I found this to be quite amusing:
Pipes and funk. What's wrong with this country?
LYNN CROSBIE
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
October 13, 2008 at 9:17 PM EDT
First you hear a crowd screaming, “We want the funk!†No, no, it's the fresher, “We want the cup!†Then bagpipes. For a minute and 18 seconds.
This is Canadian Gold, the Celtic-flavoured $100,000 winner of CBC's appalling search for a replacement theme song for Hockey Night in Canada.
On Saturday night, veteran hockey commentator Don Cherry announced this song, composed by the 37-year-old, Alberta-based musician and school teacher Colin Oberst, as the winner of the contest launched in June.
The second-place winner, out of more than 15,000 entries (including mine, Die, Leafs, Die), was also announced: the bluntly titled Sticks to the Ice, written by a 13-year-old Torontonian named Robert Fraser Burke.
By now, we are all familiar with the wretched story of Vancouver artist Dolores Claman, who wrote The Hockey Song that Hockey Night in Canada has been using as its intro since 1968.
Unable to reach a fair settlement with CBC, who had the audacity to nickel and dime their own Siren, Claman has since placed the song with CTV, and, while Stompin' Tom Connors also expressed interest in selling CBC the rights to his own, second-best-known hockey theme, the public broadcaster went with the pipes and the funk.
What is wrong with this country?
Claman's ascending, horn-heavy instrumental is so deeply embedded in our consciousness, so painfully evocative, that it is more moving and more memorable than our idiotic national anthem. Said anthem has existed in several different versions since 1880 and was only signed into law in 1980. I still don't know the words to O Canada. And I bet you don't either. Come on, sing the Ton histoire est une épopée bit. Or the Inuktitut version.
But I do know every word of The Star-Spangled Banner. Is that because America the Rapacious Monster has slipped me yet another roofie, or is it because Americans are fiercely protective of their various histories?
And that they are protective also of “remembranceâ€? If that word feels unusually Canadian, thanks to war veterans, it is not. Knowing the words and melodies of a few key songs does not necessarily make us patriots but it makes us human; in other words, not apes at a birthday party improvising, “Hippo Blah Blah Blah Blah!â€
In other words, there are a few, a very few songs that assemble masses of people into a community, that yoke us together, in spite of our differences. This is one of the reasons people are solemn or even cry while singing their anthems: Because the familiar words and e pluribus unum sentiment make us embrace the illusion and truth of having, and belonging to a “home and native land.â€
To alter such songs is heresy: Imagine if ball fans everywhere were suddenly told by the estate of Norworth and Bayes to stop singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh-inning stretch? Or, if on a whim, major league baseball, in cahoots with Arby's, decided to change the words to, “Buy me some roast beef and pepper jack�
Impossible.
Yet here is CBC – and what is Cherry smiling about? The broadcaster is forever threatening to unload him as well – calmly losing a song that identifies, for several generations, our national sport, definitively, and replacing this song. Why not make the players wear hemp skirts?
The genius of the Claman song and its placement on the show was its function. It served as an anxious anticipatory appetizer for crazed fans, while also serving to train others to note, on some level, that it was Saturday night – in a far more familiar-yet-thrilling way than a frail Elton John or Bay City Roller song ever could.
Those of you who grew up hating hockey still thrill to the sound of the song and can sing it note for note. Others who love the game feel the song as surely as their own heartbeat and still others will take exception to CBC Sports executive director Scott Moore's comment that, “Hockey is a game. It's not a song.â€
Fan of the game or not, one would have to be a fool not to understand that the game is a song: Its propulsion is the loud rock music played throughout (to say nothing of the songs of the crowds), and its performance prayer is Claman's work.
CBC is re-vamping its image, incrementally, and clearly phasing out such old-timers as Cherry, colour commentator Harry Neale and play-by-play announcer Bob Cole, to create an aesthetic arena where the voice of Foster Hewitt will be a mere cherished memory of old-time fanatics who take their game without bagpipes.
But losing the song – and its shift to CTV is not lateral – is almost as terrible as watching the Leafs. When the controversy came to a boil this summer, one news crew went out and interviewed people on the street, young and old, and each of them sang the song perfectly and were dismayed.
Claman's song, for reasons both logical (history, tradition) and esoteric (evoking poet Anne Sexton's line that “music remembers better†than us) was the energy behind the CBC broadcast, and with its departure goes the station's position as an announcer of the past and present, as our own rebel yell that “It's Saturday Night!â€
Change is as inevitable as death, but art should transcend such mortal matters. In 40 years will generations be pricking up their ears at the word “cup†and the wheeze of a bagpipe?
Regardless, I hear The Hockey Song in my head remembering so much of what I have forgotten and stand on guard, I stand on guard for it.
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