Ire to the ear

Why do Canadians feel compelled to apologize for our successful pop exports? Calum Marsh

‘The theme from Titanic, as popularized by song monstress Celine Dion, unequivocally proves that our nation and the rest of the world is spiritually lodged in 7th grade,” the cultural critic Cintra Wilson wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle toward the end of the 1990s. “This music distills the emotional torpor and the whining indignities of puberty and filters it through hundreds of thousands of dollars in production value into a kind of sap-like audio cologne, which, for reasons of stunted spiritual maturity, appeals to billions of adults as well as the emotionally hairless teen.”

My Heart Will Go On is “eyebleeding,” and Dion, Wilson concludes, is “the most wholly repellant woman ever to sing songs of love.” Invective doesn’t get much nastier.

This was hardly the extent of the censure directed at Dion during the height of her success. Carl Wilson, in his endlessly quoted Dion monograph Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To the End of Taste, surveyed the range of opprobrium aired around the time of Titanic, when “Celine bashing became not just a Canadian hobby but a nearly universal pastime”: Rolling Stone lambasted her voice as “just furniture polish”; Maxim, Q magazine, and the BBC ranked Dion atop lists of the world’s most irritating singers and My Heart Will Go On as the most terrible song. “The catalogue of slams, from critics to Sunday columnists and talk-show hosts to Saturday Night Live,” Wilson wrote, “could fill this book.”

Nor is poor Celine alone in sharing the contempt of the critical establishment. Justin Bieber, more than a decade after Dion rode the current of wind flutes to the top of the charts, found that same synthesis of odium and triumph: as Baby became inescapable, “Bieber” became shorthand for “laughably bad.” He has long since aged out of wunderkind moppet stardom and proven more enduring — the singles continue to arrive, vocals deeper, and the records continue to go platinum — but his status as punchline hasn’t changed. The name Justin Bieber is invoked as an emblem of pop incompetence — a catch-all for a certain brand of bad music. Even if you like him, it’s hard to shake the sense that he sucks.

More national fiascos abound: there is Vaughan, Ontario’s nowforgotten R&B washout Shawn Desman, one-time Working for the Weekend wonders Loverboy, the best-left-undescribed Hedley. And, of course, there is Nickelback. No rock band in the history of recorded music has suffered such a seemingly universal drubbing. The depth of Nickelback’s reputation is a pop-cultural nadir. They sell millions of records, and sell out arenas the country over. And yet they are loathed by music-listeners more than just about any other artists on the planet. They seem not so much a group as a joke.

What is it about Canadian musicians that seems to arouse such ire? These artists are mocked and disparaged, and discerning Canadians, face to face with the music fans of another country, often feel compelled to apologize on their behalf — to get out in front of the recriminations and make clear there’s no shared affinity. This, one must admit, is a rather curious phenomenon.

Certainly, widely abhorred musicians hail from all over the place: sonic catastrophes on the order of Celine Dion do not originate in Canada exclusively. But you’ll never hear an American express shame or accept responsibility for the failures of sound produced by their country. Canadians, on the other hand, nearly always speak of embarrassments like My Heart Will Go On as uniquely their own.

Indeed, the point we ought to take away from the detested popularity of Bieber or Dion or Nickelback is not that Canada has a knack for churning out abysmal hit-makers. Our country is hardly special in that regard. What these embarrassments suggest instead is something about our inclination toward apology: we can’t seem to help but apologize, even for things that are plainly not our fault.

Canadians no more own Celine Dion than an average American owns Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire or Pauly Shore. We instinctively wince when we hear those pan-flutes in the presence of someone not from here, because, deep down, we worry that we are accountable for our domestic pop-cultural exports. But How You Remind Me would be poisoning the airwaves no matter where Nickelback happened to form — and it shouldn’t be our burden to ask forgiveness for.