The Hip sang Canada, the Cowboys sing Quebec

What the songs of both bands tell us about political culture in the Two Solitudes.

Thousands of people rallied outside of Quebec’s national assembly yesterday and, as is the case at every rally that labour organizes in Quebec, many of the songs that blasted on the speakers were songs by Les Cowboys Fringants. En Berne, Le gars d’la compagnie, Salut Mon Ron. Songs that are political and not-at-all but regardless, iconic.

The Cowboys’ frontman died this past week from prostate cancer. Karl Tremblay was just 47. Spontaneous vigils sprung up across the province and the premier offered Karl’s family a state funeral.

For anyone with two feet on either side of Canada’s two solitudes, Karl’s death felt a lot like Gord Downie’s death. Downie’s name even trended briefly on Twitter after Karl’s death. The frontman of the Tragically Hip also died too young from cancer, at 53.

Both bands are iconic. Both bands had iconic frontmen who didn’t play other instruments on stage. They had voices that are unreplacable. And both bands had glorious final shows: the Hip playing Kingston live-to-air for all of Canada on August 20, 2016 to a live crowd of 6700 while 25,000 watched in downtown Kingston on a screen, the Cowboys playing Quebec City’s Festival d’été to 90,000 people on July 17, 2023. (The Cowboys would play a few other shows after but shows were increasingly cancelled as Karl’s health deteriorated).

I suspect that if English Canadian unions had the habit of playing cancon before rallies, there’d be a lot of New Orleans is Sinking despite it not exactly being a political song.

But beyond the superficial similarities, both bands are rooted in the cultures from which they came. Through their music styles and lyrical choices both demonstrate how vastly different English culture is from French Canadian culture. Or more precisely, how vastly different is the expression of each culture’s politic. In Quebec, the politics can be worn on your sleeve. In Canada, politics are better kept away like the hidden maple leaf tattoo that you got when you were 19.

Les Cowboys are a political band. Deeply political. Quebec independence, social justice, fairness, cynicism — so many of their songs lament the state of modern Quebec. Take the song, En Berne :

“Si c'est ça l'Québec moderne, ben moi j'mets mon drapeau en berne

Et j'emmerde tous les bouffons qui nous gouvernent

Si c'est ça qu't'appelles une nation, probable que tu sois assez con

T'es mûr pour te présenter aux élections

To translate — if this is modern Quebec, fine, I’ll put my flag at half-massed. I’m sick of the fools who govern us. If this is what you call a nation, you’re probably stupid enough to run for office.

Or this from one of my favourites, Lettre à Lévesque:

Et que pour bâtir un pays

Faudrait pas oublier d'inclure

Les citoyens des autres ethnies

Et leur culture

Translation: And to build a country, we can’t forget to include citizens from other ethnicities and their cultures.

Similarly political lines go on and on and on. But Les Cowboys aren’t radicals. They aren’t anti-capitalist. Their classic, La Manifestation, pokes fun at protests and stereotypical protesters, ends with this:

À la manifestation, c'est vrai qu'on n'a rien changé

On a causé un bouchon d'circulation ça fait toujours bin ça d'gagné

Translation: at the protest, it’s true that we’ve changed nothing, we jammed up traffic and that’s enough of a win!

In their songs, politics are front and centre, just like how politics are in Quebec. In Quebec, politics is existence and it’s no surprise that the Cowboys, who reflect these politics, hold such an iconic place in the province. They follow in the paths of political folk singers like Paul Piché and Richard Desjardins — singers who sing about Quebec, its beauty and it’s problems; who turn life into lyrics. Add an accordion or a fiddle and some je ne sais quoi from Karl Tremblay and you have a superstar band.

The Tragically Hip similarly follows in a tradition of Canadian singer songwriters but the Canadian tradition shies away from talking about politics directly. Think about artists like Gordon Lightfood or Stompin’ Tom, who rarely talked about politics directly in their songs. Instead, storytelling takes the place of political commentary and things more often implied rather than stated directly.

While I’m a big Cowboys fan, I also am a Hip fan. And I have the benefit of being able to easily understand the lyrics to Hip songs. So as I was thinking about how differently both bands sing about politics, I tried to think of any Hip song that explicitly talks about politics. I came up short. I couldn’t think of anything.

