“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
There’s something remarkably honest about the United Steel Workers of Montreal. Far from being a contrivance, their country and bluegrass music feels earnest and appropriate, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new video for their song “Émile Bertrand.”
This elegy for the lost working-class life of Montreal’s southwest is named in honour of the Émile Bertrand restaurant, a snack bar at Notre-Dame and Mountain that was famous for its home-brewed spruce beer. It closed in 2006 when its owner, Barbara Strudensky, died of cancer, so the USWM filmed their video in Point St. Charles’ Paul Patates, which has inherited Émile Bertrand’s legacy — and spruce beer. “Dreamin’ just comes easy when work is just too hard to bear,” croon the USWM’s vocalists, Felicity Hamer and Sean Beauchamp, as the video cuts between present-day scenes of the Lachine Canal, St. Henri and Point St. Charles and historical photos of Griffintown.
There’s something about this landscape that invites nostalgia. Maybe it’s the unexpected tranquility of the canal and the brooding ghosts of industry along it. Five years ago, when I lived in St. Henri, I lay awake at night listening to the mysterious clanging of trains in the nearby railyards. Those solitary moments, more than anything, are what I remember about living in the city’s southwest.
I’ve written about music here before, and I’ve even posted a couple of music videos that have absolutely nothing to do with cities aside from the fact that they were shot in them. It feels kind of silly, but still, it’s a nice distraction from the dreary November weather.
So here’s another video, this one by the New York-by-way-of-New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. Last year, they landed their own show on HBO. It’s about a pair of New Zealand comedy singers who are trying to make it big on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As with any type of comedy, it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I have no doubt that some of you will find this song utterly annoying — but I love it.
“Inner City Pressure” is not only a parody of Pet Shop Boys, it pokes fun at the great hipster/artist/creatively-under-employed social substratum that has engulfed large swaths of urban North America. There might even be a bit of a satirical take on Wong Kar Wai in the slow-motion shots of nighttime streets under the elevated rail, which are nothing if not reminiscent of the scenes in the first part of Chungking Express.
Music videos and urban issues are not a likely combination. Most videos are daft things intended merely to promote a pop single of dubious musical value. Some are works of art in their own right. Rare, however, is the videoclip — as they are called in Quebec — that has a unique or interesting perspective on public or urban space.
One of these is the video for indie songstress Arianne Moffatt’s song Montréal. The video takes a fairly literal approach to the song’s content — it’s about returning to Montreal from Paris — but what makes it fascinating is the way it plays with the relationship between maps, signs and public transportation. One of the best sequences is when the headlights of an RER train morph into stops on a map of an RER line; the camera follows the line, pulling back to reveal the train’s interior. Also memorable are the scenes from Charles-de-Gaulle airport, the landing in Montreal and the closing shots taken along the Ville-Marie Expressway heading into Montreal, the concrete overpasses of the doomed Turcot Interchange looming overhead.
Another video I like comes courtesy of Lily Allen. It’s an alternate MV for her hit LDN. Although the mise-en-scène is completely straightforward — it’s just Allen riding around London on her bike — it is more effective than the more heavy-handed original. The cheery, colourful visuals are the perfect accompaniment to Allen’s sarcasm… and who doesn’t like looking at some street-level footage of London?
“Ain’t no streetcar, ain’t no subway car, it’s the Spadina bus!”
You know, it occurred to me the other day that when I made my first City Music post last month, I never bothered to define what I hoped to achieve with the series. So here goes: “City music” is pop music with a distinct sense of place. While the literary and cinematic landscapes of our cities have been well-charted — think of the Montreal of Mordecai Richler and Michel Tremblay, or the New York of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee — the musical landscapes remain, for the most part, terra incognita. So think of me as a navigator (half-blind, perhaps, but with a good sense of direction) who will seek out and record the places found in music.
With that in mind, I present to you two songs, one from Toronto, the other from Calgary, one from 1986, the other from 2002. Both are about bus lines: Toronto’s fabled Spadina bus and Calgary’s less-hyped but no less interesting number 2 bus.
This is the first in a series of posts on city-related pop songs.
Photo by Chiron Bramberger on Flickr
Owen Pallett doesn’t like condos. This is abundantly clear in “This Lamb Sells Condos,” a song on his most recent Final Fantasy record, He Poos Clouds, winner of this year’s Polaris Music Prize for best new Canadian album. The Lamb in question is Brad Lamb, a Toronto condo broker whose billboards, including one with Lamb’s face photoshopped onto the body of a sheep, are found throughout the city. “The lyrics of Pallett’s song are a scathing psychoanalysis of Lamb and his colleagues in the loft and condominium development business, as well as a critical look at the costs — emotional and communal — of urban growth,” Torontoist informs us. Pallet himself elaborates, explaining that “these condos make me wickedly mad. It is turning Toronto into the architectural equivalent of a Glade Plug-In.”
But don’t expect a polemic in “This Lamb Sells Condos.” Instead, its lyrics are decidedly off-kilter and tongue-in-cheek, set to a gorgeous piano composition. The song isn’t so much a personal attack on Lamb as a poke at condo promoters in general, big-ego characters who have gleefully reduced urban life to a kitschy brand. “There’s a merchant in our midst and with a barrel fist / He’s coloured every surface, he’s slapped up a portrait / And yes, it is his own! He’s gonna take your home!” sings Pallett. “Look! Over the treetops! / Newly conjured erections are making him a killing / And Richmond St. is illing, so the graduates are willing / To buy in to the pillage, now there is no hope for the village.”
Click here to download “This Lamb Sells Condos.” The lyrics are after the jump.
Montreal Apartments