“Get Away From Me”: Canadian Pop Music on American Culture ...

Tokyo, June 11: The conference at Sophia University rocked! Suitably for an event at the Institute of American and Canadian Studies, it was about Canadian pop music’s relationship to, and perspectives on, American culture. If you look closely at the poster… you can see we had a pleasingly random collection of talks with each speaker’s own desired take on the theme, while intriguing threads came up between the papers (such as the perhaps unexpected civicmindedness of both Rush and Peaches! “Let them all make their own music” takes on rich meaning…) Here are some photos.

. My paper, “‘Mean, Mean Pride’: Rush’s Critique of American Cool”, argued that Rush created their non-image out of a particularly Canadian form of uncoolness which allows them to escape the kind of fierce identification with image that seems essential to nationalism as well as to rock and roll stardom and fandom. Instead, they consider everything (musically and lyrically) from several complex angles, critiquing even what they celebrate (for instance, their treatment of American heroes like Tom Sawyer, or Ayn Rand!)

Motoyuki Shibata (on the right; he’s head of the University of Tokyo’s Contemporary Literary Studies programme) introducing the first panel, with (l to r) Steve Clark, Ted Goossen, and Hidetoshi Tomayama. Ted spoke about The Band, particularly the way “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” gave a sympathetic picture of the South, and an articulation of defeat (in the context of Vietnam) in the words of a Canadian sung by a Southerner. Steve’s paper was called “‘Dark café days’: Joni Mitchell’s Blue and tested the possibility of doing a specifically Canadian post-colonial reading of Mitchell, with an emphasis on urban and prairie geogrpahy in her lyrics, and circular longings for departure and return. Tomayama-san spoke on Neil Young, insightfully showing (among other things) the ambivalence and implication of the audience in “Southern Man” both lyrically and musically.