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I think "Dougie Stardust" would have been an excellent album title, and the flashy suits would have worked terrifically well with the tongue-in-cheek album concept.
We can say, "well, that's un-Hip," but as far as I'm concerned it was precisely what the Hip would have needed at that point, following complete public (and to some degree fan) indifference to NFPA - which also has a witty album title, incidentally. The Hip's image was staid and boring. No one except Gord had changed their look in 20 years. Dougie Stardust would have shaken it up, gotten some attention, and challenged some too-comfortable Hip fans in the process. It would have been fun. Hell, the outfits were still fun, even under the terrible circumstances in which they were ultimately rolled out.
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I also don’t like the album cover.
Is that a kid with a mullet?
I don’t really get it.
That said, maybe on stage Gord would have slipped into a Dougie Stardust alter ego aka Bowie, Bono, etc.
That could have been fun.
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andrew, setting aside a disagreement about whether we prefer our performers to freeze their look in amber or to show some creativity and panache in self-presentation, I was making more of a strategic 'career management' point. The Hip were basically dead in the water commercially after NFPA. That album was met with complete indifference even by many Hip fans. The band had become taken for granted, its efforts greeted with a collective yawn from critics and the mass public. I'm suggesting that the group's unchanging and uninteresting self-presentation was one part of that tendency not to pay any attention to whatever the Hip were doing. Putting out an album with a strikingly sardonic concept ('Dougie Stardust') backed by an even more striking stage presentation (Downie's suits) might have shaken up that complacency, moved the critical and popular needle a bit. The Hip, in the public's mind, were in a rut; they needed to get out of it.
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Killer Whale Tank Wrote:The Hip were basically dead in the water commercially after NFPA. That album was met with complete indifference even by many Hip fans. The band had become taken for granted, its efforts greeted with a collective yawn from critics and the mass public.
I heard Streets Ahead lots on the radio when this came out, and even more At Transformation. I still here AT on the radio frequently.
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