Tragically Hip
It means quite a bit when you think about it. A bar is an intimate place, sometimes more intimate than your living room, and with that intimacy comes the potential for surprise. No one stands in line to buy tickets to see a bar band. When we get to the bar, we might not even know if there’s a band that night. But later the beehive vibration of bar chatter is flattened by some plainly dressed group of third-shift rockers we’ve never heard of, who disarm us with a drumbeat beyond intellectualization and the sound of a shitty amp through a shittier PA, who play better that night than they ever have before or may ever again. At work the next day you have a flash and call up your friend: “Who was that band last night anyway?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Each of the Tragically Hip’s albums consciously strives to capture this facet of the bar-band experience–the visceral rush that comes from discovering a band discovering itself. On their latest album, In Violet Light, the Hip continue to close in on their paradoxical goal: using their chops, songwriting ability, and money to record songs that maintain the spark of a rehearsal or a first take. Like early Replacements albums, the Hip’s recordings conspire to convince you that each song bursts into being the moment you press play or drop the stylus. “Save the Planet,” a typically rollicking tune off the band’s outstanding 1998 album Phantom Power, begins with the clatter of each instrument staggering in fashionably late. Of course they knew the tape was rolling, but their simulated spontaneity insists they’ve never played it the same way twice, or stopped to wonder if they could or even why they would want to. This is a tricky endeavor, but when it connects it’s an aesthetic experience the way getting shot in a bulletproof vest can be an aesthetic experience.
The irony that’s often glossed over, however, is that punk achieved its initial guerrilla contact by co-opting the bar-band paradigm–and the bar-band bar. Suddenly any fledgling band (say, Television) could play a “gig” for a few of their friends and a couple of passed-out drunks at some dive down the street (say, CBGB). A few gigs create a scene, a few more create a movement. Ideas rely on the places from which they spring, especially when they’re as arty and dissociated as punk could be. Without a stage, there’s no drama; the bar-band bar gave punk its physical roots, as it had for so many kinds of music before. The primacy of space is reflected even in the mutation of the musical term barre chord into its now universal spelling: bar chord.
At the Hip’s House of Blues show this past summer, these pocket anthems became real ones, expanding like sponge animals in water. The imagined communities Downie conjures on the albums were made flesh. There’s a gesture of enthusiasm I’m accustomed to seeing at shows: the sublime lunge. Sublime lungers nod along to the music before, oomph, ducking and squinting to a particularly tasty run of chords or some other anticipated moment in the song. No matter how much they enjoy the performance, however, the sublime lungers are always on the outside, reacting to the music. By contrast, the audience at HoB was on the inside–they weren’t just dancing to these songs, they were fucking them.
