Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Super Trouper


Released in 1979, ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was, in my home, generally acknowledged to be my father’s album, though anybody in the family might open the gatefold and crank up “Does Your Mother Know” or “Take a Chance on Me” to summon a quorum in the living room. It was perhaps the first album I recognized as a family endeavour, like Disney World or cross-country skiing. Until then, my father listened mostly to country music, which I hated.

Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most of it, even the songs I disliked.

Super Trouper was not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode and obsess over. Having discovered Super Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring, though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.

The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus “The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics could be quite delightful.

As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of the question went way over my head.

The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?

The Super Trouper song that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or, I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers, could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps and unsuccessful improvisations.

Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes, I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

Four of Super Trouper’s 10 tracks are ballads, the spinach of a 12 year old’s musical taste. “The Way Old Friends Do” was something you’d hear at a wedding dance you didn’t want to be at. My sister loved “Andante Andante,” but it put me to sleep. I didn’t even know what the title meant. I liked the clever, hook-filled songs that were for and about nightclubs, not the ones set in a meadow. Their “pretty” songs have always left me cold.  

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Travel as nostalgia

This piece, which I wrote for National Geographic Traveller India, about revisiting places after a long time away, had been floating around in my head for a while.

Getting older, I realized that, as well as seeing new places, I wanted to remind myself where I had been, the places that had shaped me and my world view. But I often found that when I went back, I would mostly fixate on what had changed, which would bolster my memories about how things had been. It was like a spot-the-difference puzzle.

The intersection in Galway where, so many years ago, I called home to discover my granddad had passed away. I'm sure it's a different phone in front of the old stone building, but standing there conjured the same emotions.
What I left out of the Nat Geo Traveller India piece was that on my 2015 trip to Ireland, where I revisited the site of where I received news of my granddad's death, I also visited, for the first time, the port where the Irish side of my family--my granddad's family--left Ireland for the New World.

Maurice and wife Catherine Riley left Tralee County on the Brig Martin in July 1820, according to Prince Edward Island history. At Tralee's historic Blennerville port, I wasn't able to find records of their departure; it was before peak Potato Famine migration. But in revisiting a piece of my own past in Galway, I was able to go on and act as a proxy for my ancestors, who, never having returned to their birthplace, made me a Canadian.

It's hard to imagine a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic loading up passengers in this mucky spot in Blennerville, Ireland.

Monday, July 04, 2016

You can sit (in) with us!

Think what you like about the demands made by Black Lives Matter – Toronto, the honoured group in 2016’s Pride Toronto parade. (I think the list ranges from “of course” to unfair; that’s my cis white male opinion.)

But their mid-parade 30-some-minute sit-in near the media area was a perfectly appropriate piece of street theatre. Perhaps even a welcome gesture, if you don’t factor in the increased rates of heat stroke and sunburn along the route and the risk of making the Prancing Elites late for their performance.

Politics in the Pride parade? Who would have thunk? But just how did Prime Minister Justin pass the time waiting for the Black Lives Matter sit-in to end?
Parades—Toronto’s Pride parades in particular—are platforms for speech, performance, self expression, unexplainable dancing styles and wardrobe choices, community awareness, celebration, politics and everything in between. The whole thing is a jumble of performances that may or may not make sense or be effective individually or as a whole.

The Pride parade has never been curated, though there have always been sources of tension about what should be included and what shouldn’t be.

To the extent the parade adopts a theme, enforcing it is untenable. Who wanted to police the “Bursting with Fruit Flavours” theme back in 2004? (This years theme, You Can Sit with Us!, was clever, but perhaps unbearable for nonconfirmists who don't want or need the cool kids permission to take a seat.) If a parade entry is uplifting and inspiring, that’s fantastic. If it’s challenging or even nonsensical, that’s fine too. This year’s edition provided my most intense and most meaningful parade-watching experience so far. When the names of the people murdered in Orlando’s Pulse nightclubjust plain little signs with names and ageswere carried down Yonge Street, I cried. I didn’t want to or expect to, but I did.

In 2004, the Raelian group was required to cover parts of signs featuring a picture of the Pope (JP II) and text like, “Official sponsor of AIDS.” Though naked marchers were arrested in 2003, they have been for the most part welcome in the parade, despite years when they were asked if they really, really, really had to bare all. For seven years, the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) was the wound in the parade that would not heal. People wanted them out and they wouldn't leave. After years of debate and acrimony, Pride ended up creating a dispute-resolution process that affirmed that QuAIA could march, despite real threats to revoke Pride’s city funding if they were not given the boot.

Perhaps the biggest get-out-of-jail-free card handed to Pride executive director Mathieu Chantelois when he took over in 2015 was QuAIA’s announcement that they weren’t interested in marching anymore.  Whew! Controversy off the table! Done and done! Let the good times roll!

