My whole movement is gangsta

Sloan

I hate Sloan. I mean, the middling Canadian band from Halifax, now centered in Toronto for the most part, and not that girl up there. (That picture was like the first thing that came up when I googled Sloan.) I have seen them play twice. The first time was two Septembers ago when they played a welcome back thingamajig at UBC in front of 75 uber fans who braved monsoon-esque rains. I stayed in res that night and watched the "show" from the panoptic 16th floor balcony of our quad. The second time I saw them was back in September at the UofT's flaccid and freaking lame (beer and dope-less) welcome back function behind Hart house. Both times I didn't even watch their entire set finding the grey haired geezers to be the most middle-brow band I think I've ever seen ... they were on the cusp above mediocrity but below interesting, an interstitial space; they were not bad per se but they also weren't worth my time let alone my fucking cash money.

I suppose my apathy for Sloan derives from the fact that back in the mid 90s when Sloan was going to become the biggest Canadian band of all time (or whatever the hell), I was spending my time digging through used CD bins for obscure (and frankly shitty) rap albums by Wu Tang syndicates and obsessing about DJ Premier's production. (Has Sloan ever flipped samples and/or made/scratched choruses as virtuosically as Primo???) It was not that I didn't like rock at the time (the I hate dudes with guitars phase came later) but Sloan always struck me, correctly too, as not worth my time. They never shifted the paradigm and, for as much as I can tell, they never really even wrote a truly profound song to save their lives.

So: what the fuck was I doing at a SLOAN TRIBUTE SHOW last night? Well, I had nothing to do and when Adam suggested it after another good Popular American Lyric class, I decided to go "ironically," as I am doing now as a lifestyle (see: Svend Robinson pin, Juelz Santana/Dipset fandom), (fuck sXe, go irony). We had some time to kill before heading down to the Boat, so we first went out for a pint with other classmates (who declined to follow us into the abyss of mediocrity, not even as a scientific experiment) and then hit the fucking Thomas Fisher rare books library to pick up one of Adam's friends Jessica whose last name may or may not have an "e" at the end. But, first, we went down to (er, crashed) the reception after the talk (Jessica was at this talk on Chaucer) and sampled the snacks and had a glass of wine, though we probably should've gone for the second glass or the port they were also serving. I unconsciously made an awesome Chaucer joke ("I was reading the Handmaid's Tale last night") and we were off to make a cameo appearance at the GSU Pub (a shitty K-Pub equivalent) for a Grad English pub night. This appearance consisted of sitting down, saying hello, standing up and saying goodbye in less than a minute. Finally, we made the trek down to the Boat.

At this point, I should mention the amazing umbrellas we all had acquired on the way from the first pub down to the Boat. Jessica was rocking Adam's fresh as fuck found hot-pink with gold trim umbrella. Adam had a flower print on black background broken down and barely functioning parapluie which he found next to a garbage can near the GSU Pub. I was employing a naturalistic bit of bush-branch (dirty jokes not appreciated) that we stumbled upon; unfortunately, no one had a spare Sloan t-shirt to drape on the branch so I had to rely on my high school band hoodie (talk about fresh!) to keep the rain off of my head. We were the three dopest mu'fuckers on Augusta that night by far! The greatness of our umbrellas put us in the best mood ever and as we entered the Boat, we were almost wetting our pants in joyous glee!!!

Unfortunately, the tribute night was the wankish equivalent of a Leah MacLaren book reading without the fawning 50 year old virgin high school English teachers to ask questions that would never end. Never had I seen such an ugly side of "Torontopia" which, for the most part, has acquitted itself well since I moved out here (emo complaining from late 2005 notwithstanding). This night though was like a circle jerk where after getting tugged and fucked by the stillepost hipstas [sic] before they would even play, the bands would then proceed to pat each other on their backs while making mockery of the corpus of Sloan and then turn around and proclaim how much fun we were all having because they were the best wankers of all fucking time.

Now, unlike Adam, I do mean to be a bitch, because even I - the Sloan hater - couldn't appreciate the mocking-by-covering of Sloan's weak songs. The covers were just so full of self-flattery that it made it impossible to enjoy them at all. One such example was the "set" played by new semi-darlings Dollarama whose gimmick is that they only play "instruments" that they buy at local dollar stores, all without the necessary stoner cachet or vision to pull it off. Translating this "aesthetic" into Sloan covers meant playing clips of "classic" Sloan tracks and then banging their shits and yelling into mics. And the hipsters ate it up like a Destroyer record!!! There were other bands including a dude playing some sort of keytar/guitar hybrid poorly, as well as a Ninja High School "rapper" singing Sloan songs over tired ass breakbeats. I was so horrified that I had to bounce out of there before Laura Barrett played, even though I am slightly obsessed with her.

There has been a whole we're-having-fun-we're-cool-fuck-you argument that has arisen out of and against some pointed critique of this show. The most cogent and obvious response is that why not have a good show instead of a shitty-but-it-was-fun-we-love-ourselves tribute show?? I don't even like Sloan but even they - and their vanilla middle brow chic ethos - did not deserve this night. I made this point on stillepost but what if somebody from out of town was put into the Boat last night, what would they think? Of course, they would probably hate it and demand to get back to wherever they we were plucked from. This speaks to the universality, the quality, of the show or the utter lack there of. Instead of quality, we got an affront both to Sloan and to art.



It's funny that the same people who openly mock the Queen Street Man (click that link, shit is hilarious) are sooo much like him and his ilk but instead of hitting the Drake for Drake Juice they might go to Sneaky Dee's for huevos rancheros! The pretention and preening of the QSM and the Kensington hipster are so close that they might as well go to the same parties and trade one-inch buttons with each other. (Full disclosure: I too have one inch buttons.) And, of course in a point so obvious I shouldn't even mention it, the defining feature or attribute of both the QSM and KH is an artificiality -- that shit's not real ("keep it real, son") -- which makes the pretention even worse.

In short, this night was fucking wack.

Listening to: Lover's Choice - Joy & Pain (from the Roc 'C' white label OX SHIT EP)