But as the band is so iconic, luckily, there is a full catalogue of the topics contained within the Hip’s songs. Going through the list of issues, places and themes, you’re given a tour of the world, of cultural touchpoint and a few highway markers. But there’s almost nothing that could be considered outwardly political.

There is one reference to “North American Indians” in the catelogue and that’s in the song Looking for a Place to Happen (released in 1992):

Jacques Cartier, right this way,

I'll put your coat up on the bed

Hey man you've got the real bum's eye for clothes

And come on in, sit right down,

no you're not the first to show

We've all been here since, God, who knows

Gord wasn’t yet into the kind of Indigenous solidarity work that marked the end of this life when this song first came out and we can see that interplay between storytelling and stating politics plainly in song — “We’ve all been here since, God, who knows” is a reference to Indigenous people being here since time immemorial but the treatment the lyric gets feels like an after thought. Compare that to this line from Gars d’la companie (released in 2000):

Les Amérindiens ceux qui chassent de père en fils

Ont voulu leur parler, y s'sont fait dire rentrez chez vous

C'est pas avec vous autres qu'on va faire des bénéfices

Pour nous un caribou c'est ben plus beau sur un trente sous

Translation: The Aboriginals, those who hunt from father to son / Wanted to talk to them (the Americans, who were logging their lands), they were told "Go home It's not with you that we'll profit / For us a caribou is so much more beautiful on a quarter

There is also a mix of references in the song Bobcaygeon to anti-fascism: the Christie Pitts riots get a reference that most people would miss, and Gord sings about a band called The Men They Couldn’t Hang who wrote a song about anti-fascists clashing with fascists. The Hip once played with them at Lee’s Palace in 1986 (and hey, while we’re looking at meaning upon meaning upon meaning, look up the new film production group Above The Palace).

Gord Downie’s politics often came out much more clearly in his on-stage, frenetic singing and ranting that was so characteristic of his live performances. His off-stage politics grew more radical as he aged.

When I reached out to radio guy and Hip superfan Dave Kaufman for this article, he pointed me to something he wrote about the band in 2016, in particular this; “Perhaps most importantly, Downie is also uniting. The Hip’s music forges a common bond that can basically be agreed upon from coast to coast. Although Downie sings of Canada, his songs are by no means patriotic, or no more than in the way that we’re all influenced by where we’re from. The band have never been so obvious as to drape themselves in a Canadian flag, but instead, they evoke that shared experience of what it’s meant for many of us to grow up in Canada.”

This paragraph jumped out at me too. Inward, cloaked, sometimes puzzled but always through storytelling — this is how English Canada has created its culture. It’s not audacious and when someone who is audacious, like Gord Downie, comes along, our minds are all blown. Through storytelling and innuendo and feelings, the Hip evokes a Canada that many Canadians identify with. But frustratingly, it is a Canada that is devoid of politics; a country devoid of it’s own political project. Downie cares about fairness, but you need to know who David Milgaard is to get it.

For me, this harkens a line from Stompin’ Tom, quoted in Active History: “Connors was outspoken about the importance of myth-making and storytelling to national identity, once saying that ‘the people of this country are starving for stories and songs about themselves. If we don’t have it, we’re gone. We won’t have a country anymore.’”

Downie as scribe was fundamental to this nation-building storytelling too — from the goal that everyone remembers to Claoyquot Sound to Cape Spear — these are our own myths. A nation that has never been sure of itself, that is too timid to speak openly about politics and that can unite under the strum of three basic chords with a nation whispering we always knew that he’d go free.

It’s important to mention that the two bands grew from totally different political moments. The Hip predates the Cowboys by a decade and have the political sensibilities of Gen X whereas the Cowboys came to age in the era of Parti Québécois neoliberalism — selling out the dream of a social democratic, free Québec. Maybe if the Hip came to age a decade later, the politics in their songs would have been different. Though somehow, I doubt it. I’m not sure you’re allowed to become famous in Canada if your politics are too obvious.

But even still, there is yet another band with another frontman who died too soon and who were contemporaries of The Hip — Spirit of the West and John Mann — who reminds us that a relationship could be destroyed when things are too political.

Luckily, that message never made it to Quebec.