How Canada helped shape pop-punk
While the genre started in California, Canadian acts were essential to its foundation in the '90s and '00s
To us, the flyer on the counter was everything. The skate shop in the mall downtown had a piece of paper taped to the glass countertop, obscuring the rows of skate deck trucks and silicon wheels in the glass case below, that advertised the event of the 1999 summer season. Gob was coming, and they were going to play in a small community a mere two-hour drive from Whitehorse, where I grew up.
My friends and I could hardly believe it. Gob's second album, How Far Shallow Takes You, released on Vancouver's Mint Records, was a permanent fixture in the Discman tethered by a cassette adapter to the stereo of my 1988 Datsun Maxima. This development was monumental, a testament to what was possible in our small, isolated city. If Gob was coming, the expanse of the future widened ahead of us, opening an infinite amount of doors.
Langley, British Columbia's Gob came onto the scene right as pop-punk began to emerge from DIY clubs and off-hours bowling alleys onto national stages. The band's debut record, Too Late…No Friends, released in 1995 on Mint Records, was an early benchmark in Canadian pop-punk. Local scenes from coast to coast were chock-a-block with punk-rock bands laying waste to garages and all-ages venues, but it was a rare occurrence when kids like me, locked up in the frozen north, heard about them. Being able to go to our local CD store and buy that Gob album was a signifier that this was a band that mattered.
Punk-rock was egalitarian. Every city in the country had an emergent punk scene: B.C. had NoMeansNo; Winnipeg had Propagandhi. But it was Alberta that set the groundwork for pop-punk to flourish with Calgary's Chixdiggit.
Chixdiggit was a branding exercise turned Ramonescore pop-punk band. After selling shirts emblazoned with its logo at its high school, the band swiftly realized brand recognition is nothing without a product to back it up. Chixdiggit was formed in 1990 by K.J. Jansen, Mark O'Flaherty and Mike Eggermont, who all divided up instruments among themselves, despite not yet knowing how to play them.
Chixdiggit went on to sign with Seattle's iconic Sub Pop records on the strength of the band's now-legendary ability to craft unforgettable pop-punk earworms in under two minutes. Its inaugural self-titled album was released in 1996, as one of the first Canadian bands ever signed to the label that launched Nirvana. (New Brunswick's Eric's Trip being the first in 1993.)
In the waning days of the '90s, bands like Blink-182 led pop-punk away from circle pits in dimly lit basements to festival stages sponsored by Budweiser. The emergence of pop-punk as a musical endeavour that had wide-ranging appeal changed the landscape for punk-rock audiences nationwide. Pop-punk had suddenly turned a corner, off the little back roads that we held like secrets and onto roads much more well traveled. Some of us bristled as pop-punk grew in popularity, transcending from niche interest to national sensation.
We felt betrayed, in a way. We cried sellout until our throats were hoarse as musicians jumped onto the runaway bandwagon of pop-punk. Even bands like Gob signed with bigger labels and took a fine cloth to their harder edges, sanding the roughly hewn sounds until they worked on daytime radio stations in target markets.
But while the likes of Gob and Chixidiggit were instrumental in building the foundation of pop-punk in Canada, the turn of the millennium introduced us to an array of artists who made seismic impacts on the scene, leaving an indelible Canadian-shaped mark on the history of pop-punk.
The 2000s: bidding wars, awards and mainstream success
In June 2000, Ajax, Ontario's Sum 41 released an EP titled Half Hour of Power to almost overnight success. (At 11 songs, the EP was also sometimes considered the band's debut full-length.) "Makes No Difference," the breakout single from that EP, became omnipresent. The band proliferated MuchMusic countdowns and quickly became the darling of opening slots for now-mainstream bands like the Offspring and Blink-182. It wouldn't be long before Sum 41's debut went platinum in Canada, and the band was the headliner of its own parade, a runaway freight train of unabashed pop-fuelled punk and metal clichés crafted into undeniable commercial success.
