317: The Tragically Hip (B+)

The Tragically Hip in tier list

Some specifics on things I liked or didn’t like or thought or felt or whatever:

I feel like they shine on their slower songs, where they have more emphasis on melody and on lyricism and on emotion. Those songs still aren’t always my favorite, but I tend to like them much more often, from these guys. Which is interesting, because usually it’s the opposite. Usually I have a much harder time liking a slower, mellower song. From The Tragically Hip, it was the fast and more rocking songs, particularly in their first 10 years or so, where I got the most lost and bored. I dunno, I feel like on those higher energy songs their drums are almost hypnotic in their repetition. It all blends together and I zone out, I almost can’t even hear it.

There was an interesting phenomenon I experienced as I listened in which I couldn’t tell if they were growing on me or if they were just wearing me down. I feel like that’s a pretty intuitive distinction, hopefully that doesn’t require too much explanation. I have a hard time believing that they’re actually substantially better/different now than they were half a dozen albums ago—so am I learning to like them more (growing on me), or am I losing perspective on why I don’t like them (wearing me down)? I do think both of those things happen to me, and I never quite know which it is until I give an artist space and come back a long while later.

I already briefly went back and did a quick listen to some of their earlier stuff to check a little bit; I still didn’t really like that early stuff, and yet I still think that they are growing on me more than wearing me down. I dunno quite how to explain that. There is a weirdness, a quirkiness, a matter-of-factness about the mundanities of life and the big feelings in those mundanities, that sits in all of this music, that I’m coming to really quite appreciate. There is a character and a heart that I can’t help but grow fond of. I don’t hear it as well in their earlier stuff, but I feel it so strongly in their later stuff that I can’t help but feel like it’s there in the earlier stuff and I just have to wait a little while until I learn how to feel it.

I noticed/came to decide that Downie’s voice feels a little bit familiar to me because it kinda sounds like Morrissey. That’s interesting to me because I decidedly deeply dislike Morrissey’s voice and vocals, while I find myself becoming rather endeared to Downie’s. *shrug*

An explanation/justification/whatever for how I’m fitting them into everything:

These guys are a perfect example of how my stupid dumb-dumb head poopy-pants overly structuralist and systemic ranking system kicks me in the butt. I have a number of pretty developed feelings about The Tragically Hip after listening to them every day for two weeks, and those feelings do not fit terribly nice into my tier list.

It took me until Trouble at the Henhouse, their sixth album, to manage to really listen to an album and have it not just skip right back out of my ears again, for me to even really manage to hear it. It took me another three albums until In Violet Light, which I was willing to say I liked pretty unreservedly. By that point, they’d grown on me enough that I liked their quirkiness and weirdness and was pretty positively inclined toward the rest of their stuff. I gave a quick listen back to some of their older stuff (which, to my understanding, they are more well known/famous/remembered for) and I still did not care about it at all. There was never really anything across their discography that I loved, or anything that I really felt particularly personally connected to. But, I was endeared to them, and at this point I am fond; I want to like them, and I rather like the idea of them, their energy, even if I don’t really think their music is all that special.

Where does that fit? I don’t like their music enough to put them as an A, I wouldn’t call myself a fan. I “want to like them more than I do”, which is how I characterize the Cs, but there are big swaths of their later music that I like more than many of my Bs. And, I am more fond of them than I am of most of my Bs, even the ones that I generally like listening to more. I am more and more convinced that some kind of tagging system is the way to go—I could form sets that I think offer meaningful descriptions and categories of how I experience music and relate to artists, and I could put artists in as many of those sets as I wanted, and there would be no ordering within or between sets. The description is what matters—ranking is quick and to the point, but it doesn’t actually do a very good job at shorthanding to anything related to my description. I think my proposed tagging system would offer a pretty satisfying way to shorthand and quickly understand a basic gist of my feelings about an artist without falling too far away from the description that actually matters.

For now, my compromise is going to be a low B+. Is what it is.

The Tragically Hip complete, now listening to: Bruno Mars