How Gord Downie and the Hip wrote the story of my small town

Grunt work time between dream state and duty.- "Thompson Girl"

I refer to Brantford, the southern Ontario city of nearly a hundred thousand people that I grew up in, as a town. Most people there do, too. A manufacturing powerhouse in the first half of the 20th century, Brantford was the quintessential working-class community where factories paid a decent wage and leafy neighbourhoods blossomed.

By the 1980s, however, many of its shops had shuttered and it had become one of the most economically depressed areas in Canada. A shadow of its former self, with abandoned factories and storefronts as constant reminders, it just feels small despite its size. In 1988, a final blow came with the closing of the Massey Ferguson factory — the lifeblood of the town. The company had century-old roots in Brantford, but the age of mass agriculture had closed in on small farms, and with it, the market for farm machinery and the livelihood of many families in Brantford. My dad was a welder and the declining fortunes of the town meant fewer opportunities to wield his torch.

Lava flowing in superfarmer's direction.- "Poets"

I didn't know any of this, of course. I was a kid. Post-industrial blight was just background noise. The foreground was marbles and baseball cards and VHS tapes and other long-gone relics of an age when culture was something you held in your hand, something that ended up in the dump on the outskirts of town. The soundtrack of those days, however, radiating from the radio in my dad's truck and my older sister's bedroom, has never really disappeared. "New Orleans is Sinking," "Blow at High Dough," "38 Years Old," "Little Bones," "Twist my Arm," and other soon-to-be classics by The Tragically Hip became part of the Canadian fabric, especially in towns like mine. You start to form longterm memories around age six; the apple-red cassette case of Road Apples is one of my earliest.

Superfarmer's bent on the cover of Time / The moralists scream, 'He's all mine.'- "The Rules"

NAFTA was signed in 1994, another notch on the bedpost for neoliberalism's seduction of the political classes. Workers were on the receiving end of that ill-intentioned romance. Capital continued to flow out of Brantford, especially its downtown core, and it would remain that way for years. A decade later, the adaptation of the horror videogame Silent Hill was filmed downtown. Ask anyone from Brantford about it and they'll joke that it wasn't Hollywood magic that made it look so haunted and dilapidated — downtown already looked that way. It's not a very funny joke. I didn't know what NAFTA was in 1994, or understand its connection to Brantford, but I do remember that the single, solitary time I witnessed excitement in our downtown core in those days was in September of that year. A huge swath of people lined up in front of Sunrise Records, one of the few remaining stores. Day for Night was being released at midnight.

Picture a century of water / Bury the pipeline guy right here.- "Something On"

Brantford is the birthplace of the telephone, sort of. Alexander Graham Bell made the first long distance phone call there in 1876. A century and a bit later, in 1998, I hooked our phone up to our computer: the world opened, while our town closed. A new kind of pipeline.

In the waning days of that high school year, I managed to download a pre-release copy of Phantom Power, which was a feat pre-Napster. I burned a pile of CD copies and circulated them around school. A few days later, the morning announcements read that illegal copies of the new Hip CD were circulating (even school administrators knew they were the Hip, not The Tragically Hip) and would be confiscated upon discovery. I freaked out and scrambled to get all the copies back; it only occurs to me now that I was never caught, so I guess no one narced on me — thankful for the tunes, I assume. I like to think Gord would have approved: a 16-year-old high on the tiniest of crimes, the urge to share music far and wide, and the thrill of new songs made by someone who had been singing since before I was born. We all bought the album anyway, that bright yellow cover a beacon in all of our CD racks.

You said you didn't give a fuck about hockey / And I never saw someone say that before.- "Fireworks"

Hockey is life in many parts of Canada, but nowhere more so than Brantford, birthplace of Wayne Gretzky. His name is everywhere — on the main road, on the sports center, on the hockey museum full of his memorabilia, wherever else they can manage. This is not exactly the ideal place for a scrawny indoor kid to grow up. Most teenagers in Brantford put on hockey helmets; I put on headphones. The exact, conflicted, melodic expression of that feeling could only come from Gord Downie, writer of so many Canadian anthems that challenge the assumptions of and about Canadians, cherished by hockey players and sensitive boys alike. I don't give a fuck about hockey.

Titillations been replaced / By interstate, brick face and Coffee-mate... / Fields of muscle quilted to the bone.- "Vapour Trails"

The year before, the 403 highway had made its way to Brantford, bringing with it a more advanced supply chain. Near the decaying Massey Ferguson factory, a highway now blazes through town. Big-box stores crowd the off-ramps. My dad drinks his coffee at a Tim's on the old highway, the 2 & 53, which doesn't get too much traffic anymore. A double-double looking out on cracked asphalt, it's solitude with options.

That's when the powers of observation / Come to the periphery town / And we'd carry their water / We don't make a sound.- "Save the Planet"

As housing prices soar in Toronto, so too in humble little Brantford. Make and spend your money in the city and rest your head in our affordable town. Greater Toronto spreads to lesser Brantford. It will soon reach a population of a hundred thousand and officially become a city, but Brantford's fate is to be a commuter town. The market marches on. The coffee will be better, I'm sure, but my mom is having trouble finding an affordable place.

The most worthy men and the fiercest architects / Couldn't fight the current, they couldn't save / They couldn't save the sheds.- "Membership"

I'm old enough now to start experiencing everything as cyclical return. The Russians are back; another crisis in the Kremlin. The fascists are back; their voices rang with that Aryan twang. NAFTA is back, but I only believe in the nation of me and you. And Phantom Power isn't on Spotify or YouTube, so I'm passing it around again.