The industry too often created pop stars and flashes-in-the-pan in the hopes of cashing in on the latest fad and obscuring real music. Downie remarked that the inspiration for these lyrics came from his critical assessment of the music industry. The song’s chorus refers to fireworks exploding in the distance, emulating heaven, and replacing stars. You held my hand and we walked home the long way You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger If there’s a goal that everyone remembers Related: Top 10 Montreal Canadiens Goal Celebrations He won the Stanley Cup twice, first with his famous flying Cup-winning goal in 1970. Considered one of the greatest hockey players of all time, Orr was a defenseman for Harry Sinden’s Bruins (of course). The song is also about growing up and about the first flush of love that can displace even the great Bobby Orr.
WHEN DID GORD DOWNIE DIE SERIES
Paul Henderson and Bobby Clarke of Team Canada celebrate Henderson’s series-winning goal in Game 8 of the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union at the Luzhniki Ice Palace (Photo by Denis Brodeur/NHLI via Getty Images) It was the defining moment for a generation. The ’72 summit series was a great moment for Canada and Paul Henderson’s series-winning goal is the most famous goal in Canadian hockey history. The song references the 1972 Summit Series, hockey legend Bobby Orr. The 1972 Summitt Seriesįireworks is the third single from the Hip’s sixth studio album, Phantom Power.
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Hockey, as a central part of Canadian identity, found its way into many of their songs.
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Downie famously wore his Boston jersey in the music video for Courage (for Hugh MacLennan). This was no doubt influenced by his godfather Harry Sinden, former coach of the Boston Bruins. To me, the power of his lyrics and of the meaning of the songs justify retracing some of these steps. I came to those pieces only after I started writing this one. This week, Bob McKenzie released an excerpt of his 2014 book, Hockey Confidential, in which he traced the history of the Tragically Hip and hockey. Justin Cuthbert did something similar last year. I am not the first to try and connect Gord, hockey, and music. I’m not sure if you need to be Canadian to understand Downie and the Hip. I cried like a baby as I watched Downie kiss his bandmates and crew in appreciation and slowly mouth the words “I love you” directly into a camera during one of the Hip’s signature jams. He made us confront the scared creatures we are, as he likes to say, “at the lonely end of the rink.I let my kids stay up late to watch the first set. He forced us to live our history from every point of view our victims, martyrs, demons the geography we’ve annihilated. His perspective in a song will often turn sharply from victim to perpetrator, from the character locked in the trunk of a car to the one who locked the trunk.
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To be intensely patriotic is to juxtapose your country’s tiny triumphs alongside its immense, overarching darkness. There is something to be learned from the strange consensus Gord has built. And imagine if, year after year, Springsteen drilled ever deeper into that terrain. Imagine, though, if Springsteen never broke outside the Mid-Atlantic, and imagine if the Mid-Atlantic had roughly 60 percent as many people and 20 times the geographical area. Gord sews together the same disparate audiences that are drawn to songwriters like Matt Berninger. The singular importance of the Hip is that they resonate with my friends who teach post-colonial studies as deeply as they touch the right-wing hosers I still hang out with from high school, who drunkenly belt the anthems out in the parking lot after hockey games.