenson, was killed on September 11th, 2001 as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11.

After my father's parents died (within a week of one another, the week before Christmas of 2005), he said to me, "You are never too old to become an orphan." It's kind of an obvious thing to observe, but it's kind of not: when we think of orphans, we think of Oliver Twist or other filthy street urchins cleverly surviving under fantastic circumstances. Children, who have their whole lives to attempt to sort out what that loss means. To be orphaned in the middle of your life, especially under such tragic circumstances as either Elvis Perkins or my father had, some pretty extesnive Working It Out is going to be required, and it has to happen in tandem with an adult life that is already in progress.

So 'Ash Wednesday' is Elvis Perkins workin' it out, but not in a self-pitying or even particularly direct way. Loss and death are major themes, but more in a universal sense. September 11th affected all of us, but it's hard to imagine having to deal with the horror and fear caused by the act itself at the same time as dealing with the loss of your mother. That kind of pain is almost too big to think about, and certainly almost too big to channel through an acoustic guitar.

Elvis Perkins made the decision to make his one grand statement in the first track of his first record. 'While You Were Sleeping' is the one song that seems to most specifically address the particularly large hole punched in Elvis' heart on 9/11. My interpretation of it is that it is a kind of lullaby sung to his mother in which he chronicles all of the strange, terrifying and exciting ways the world has changed and will continue to change since the moment of her death. It starts with just an acoustic guitar, and with each verse adds a drum beat or an accordion or a violin until just about every sound you can think of becomes a part of some joyous funeral march - a softly blown jug from a jug band, a singing saw, the voice of a small child singing the final chorus of 'Uh oh, uh oh...'. The lyrics are full of fantastical imagery and include references to probably every kind of human experience with the exception of the one that took his mother and our sense of security away.

'While You Were Sleeping' is one of my actual favorite songs, one which on some days I would not hesitate to designate as My Favorite Song. It is on a list with the final moments of 'Dark Side of the Moon' and Brian Eno's "Golden Hours" as songs that affect me on a cellular level every single time I hear it.

It's hard to ignore that Perkins' lyrical bent and even his voice are strongly reminiscent of Jeff Mangum. I heartily recommended this record to a friend who came back with a negative reaction, claiming he felt that Elvis Perkins was trying to rip off 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea', to which my initial reaction was "Fuck you, dude" until I remembered that I write off musicians all the time for identical reasons. Then I decided that "Fuck you, dude" is STILL my reaction because it's such a great, great song, and if you can't see that and feel that then seriously dude, fuck you.

I've spent a lot of time talking about that one track, and there's a whole album worth of great material here. 'While You Were Sleeping' towers over every other song, but every song except for that one are equally good among themselves. 'May Day!' is the song I would sing if I were cheerfully skipping down the street to sign in for processing at the slaughterhouse. It seems to be playfully criminalizing George W. Bush for his valiant attempts to sink our country as deep as possible, but it never comes right out and says it. 'Without Love' is a wonderful little jazz trio number, and 'Emile's Vietnam in the Sky' is a smoothly cryptic reflection on the big question of death and what follows.

I used to work in a hospital coordinating pre-transplant testing for people in need of kidney and pancreas transplants. My responsibilities would frequently take me through the halls of the Doernbecher Children's Hospital, a fantastically sad place full of very sick children. I've dealt with terminal adults, and I've dealt with kids who literally never had a chance. Doernbecher is full of brightly colored murals and dim old televisions playing the same Disney DVDs on repeat for a very short eternity. The tiniest and most withered little girl I ever encountered in this building, she probably hadn't been outside its walls since before she could remember. But she was stilll a kid, a little smiling kid whose face registered frustration more than fear. I was listening to this record almost constantly at the time, and I came to recognize the attitude of a sick child in the chords and lyrics much more than I heard the fear and desperation of a grown man. We all have to deal with tragedies in our life that are seriously over our weight class, but we can't let it get us up against the ropes. To survive we have to run in its face, to flail our arms and throw elbows and scream and shout at it. I don't know how the story of 'Ash Wednesday' didn't crush Elvis Perkins into powder, but if you can hear the optimism in these songs then maybe you'll be as lucky when it's your turn.

[Horned Gramma]

Sorry for forcing y'all to think about losing your parents and dying children and shit so early in the morning. Your dear old Horned Gramma is kind of a sentimental guy.

[Snorlax]

<3

[bradberad12]

I have always been on the fence with Cancon rules, and my negative views are as follows:

1) censorship. I just didn't like the government telling me (or more specifically radio stations)what I had to listen to.

2) This censorship led to limited music. Growing up I hated hearing the same old Rush song; or the Tea Party again. The radio stations I listened to (unfortunately I kept mainstream growing up), would never have played more underground music of the 90's, because of their limitations. So instead of Pavement and Jane's Addiction and Sonic Youth, we would hear equally abstract, but of lesser quality (IMO) Canadian bands like Bif Naked, Rainbow Butt Monkeys and the Killjoys.
Now I lok back and wish I could have been introduced to these American bands at an earlier age.

However, that being said, I look at the vibrant Canadian Music scene and have to attribute it's international success to CANCon of the 90's (and Government's (GoC) influence in promoting Canadian art). Many current artists grew up knowing it was possible to make a career in music by seeing all these semi-successfiul bands from the 90's. The Global influence has furhter made it easier, and the GoC continues to provide positive influence for these acts. CBC radio 3 and it's website is a clear indication of this.

[bradberad12]

By the way, the Veda Hille stuff is good

[Geoff]

You should make a metal week or something some time soon These are always a good read.

[Pea]

elvis perkins is awesome

[Horned Gramma]

Sorry geno, I don't do metal. It's just a language that I do not speak or understand.

[Geoff]

Dec 16, 2010 14:06:06 GMT -8 Horned Gramma said:

Sorry geno, I don't do metal. It's just a language that I do not speak or understand.

Aww

[Horned Gramma]

Dec 16, 2010 13:20:38 GMT -8 Pea said:

elvis perkins is awesome

The Elvis Perkins in Dearland record had its moments, but it was a little too polite for me. I don't know, my CD got horribly fucked up just a couple months after I got it so I don't know if I really know how I feel about it.