Meanwhile, at a Shania Twain concert in Ontario a year earlier, a young Avril Lavigne won a radio contest for an opportunity to sing onstage with the Canadian icon. There, in front of 20,000 relative strangers, the two duetted on "What Made You Say That." Lavigne remarked to Twain that her goal was to become a famous singer.
That wish was shortly granted, when Lavigne was discovered singing country covers at a bookstore in Kingston, Ont. What followed was a tornado of bidding wars that ultimately landed with Lavigne signing a deal with Arista Records, who also enlisted Ajax, Ontario's Closet Monster to play the part of her backing band.
Lavigne's debut record, 2002's Let Go, was such a smashing success that it borders on unnecessary to describe. On the strength of hits like "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi," Lavigne ascended to stardom on a runaway escalator. The songs appealed to the very core of their target demographic's feelings of alienation and dissatisfaction, those felt by teens in malls all over the world. Not just a financial success, Lavigne easily won the hearts of critics, earning best new artist at the 2002 MTV Music Video Awards, Junos for album and pop album of the year, and even nabbing a Grammy nomination for best pop vocal album.
Lavigne is often labelled a pop-punk princess, a coronation held when she was only 18 years old. It's a genre definition that causes friction in music fandoms, with harsh critics arguing that there's very little punk found in a million-dollar marketing ploy by a major record label. Some critics took umbrage with Lavigne's lyrical content, saying the singer had a lot of growing up to do as a pop artist, ignoring the obvious fact that the singer was indeed still a teenager. But the reality of Lavigne's impact on Canadian music is undeniable and everlasting. "Sk8er Boi" lives on not just as an earworm and bonafide hit, it's a popular meme format to this day, 20 years after its debut.
2002 gave us the Montreal-based Simple Plan, a group spearheaded by former members of the pop-punk band Reset. Simple Plan released its debut album, No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls, on Atlantic Records, and despite some critics drawing unavoidable parallels to acts like Good Charlotte and New Found Glory, the Quebec quartet set about immediately establishing itself as a powerhouse of pop-punk.
On the back of singles like "I'd Do Anything" (which featured Blink-182's Mark Hoppus on guest vocals) and "Perfect," the band catapulted in short order to venerated stages like the long-running Vans Warped Tour, and opening slots for Green Day and Good Charlotte.
No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls is certified double platinum in both Canada and the U.S., meaning shipments of two million records for the band. Simple Plan climbed Billboard charts, recorded the theme song for the newly rebooted Scooby-Doo and, in the perfect confluence of Canadian pop-punk dominion, toured as the openers for Avril Lavigne.
From the early days of punk bands leaning into their natural instincts to write catchy hook-laden songs to artists like Lavigne, Sum 41 and Simple Plan becoming so steeped in fame, the impact that Canada has had on the formation and longevity of pop-punk is undeniable.
Lavigne changed the game the same way that bands like Gob and Chixdiggit did, but she did it on arena stages and a major label. Lavigne was a woman singing songs about feeling alienated — the love and loss and confusion of her whirlwind teen years — in the same vein as so many others. Her success lies in her standing tall as a pastiche of youth subcultures that millions could find themselves reflected in, shining bright from the biggest stages she could find.
Pop-punk has grown and shifted in the decades since its inception. Bands like Meet Me @ The Altar, Pinkshift, Magnolia Park and even recent Grammy Award-winner Olivia Rodrigo are making new waves in a scene many are quick to write off as an ocean of nostalgia.
While some of the prominent forebearers of the genre stopped carrying the flag of pop-punk long ago, the impact they made on the scene remains. As pop-punk rose in prominence — into the radios, TVs, hearts and minds of adoring audiences — it was Canadian artists who rose to the challenge at the turn of the millennium and made themselves known. Not content to be footnotes in the history of pop-punk's formation, these artists opted instead to carve themselves into the headlines.