And then the sit-in.

What’s not suitable for a Pride parade? My first test is: Is the entry composed of queer people expressing something, or allies expressing something queer? For Black Lives Matter, the answer is most definitely yes.

I have written before about how boring the Pride Toronto parade has become—and remains. So the second and final test: Is it boring?

Well, many spectators would say that standing in the hot sun watching the same float or, more likely, the same uncostumed marching contingent of bankers for a half hour while a protest and negotiations take place is a textbook definition of boring. But only if they have failed to let their minds ponder larger issues and themes.

Watching a parade is usually about catching quick glimpses of eye candy. We love a float because it’s creative or the people on it are sexy and talented and fun to watch—for a few seconds. But when those seconds expand to minutes, we grow antsy. First, we don’t know what’s going on, and complain about the quality of marshalling.

Then someone says there’s a sit-in. Now the event is theatre. It’s not random bits of delight anymore. It’s a larger, more cohesive narrative that someone has brought to the cacophony. A story has been imposed.

This show is not in front of you. It’s all around you, like in plays where the actors leave the stage to wander amidst and interact with the audience. In this case, not literally. But suddenly the actors have framed your experience in a way that’s completely unexpected, that brings you into the story. Like a piece of conceptual art, the sit-in was a frame focusing attention.

Focusing on what? Firstly, I suppose, on our feelings. Intrigue, annoyance, validation, indignation, solidarity, you name it. Radical art means to get in your head. For parade watchers, it was boring non-boringness or non-boring boredom. It was as boring as the conversations we were having as it unfolded. That, much more than the presence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made the 2016 parade unique and memorable—a true achievement.

Whether spectators took the 30 minutes to think of the experience of Black Lives in Toronto, Canada and around the world, whether they thought about how Black Lives are policed or their relationship to Pride Toronto… maybe they didn’t. But a frame of reference was created, regardless of what spectators saw in it.

That’s theatre, and theatre belongs in a parade. Hence the ostentatious TV-camera-ready feathered pen Chantelois was given to sign the list of demands. It’s a stylized prop in a show within a show.

Politically, the sit-in was astute. Maybe not in the hot sweaty moment, but in the days and weeks of debate that will follow. Black Lives Matter­ – Toronto has created a large-scale conceptual frame for their issues. They turned something as ephemeral as a parade into something longer lasting. Whats the point of being given the power that comes with being honoured and not doing anything with it?


Some gay men and others have described the sit-in like it was a hostile act. LGBT people would never stop the Caribana parade to protest homophobia. Um, why not? Well, we got beat to it and would have to think of something else. The sit-in is a hard act to follow.

Its not war—people get killed in thoseits play, a much preferable and more parade-friendly substitute. Something can be playful and serious at the same time.

Yet there’s a larger political risk for Black Lives Matters organizers.

Cause, when you give theatre, you usually get theatre back. 

Thursday, May 05, 2016

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Zooropa

Music makes its deepest mark on us when we’re young; there’s no favourite song like the one we had when we were, say, 15 in the middle of our first crush.

Some of those early music revelations we carry forward, going back to listen to our personal classics again and again (for me, Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack), or following the bands we adopted then through their various iterations and reinventions (Pet Shop Boys, New Order).

At the very least, our youthful music catalogue determines our taste later in life. As someone shaped to my core by brightly imagined 1980s acts like Thompson Twins, ABC and, a little later, Prefab Sprout and Deacon Blue,  the time-travelling neo-’80s sound of Alphabeat, Cut Copy, Capital Cities and Penguin Prison in the last decade has been like a dear friend coming back from the dead.

Some music doesn’t attach so tightly to us. We buy albums (we bought albums—this is the streaming age now, I know) during a particular time and place in our lives, with a particular set of contextual motivations that mean much less later on. Hype or an affection for the last record send us rushing out to plunk our hard-earned money down for something we hadn’t heard and, damn it, we were going to love it. Or feel betrayed. An album that seems like a revelation when we buy it can eventually sound like a dated dud, or vice versa.

I decided to go back into my CD and cassette collection (my mother got rid of my albums back in the 1990s during a major yard sale purge) to listen to things that I had set aside after my first infatuation, just to see if there was any lingering feelings of affection or resentment.

Back in 1993, I remember sending two friends who I knew from my university years a missive that somewhere stated that U2’s Zooropa “changes everything.” I want to believe it was a CC email, but since I wasn’t on the Internet until 1994, it must have been a letter I printed, copied and mailed. Neither of the recipients shared my enthusiasm; they didn’t argue back one way or the other and it was at this point I started to doubt our friendship.

