04-03-2018, 07:20 PM
andrew sharpe Wrote:I have this book on hold at the library so will reserve judgement until I read it, but the fact that he's quoting fan-sites and writing chapters about cover bands isn't encouraging.
In the acknowledgements he thanks Hipbase... "This book would not have been (sic) come together so quickly without the endless resources of the Toronto Public Library, the fan community at Hipbase.com and HipMuseum.com. I believe he's read the "Thoughts and Insights" threads because I see something I wrote in the UTH thread in August 2017 appearing on p. 67 of the book (where he says "Of the line in 38 Years Old...):
potise Wrote:Re: Thoughts and Insights -- Up To Here
Postby potsie » Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:09 pm
There is a very wide chasm between UTH and the EP in terms of the lyric writing and musicianship of the band. UTH is truly a quantum leap forward. I think it still holds up very well 28 years later, including in the areas of production and sound.
I’ve always viewed UTH as the Hip’s “party album”. The straight-ahead blues rock is likely a product of the band’s over-riding philosophy for their live shows in the 1980’s: To make music that filled the dance floor at the clubs they were playing (a credo espoused by Downie in print in the mid 1980’s). The songs of UTH accomplish that goal better than any other album in their catalogue, FC included.
When paying a cover charge to hear an unknown band and experience new music in a club, people want to have a good time. That’s a simple concept that generally involves the band playing music that induces both drinking and dancing. The songs on UTH would have worked well on both fronts, resulting in a happy club owner that invites the Hip back for future shows, and patrons that tell their friends about the fun band they saw last night. And the audience grows.
Simply put, the Hip made the album they needed to make at that time to solidify their future as a viable (and profitable) live act. To illustrate my point, drop any five random tunes from UTH and imagine instead that it contained “Don’t Wake Daddy”, “Flamenco”, “Apartment Song”, “Sherpa”, and “Put it Off”. For many people (although not me) these songs may be on par or better than any they hypothetically drop from UTH, but they are not “good time” songs and do not represent the type of music the Hip needed to fill clubs in 1989 and 1990.
All that being said, the subject matter of the album is very incongruous to the musical spirit. In fact, this may be one of the Hip’s darkest albums, something I almost always overlook when listening to UTH. Song protagonists often find themselves in very troublesome situations: The resulting disaster of messing around with a unknowingly loaded gun on “She Didn’t Know”, suicide in “Opiated” (“It was see if you like it or see you up there”), end of life as the metaphorical calendar burning in “Another Midnight”, a rape avenged with murder in “38 Years Old”, and a scorned women prodded by her mother to her teach her wandering husband a lead-filled lesson in “I’ll Believe in You”. In addition you’ve got a bitter break-up song about a self-centred individual in “Boots or Hearts”, and some potentially heavy material on “Weight”, “Everytime” and “Trickle Down”, depending on how one interprets these songs.
When you dig into the lyrics on UTH, the album really does begin to feel like a bit of a downer. Yet, I can clearly recall myself standing on a coffee table with some buddies at a party in the early 90’s belting out 38 Years Old and singing “See my sister got raped so a man got killed” like it was a breezy line without any weight. That discordance between the “feel” of the album and the darkness of the content is what makes UTH very interesting to me.