The last song played by The Hip at their final concert in 2016, held in Kingston, Gord Downie’s home town, at the conclusion of the farewell tour that preceded the beloved, unofficial poet laureate’s death by about 14 months, aged only 53. We all knew it was coming. He’d been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an incurable and aggressive form of brain cancer, and that last song of the last concert wasn’t just a so-long, it was the final goodbye, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The Canadian music scene hasn’t been the same since.
I’ve gone on the record several times in this space that I’m not particularly impressed with rock compositions that lean heavily on chords instead of melody to grab the listener’s ear – from where I sit it’s the oldest trick in the book, maintaining a flat, “horizontal” tune consisting of one or maybe two notes, while the chords shift behind them, creating what sometimes seems a false sense of musical progression – yet, you may have noticed, I keep showcasing just such chord-driven numbers in Songs of the Day, from Paul Westerberg’s Love Untold, to Sarah Harmer’s Basement Apartment, to various selections by the Hip, like Nautical Disaster, and today’s pick, Ahead By a Century. What can I tell you? Done right, novel chord progressions can be fascinating too. Were that not the case I don’t suppose there ever would have been a dominant genre of pop music called Rock ‘n’ Roll.
I suppose, then, that one day soon I should feature I Am the Walrus, John Lennon’s masterful, heavily orchestrated screed against schoolroom abuse, sneering cops, self-satisfied experts, oppressive conformity, and pretty much everything and everybody else, which boasts a melody about as supple as the blaring of a European police siren, but undergirds it with a chord structure so complex that composer and musicologist Howard Goodall characterized it as a “musical mudslide”, employing 16 chords in total, eight in the introduction alone.
Ahead by a Century isn’t quite in that league, its level of difficulty being described in most of the guitar tutorials as “intermediate”, but on the other hand its melody isn’t quite so flat, and it manages to be more accessible, more akin to a hummable pop tune, while still achieving something close to the same visceral intensity, no small feat.
As with so many of Gord’s compositions, the lyrics, enigmatic yet compelling, do a lot of the song’s heavy lifting, drawing the listener into a story that seems deeply personal and emotional, filled both with regret and a newfound determination to finally move past the traumas and grievances of the past, and to start really enjoying life again, while there’s still time. It begins with memories of an innocent, unbothered childhood, the uncomplicated joys of which are punctured by the metaphorical stings of life’s marauding hornets. Gloom sets in, “rain falls in real time”, and something drags the narrator down, holding him back, while his young female friend, one gathers, moves on without him, leaving him behind. She’s the one, I’m assuming, who’s now a hundred years ahead of him, perhaps in the achievement of traditional life goals, perhaps in the attainment of maturity and happiness, or maybe, in fact probably, both. In any case, he knows he’s been a disappointment; oh, how he knows it. I’m reminded of the line from Jackson Browne’s sublime These Days: Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them.
One wonders, were he and this girl maybe a lot more than childhood buddies? Are they still in touch? Has she been openly disapproving? Has she stung him too? Or did they go their separate ways long ago, and today he’s beating himself up because he’s sure how she’d react if she could see what’s become of him?
Well, either way, never mind. Enough with the past. Enough with the self-doubt, the old grudges, the slights, real and imagined, the urge to get back at those who’ve inflicted hurt, the embarrassments, the disappointments, and the being disappointing. This is no dress rehearsal, this is real life, life is short, and those nasty, stinging yellow-jackets have been running the show for far too long.
Tonight he smokes them out.
the needlefish 