The World’s a Stage

Rocking in the free world an hour north of Toronto: Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot perform at Live 8 in Barrie, Ont. Photo Shaun Dhani.

Residents of Barrie, Ont., will remember 2005 as the year that the rock ’n’ roll circus — i.e. Live 8 — came to town. To their chagrin, they’ll also remember the fact that most international journalists, too lazy to consult an atlas, assumed their serene burgh of 103,000 to be a part of Toronto. (It’s actually 80 kilometres north.)

Six months on, it still seems peculiar that Toronto proper couldn’t accommodate this twice-in-a-lifetime event, especially after uniting nearly half a million music fans at the SARSstock concert in 2003. It scarcely mattered in the end. Barrie proved a genial host for the internationally broadcast event, welcoming 30,000 rock fans to Park Place for 10 hours of (mostly) Canadian music. Granted, Barrie’s Live 8 lineup tended to the overly familiar (Tom Cochrane, the Barenaked Ladies, Neil Young). But in addition to raising awareness about African poverty, the show on July 2 demonstrated the unifying power of pop music. Newer bands like Montreal’s Simple Plan provided youthful brio, but it was nothing compared to the awe inspired by old guarders like Gordon Lightfoot. Standing in the middle of the giant stage, brandishing nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Lightfoot dazzled the disparate crowd with evergreen songs like If You Could Read My Mind. Simple Plan have a long way to go if they want to achieve that kind of permanence.

One of the rewarding sidebars to the Barrie show was an early-afternoon appearance by Somali-born, Toronto-bred rapper K’naan. A month before Live 8, K’naan Warsame didn’t even have a full-length album; for 15 minutes on July 2, he had a bigger audience than most artists see in their lifetime. Born in a quarter of Mogadishu known as the River of Blood, K’naan fired his first gun at age 8 and has witnessed the sort of extreme violence that most rappers can only invent. Instead of exploiting these experiences for gangsta cachet, K’naan espouses a socially conscious rhyme scheme; his debut album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, is a plea for human empathy and features some of the hottest beats in recent Can-rap. K’naan’s talent was rewarded at the Canadian Urban Music Awards in November, where his single Strugglin’ was named hip-hop recording of the year.

Martha Wainwright. Courtesy Universal Music Canada.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, Martha Wainwright issued her own debut this year. After years spent in the shadows of legendary parents Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle and brother Rufus Wainwright, Martha made her pitch for greatness — and it was a slider. The Montreal-born songwriter does not share her brother’s cabaret obsession, but instead opts for a sinewy folk style that’s rich in clever wordplay. Having captured notice early in the year with an EP called Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole, Wainwright followed up with her eponymous full-length CD, an astonishingly poised collection of tunes that was one of the best-reviewed releases of the year. Wainwright takes a decidedly unsentimental view of her kin. The title track from the EP, recast on the full-length as BMFA, is a stinging rebuke of her father, whom Martha accuses of ridiculing the family through his notoriously acerbic lyrics. “For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a s---ty thing to do,” Martha told London’s Guardian newspaper. Loudon has yet to weigh in on his daughter’s success — at least publicly.

Wainwright didn’t go out of her way to name-check her hometown, which is probably wise given the excess ink spilled this year on the virtues of Montreal’s music scene. The diffusion of indie acts like Arcade Fire, the Dears, Stars, the Unicorns and the Stills prompted U.S. publications like the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Spin to dub Montreal the new Seattle… or the new Detroit… or whatever. Accepting such admiration to be fleeting at best, Montrealers responded with a collective shrug. That said, the attention signals a wider interest in Canada’s indie music scene, which this year spawned dazzling records from the likes of Montreal’s Wolf Parade, Toronto’s Metric and Toronto violinist Final Fantasy, a satellite member of Arcade Fire.

In the realm of meat-and-potatoes rawk, Nickelback remains prime Angus beef. Chad Kroeger and his gang of prairie boys released their fourth album, All the Right Reasons, in early October — and it proved a juggernaut. With first-week sales of 325,000 across North America, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, the first time a Canadian band had accomplished that feat since Bachman-Turner Overdrive did it in 1974 (with Not Fragile). Nickelback learned, again, that blockbuster album sales can’t buy you critical acclaim; according to Rolling Stone.com, “All the Right Reasons is so depressing, you're almost glad Kurt [Cobain]'s not around to hear it.”

New INXS lead singer J.D Fortune. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

You know the definition of “success” has changed when Canada toasts a native son for winning a contest to replace the dead singer of a has-been band. In case you slept on it — in which case: kudos! — Australian rockers INXS spent the better part of the year trying to ingratiate themselves to North America by turning their quest for a new vocalist into a reality show. The concept was more than a little macabre, but I have no doubt deceased singer Michael Hutchence would have supported Rock Star: INXS. After all, it was more or less a karaoke competition to see who could do the best Hutchence impersonation. Though less hirsute than his precursor, the eventual winner, Oakville, Ont., native JD Fortune, does an uncanny impression. Released in November, INXS’s first non-Hutchence single, Pretty Vegas, is far from high art, but it did provide some of the most chilling moments on Top-40 radio this year.

Not content with pop-chart supremacy, Shania Twain launched her own fragrance this year, the prosaically named Shania. If the Timmins, Ont., native was smelling rosy, Alanis Morissette had the whiff of an Ethiopian dark roast about her. Must have been that deal she signed with Starbucks, wherein the coffee purveyor was the exclusive retailer of Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, a rerecording of her breakthrough 1995 album, for the first six weeks of its release. Traditional Canadian music retailers like Sunrise Records thought the arrangement stank, and promptly lashed out at Morissette. The imbroglio will no doubt provide rich fodder for her next collection of big, whiny tunes.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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