I had avidly followed U2 since 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire—even now I can only listen to The Joshua Tree album when I am emotionally grounded enough to handle an intense rush of teenage nostalgia. While other bands had laid claim on my desire to dance or my sense of humour or my romantic side, U2 occupied the most existential chamber of my heart. By the time Zooropa came along, though, they were starting to feel too earnest to be as slick and clever as I wanted to be in my early 20s. My letter signalled that I wanted U2 to still be relevant, but also that I had reservations that that was so.

Listening now, “changes everything” was certainly naĂ¯ve and definitely an overstatement. Sure, the grainy, lime green and hot pink digital imagery of the glossy CD booklet signalled a shift in U2’s image, which had until this time been etched in wood, stone and rust, smeared with dust and blood. The purposeful tackiness signalled a new ephemerality. The Unforgettable Fire may have been for the ages, but Zooropa came with a best-before date.

For U2 at the time, all the production tricks—the sound effects, the distortion, the bleeps and bloops, the non sequitur intro and extros—seemed bold and mysterious. In retrospect, the production was not much more aggressive than their previous album, Achtung Baby, which has sold more over time and is regarded with much more affection than Zooropa. (I probably listen to it more now than any other U2 album.) Zooropa had less sweat and grit, so was another small step away from U2’s core sensibility. But compared to today’s producer-driven chart-toppers, Zooropa still allows you hear each band member’s instrument as an instrument. The synth fuzz rarely gets in the way of The Edge’s guitar, Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. It would be another six years before producers autotuned Cher for her Believe album; Bono’s singing is pretty much what it was on U2’s seven previous studio albums.

While Achtung Baby seemed to have placed every sound in its right place, Zooropa’s sonic texture, designed by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, comes across as sloppy to the point of contemptuous of the songs themselves. Which might have worked better if the songs were stronger. U2’s catalogue to that point was full of singalong classics. Quirky as it was, Achtung Baby was a genuine karaoke carnival: “One,” “The Fly,” “Mysterious Way,” “Even Better than the Real Thing.” As far as melody goes, Zooropa offers little to sink one’s teeth into. Beneath the layers of production, it now feels like a roundup of Achtung Baby B-sides tarted up to hide their deficiencies. The title track is supremely blah, even as it echoes their most anthemic work.

My choice for most appealing song, “Numb,” is a mumbled rap that only works as karaoke if you or your singing partner can pull off the chorus’ falsetto. The mumble/falsetto schtick also carries the next track, “Lemon,” making the songs feel like a two-for-one package, a charming “concept album” conceit that hints that neither is able to stand on its own.

On the first few listens back in 1993, I remember being fascinated by “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Perhaps for its grinding audaciousness, its strangely undanceable proximity to electronic dance music. It’s a song that’s constructed, not inspired. Now it seems like pure novelty, along the lines of Prince’s “Batdance.”

Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were diva-ing away at the top of the singles charts in 1993, but so was Robin S. with “Show Me Love,” and Snap! with “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” Pop music was breaking into piece, with the dancey singles part getting much fluffier and, on the album-driven side of things, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Wu-Tang Clan and Pearl Jam bringing on the heavy. At this time of my life, still going to nightclubs, I was definitely siding with the lighter stuff.

We tend to rebel against the music of our parents, which for me was country and western. So the guest of appearance of Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” was a factor I could not overlook. My rationalization: The song was a joke, its fat, artificially squishy bass-line making fun of Cash’s existential doom. With a more seasoned taste, I can now hear the song as U2 trying desperately to add something—anything—to the force of nature that is Cash, before whom they were bowing down in homage. Perhaps the weirdly awkward production which placed quotation marks around Cash's appearance (he's credited as “starring” in “The Wanderer”), was what started me down the road to eventually appreciating him as a music legend, a hidden trigger that caused an explosion decades later. 

Though Zooropa may have signalled the end of U2’s cultural dominance, they were still gliding along at the height of their global commercial success. The band could pick and choose the best of what everyone else was doing, or zig when everyone else was zagging. Zooropa is a cocky album, but you can also hear it hedging its bets. That caution worked against the album as a reinvention, I think. The songs that were the U2y-ist, like “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” and “The First Time” get more respectful and traditional treatment. Even if they’re weaker than other U2 hits, they wouldn’t be jarring on a compilation album. “Changes everything” was more of a business plan than a new chapter of artistry.

For me, Zooropa was a signal to move on. It was the last U2 album I bought. I was sad it had put me on the wrong side of the divide between me and the university friends I had written to about it.

U2 would never be as playful as Björk, who has burst onto the scene and seemed to be able to harness philosophizing to goofiness and danceability. And they had seemingly given up on their desire to be grand and inspiring. (Though they did reclaim that on later albums.) For earnestness, I held onto Sting, though I was not included to proclaim my affection for him to my peers. He, too, was starting to feel a little embarrassing, a little too much like dad music.

