Music, musings and miscellanea

These reiviews originally appeared at Chartattack.com as separate articles here and here.

The problem with trying to sum up a decade of music is it’s difficult to relate disparate genres to one another. That’s the case with this second installment of the CBC’s trilogy on Canadian pop music.

Shakin’ All Over, which covered the 1960s, had a much easier task since pop music in the ’60s was easier to track. But by the 1970s, the impact of Bob Dylan’s move to electric rock had taken its toll and musical genres began to splinter, blurring the lines about what “pop music” really meant.

Rather than look at the country’s artistic output through themes or genre, This Beat Goes On’s chronological view gives long-running and influential punk band D.O.A. the same level of recognition as a one-hit-wonder like Gino Vanelli. Similarly, the introduction and impact of the controversial Canadian Content laws are here met with cheers, mostly from the artists who have benefited from them. Couldn’t the documentarians have found someone who thought otherwise, if only to give an alternate perspective?

That’s not to say this is a complete washout — far from it. This series, narrated by Jian Ghomeshi, is an incredible undertaking and is the greatest summation of any period of the Canadian music industry.

But its ultimate flaw is just that — it’s a summation of Canadian music from an industry perspective rather than one that focuses on artistic achievement. It makes this series feel like a cheap overview rather than a critical examination.

The series’ third installment suffers from a focus on the industry rather than the art, just like its predecessors Shakin’ All Over and This Beat Goes On. It also grapples with the difficult task of summing up a decade that spawned sub-genre after sub-genre.

Like most music around the world in the 1980s, what was popular grew increasingly more insipid as the decade dragged on, and the gap between the mainstream and underground widened. But the introduction of MuchMusic in the middle of the decade helped heal those wounds as the new 24-hour music channel looked for any artist — mainstream or otherwise — with a catchy video.

It was this situation which allowed for artists like The Pursuit Of Happiness and Blue Rodeo to gain mass exposure and set the stage for the Can-Rock Renaissance that would explode in the early-’90s.

The trilogy has done an admirable job of including artists from Quebec’s thriving and perennially overlooked music industry, but again, the lack of a critical eye drags down what is otherwise essential viewing for Canadian music fans.