Tragically hip gord downie8/23/2023 Will we live up to them by 2064, or will we discover - sadly and shamefully - that King was ahead by much more than a century? A vision of Canada beset with tragedy and injustice Since then, 53 years have passed, and we are nowhere near living up to these words, as the recent bigotry in Charlottesville, Va., makes shatteringly clear. another Nobel Laureate - spoke powerfully of his “dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.” They recognized a blatant social injustice and started campaigning against it, but it took one hundred years for the rest of society to catch up. Those early 19th century demonstrators were ahead by a century (and more). She is already thinking and behaving in ways that will eventually gain broad political and cultural acceptance, but that are currently deemed unacceptable.įor example, in Britain in the 1810s, tens of thousands of women and men gathered in open-air protests to demand the right to vote, but it was 1918 before there was universal male suffrage and 1928 before there was universal female suffrage. She has broken free of at least some of what thwarts and binds us now. She is living one hundred years into the future. He is thinking of the past and struggling in the present. The singer is addressing his partner, who is perhaps the same person he climbed trees with as a child. The chorus is six words - “You are ahead by a century” - repeated three times. Political agitators were ahead by a century The final line of the bridge - like the final line of the verse - returns us to the present: “Tonight we smoke them out.” Literally, of course, the “them” in this line refers to the hornets, but it also refers to “revenge and doubt.” The singer plans to use smoke to drive the hornets from their nest, in the same way that he hopes to drive revenge and doubt from himself, in an attempt to return to an earlier time when he lived free of these emotions. The voice of the child is again captured when he explains - perhaps to a parent - “that’s where the hornet stung me.” This unexpected and unpleasant experience marks the end of childhood’s “golden light,” and brings on the “feverish dream” of adulthood, where we are all addled by emotions such as “revenge and doubt.” In the bridge, the “illusions” of childhood are inevitably and almost accidentally punctured. Having been back to childhood, and then forward to “someday,” the verse closes with the present and an insistence on living as fully and genuinely as possible: “No dress rehearsal / This is our life.” They have “illusions of someday” that as children cast “a golden light.” But as the rest of the song reveals, their ideas of the future are “illusions.” It will not be as they planned or hoped. The singer and his friend have played together many times: “First thing we’d climb a tree / And maybe then we’d talk / Or sit silently / And listen to our thoughts.”Īmong other things, the two discuss what they will do when they get older, or what they think their future will be like. It begins with the words “First thing,” which immediately captures the excitement children feel when they recount their day. (Courtesy of TIFF) Childhood’s golden years The writer attended the Tragically Hip’s final tour stop in Kingston, Ont. A still from the documentary, Long Time Running, captures frontman of the Tragically Hip, Gord Downie, as he leads the band through a concert in Vancouver last summer.
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