That seemed to be the fight Zooropa lost—to not be music your dad would listen to. But I didn't take to it in my early 20s, and I am not much more fond of it now that I'm dad-aged.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Living through the death of a loved one

The last year was a rough one for me, as my father passed away after a very long and brave battle with cancer.

The first thing I've written about this experience appeared this month in IN magazine, though it only seems to be the tip of the iceberg of articulating and making sense of it all. I think I could write a dozen articles or a book.

Although the IN piece focuses on some of the awkwardness of returning as a single gay person to my home province to be with my dad near the end of his life, I have to also say that it was one of the most rewarding times of my life, full of personal growth and the satisfaction of knowing I was there for my father in his darkest hours. I've always avoided reading articles about death and dying--probably out of a kind of denial--but there is much to learn in sharing this toughest part of life. 

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Nothing compares to Prince



Already, 2016 has sadly taken two seminal artists from us. And I must confess I’m more shaken up about Prince.

Bowie was an artist you discovered, his handful of chart hits pointing to a fantastical world build just over the next hill. Prince pitched his tent right in the middle of everything, where he simply couldn’t be ignored.

The two artists, who died too young just a few months apart, were monumental. But while Bowie will be an interesting historical figure, dancing somewhere on the edge of both the music and art worlds, Prince got his hands truly dirty, changing the culture at its heart, on the charts and in people's bedrooms. You never had to seek him out to hear him, who he was influenced by and who he influenced.

Which is not to say that Prince failed to build imaginative worlds as elaborate as Bowie. Unlike Bowie, who relied on costumes, dramatic changes in genre and references to history and other forms of art in order to conjure his vision, Prince, for the most part, built his worlds right there in the songs. You didn’t have to read a novel or know the backstory to see “Raspberry Beret” unfold in your mind’s eye. In fact, you didn’t even have to see 1984’s Purple Rain to “see” the soundtrack. Prince’s roles as a musician and storyteller were much more inseparable and intertwined than Bowie’s.

Oh, that Purple Rain soundtrack. It landed right in the middle of my teens like an atomic bomb. A bomb that got played on the radio. “Darling Nikki,” which wasn’t played on the radio, was the first song that I knew for a fact I couldn’t let my parents hear. Lyrics didn’t get much more sexually overt than “masturbating,” especially when masturbating was just the tip of the song’s iceberg, a hint that life and relationships could be much different than what I saw on TV sitcoms. The sonic texture was loud and carnival-like; nothing about “Darling Nikki” could be ignored. But it was not smut, or merely smut. It created a new moral universe that I only was able to parse out with age and experience. Sex was not just a component of romance and love; sex could be its own thing.

While Bowie came across as a mostly solitary artist, despite his many collaborations, Prince populated his world with characters that enriched what he had to say about desire, power, beauty and sex. Wendy and Lisa, Sheila E., Vanity 6, Morris Day—Prince was a school of thought, a way of life. And notice that four out of five of those names are women. Though womanizer was part of his brand, Prince’s erotic power did not come from dismissing women or controlling female sexuality. Neither did Bowie’s, of course, though Bowie’s oeuvre was always something less than erotic. Bowie was thinky sexy—an abstract prelude to the act, perhaps—not messy sexy.

Despite the musical community around him, Prince often did seem alone in the industry. His genius came much closer to mania than did Bowie’s; the thought-outness of Bowie’s personas and outfits suggested investments that were as methodical as they were fantastical. Prince’s name changes and reinventions seemed more personal than strategic. His Slave period—perhaps his weirdest and the one that perhaps lost him his many mainstream followers, not because they disagreed with him, but they lost a sense of a regular supply of music—seemed devoid of caprice. He was mad at his record company for claiming ownership of his music—his soul—and for all his wiliness, Prince lacked a polished retaliatory strategy.

With the charts as Prince’s main vehicle for disseminating his work, his singular sound, inherited from the best of soul and funk, left him standing outside current commercial trends later in his career. But whenever you checked in, there was always genius there. The rest—the interviews, the gossip, the packaging, the posturing—seemed irrelevant. All you needed to know was in the songs.

I don’t mean to detract from Bowie, who I admired. He created an abundance of serious art atop the humble platform of pop music, and more importantly, became a beacon for those in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond who felt they were outsiders. (Though I will always feel Bowie’s walk-back from his 1976 claim to be bisexual showed him to be as much a politician as showman.)

Bowie made weirdos feel it was cool to be weirdos—an astonishing accomplishment.


But Prince? He sang directly to the outsider freak in each one of us. And our freaks couldn’t help but dance.