Polaris and Punk Scene Panels
Within the past several weeks, two great events about the documentation of Canadian music scenes have been held in Toronto. Two weeks ago, dozens of aging punks gathered at the Gladstone Hotel for the latest installment of This is Not a Reading Series. The book of interest was Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond by Liz Worth. Interviewing Worth in a lively Q&A session was Damian Abraham, lead singer of the Polaris Prize winning hardcore punk band Fucked Up. The interview touched on several interesting themes, such as how to draw the boundaries of a scene (for example, in her book Worth includes Hamilton but not Windsor) as well as the importance of historical congruence (Abraham mused that time and place was of particular importance to the Toronto scene more so than in London or New York).
And last Tuesday, Polaris Music Awards founder Steve Jordan hosted a panel discussion featuring other writers who have contributed to the documentation of Canadian music scenes: Michael Barclay (Have Not Been The Same), Stuart Berman (This Book is Broken: A Broken Social Scene Story), Rob Bowman (Rockin’ Out), Alan Cross (20th Century Rock & Roll-Alternative Rock), Nicholas Jennings (Before The Gold Rush), Jason Schneider (Whispering Pines, Have Not Been The Same), and Carl Wilson (Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste). Jordan also asked some thoughtful questions, one of which being whether the panellists perceived there to be any clear-cut heroes or villains in their books. It was acknowledged that, while institutions (the government, major record labels or the political economy more broadly) usually get cast as the villain in music histories, the truth is not as straightforward. Rob Bowman stated his preference to concentrate on the unsung heroes in his writing (which he does in spades in his impressive history of Stax Records) while Alan Cross suggested that the narrators themselves are the real villains for introducing subjectivities into music narratives in the first place.
The latter event was not that well attended, perhaps owing to the fact that it was held at an exclusive members-only club (Twitter followers of the Polaris Awards were the only non-members excepted). This was unfortunate, as several questions important to scholars of music and the entertainment economy more broadly were touched upon (for example, who gets included in music histories? Is artistic innovation cyclical or stochastic?). While Q&A sessions do not lend themselves to deep exploration of such themes, I only hope that moving forward, events like these are held more often and in venues that are equally accessible to musical and academic communities alike.
