The Delete BinThe Tragically Hip Play “Ahead by a Century”
Listen to this track by beloved “Canada’s Band” and Kingston Ontario favourite sons The Tragically Hip. It’s “Ahead by a Century”, a prime cut from their 1996 record Trouble at the Henhouse, their fifth. The song was a single and proved to be a huge success in their native country. By the mid-Nineties, that was practically a given. This song remains to be their highest charting single and an enduring fan favourite. At the time, it also seemed to represent a distinct shift in style along with a sense of transition for the whole band.
“Ahead by a Century” bears down on their more contemplative and rustically pastoral side reflected in earlier songs of theirs including “Wheat Kings” and “Fiddler’s Green”. Those songs reveal their Neil Young and Rolling Stones influences. “Ahead by a Century” is much harder to pin down. It’s much more difficult to determine what musical threads were required to weave it into what it is. The acoustic guitars and muted backbeat are less roots-rock than before, and instead achieve an almost Elizabethan splendour, shoring up the song’s wistful atmosphere.
When it played on the radio by early 1996, it was instantly recognizable as a Hip tune. But there was something transcendent about it at the same time. It went deeper. It sounded like the kind of song that anticipates a new era while saying goodbye to an old one. Lead singer Gord Downie’s voice is a prime vehicle for that effect, departing from the keening and tremulous texture that normally greeted listeners. His voice is lower in pitch and contemplative in its disposition as if sung while looking down into a lush valley that one is leaving behind—because it’s time to move on.
The song’s themes underscore this with a story defined by a hazy and beloved memory of childhood innocence as childhood perceptions shift to adult perspectives. The lyrics weave the literal with the metaphorical with hornet stings and feverish dreams representing both poles of perception from the physical to the metaphysical. Within that, “Ahead by a Century” suggests a journey from innocence to experience that is not comfortable but is necessary and even inevitable.
Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip, appearing at Hamilton Place, Hamilton Ontario, 2009. image: thehipThis conjures the band’s own story of coming from a town far removed from the centre of the Canadian music industry in Toronto. From there, they broke all kinds of demographical barriers, becoming a visible pattern in the tapestry of Canadian culture and consciousness. Yet the what it took to achieve that and even the widespread success they gained is still difficult to pinpoint today as good a band as they were.
The Hip didn’t speak to or for every Canadian. But their artistic presence on the landscape certainly provoked conversations about the Canadian identity as their music embodies a unique strain of Canadian-ness. They were a rock n’ roll band that drew from American roots music and from Sixties British beat groups. But they also injected The Group of Seven into that mix; impressionistic and vividly evocative visions of the grandeur of Canadian landscapes and of Canadian life and people in relation to them.
The Hip did this without any calculated flag-waving or crass patriotism. That’s not how Canadians tend to think about national identity anyway. For us, it’s always about the shared historical moments, the place names, and the ineffable qualities they suggest to bring us together as a people. It’s about the success stories of one of us becoming the success stories for all of us. It’s about our collective memories of how far we’ve come together and how about far we still have to go.
On its release, “Ahead by a Century” somehow tapped into a mysterious yet also common cultural reservoir that crossed boundaries that might otherwise have seemed impermeable. A student of metaphysics could take something away from it. So could the poet. Dave sitting at the bar tipping back his bottle of Molson Canadian understood it perfectly. The teen in high school thinking about the future and the twentysomething just leaving home heard something new in it. Their parents heard something older that took them back to their own era. This song spoke to all these people with a powerful lyrical takeaway that cannot be denied: no dress rehearsal/this is our life.
The Tragically Hip – Beacon Theatre – New York, NY – Jan 23, 2015. image: thehip“Ahead by a Century” suggests a quest for something vital to which we can’t sense a single defined shape. It reflects an ongoing search for identity for people living in this diverse, mysterious, and sometimes overwhelming place we call Canada. This quest is true for us whether we’re young, old, Indigenous, immigrant, or the children of immigrants. As a song that suggests leaving things behind in pursuit of something new, that was true of the band by 1996. But it remains true for the band’s audience and the country we live in.
As a stalwart part of set lists that often included it as the final song, “Ahead by a Century” has gathered layers of meaning as the years rolled on across eight more albums and countless shows. It’s been covered by many, including by Nunavut-based indie band The Jerry Cans. They recorded their version in the Inuit dialect of Inuttitut; a reflection of a culture thousands of years old.
In 2015, Gord Downie was diagnosed with brain cancer. Aware of the grim prognosis, he continued to tour with the band and to focus on political activism. At their nationwide televised last appearance on that tour in their hometown of Kingston where it all started, “Ahead by a Century” was the band’s concluding statement. After Downie died in October 2017 at the age of 53, The Tragically Hip was also laid to rest.
At those final shows, a powerful thread emerged from hearing all of those songs which included “Ahead by a Century”; that the Canadian story is ongoing. We are still on that quest for identity together, seeking it out and recognizing how important it is particularly now in an era when our sovereignty has been so blatantly threatened. Our journey so far must also include the darker territories of our history as oppressors. Downie’s vision for that part of the story included meaningful and action-oriented reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.
To learn more about that, you can check out Gord Downie’s Secret Path. This multimedia project is based on the story of Chanie Wenjack; a twelve-year old Indigenous boy taken from his family and placed in a Canadian Residential School. The story is about Chanie’s unsuccessful attempt to return home to his family and his eventual death due to starvation and exposure during the 600 km journey on foot. Chanie’s story is one of many, shedding light on an ugly facet of Canadian history which has yet to be fully acknowledged and addressed.
You can learn more about Downie’s efforts aligned to the community of Ogoki Post on the Marten Falls Reserve to account for this terrible chapter in Canada’s story. Do that here at The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund.
The Tragically Hip are no longer a recording and touring entity. But you can still learn about them and review news related to them and the recent efforts of the band’s members at thehip.com.
Enjoy!
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Jake in the desert
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