![]() And that feeling might have been especially strong in the years of 9/11 and the second Iraq war – a quest for supportive community in frightening times, while belligerent governments were doing exactly the opposite. The commercial formula is that bands need an obvious point of focus and personality, but if those ambitions become void, it seems natural to play with as many of your friends as possible. There's an implicit politics to that collectivism, but it was also an instinctive, pragmatic and even somewhat sentimental alternative to the hopeless state of the Canadian music industry: If getting signed by a major label was both improbable and a career trap, another way to accomplish things might be to pool resources. In the new century, Canadians would set the template for the rock band as a hip, crowded artistic co-operative in which the busy pursuit of sound and meaning by each individual member would add up to a grand collective racket of yearning intelligence and energy. It was no longer to be known for great eccentric poets like Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell on one side and mainstream artists a bit goofier than their American counterparts on the other. Alongside significant records by bands such as The New Pornographers, The Hidden Cameras, Royal City and others, You Forgot It in People told the world a new story about Canadian music. The music in my memory has been overshadowed by what it came to mean. With that feeling of inevitability, it's odd to listen back today to You Forgot It in People, officially the second BSS album but existentially the first, since it introduced most of the cast of characters. (Drew likes every so often to announce the band's imminent demise.) Each of its triumphs has led to deeper dilemmas and, rather than cheap epiphanies, what it mainly offers is a sense of a fully inhabited reality that, whatever its flaws, seems almost to have always been there, and to linger on after its final syllables or drumbeats. To oversimplify, you could say many of its members (Brendan Canning, Andrew Whiteman, Justin Peroff, Leslie Feist, Amy Millan, Emily Haines, Jason Collett, Charles Spearin and more) had been caught in their own cycles of false starts and disappointed hopes on the Toronto music scene until they met a charismatic stranger (Kevin Drew) and everything began to change, beginning an epic travelogue full of feuds and love affairs, not to mention repeated false endings. It is a storybook band, in ways that seem both romantic (from the outside) and narratively complex. It's fitting to celebrate Broken Social Scene with a book of stories. The winners will be announced Thursday evening in Toronto at a party launching the book. House of Anansi ran a story contest to mark the 10th anniversary of the album's label, Arts & Crafts. This is a foreword to an e-book collection of short stories published by House of Anansi and inspired by songs from the Broken Social Scene album You Forgot It in People. ![]()
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