Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music (review)

There have been a number of books written on Canadian rock music and discussion in journals and anthologies, and so to suggest that Ryan Edwardson's Canuck Rock stands out as the best-realized of these studies invites contradiction and needs qualification. Nonetheless, Edwardson's book must be recommended for the detailed quality of its scholarship and the fact that it develops needed revisions to counter the lazier consensus about its subject. Most histories of Canada's culture industries centre attention on the industries themselves–on book and magazine publishing, filmmaking, and popular music–and prefer to tell their story as a defensive nationalist narrative of the Canadian underdog's hard scrabble to gain its rightful foothold in a national consciousness overrun with imported products in a culture controlled by foreign, which is to say American, companies. The attention in these stories inevitably swings to how culture interacts with Canadian government bodies, and attention seems fixed on the assumption that the state should have an interest and should intervene in commercial cultural production and distribution. It is assumed that by doing so, Canadian governments should create regulatory shelters for Canadian cultural manufacturers in the service of Canadian national culture. Such histories are usually linked closely to the proposition that movies, literature, and popular music are necessities for Canadians 'to tell their own stories,' and by doing so, they will strengthen–or demonstrably have already strengthened–national identity. Quite aside from a thick serving of national cultural essentialism, avoiding questions of how and why the Canadian polity should expect cultural capital invested in radio-playable pop songs, genre movies, or consumer-magazine fashion and furniture spreads (these are the artifacts under discussion) might be expected to pay back in Canadians' enhanced participation in their national life, let's pause over the question of just how 'Canadian' rock music made in Canada has ever been.

On this question, Edwardson performs the service of synthesizing research and debates on Canadian pop music to conclude: well, not very 'Canadian' at all, but not very 'American' either. Edwardson takes a much more skeptical view than usual of the nationalist project of rock music in Canada, and this opens his book toward a more materialist and paradoxical assessment. Yes, he offers the obligatory detailed chapters on early rock' n' roll, an exhaustive synoptic account of Canadian content radio regulations (Cancon) that, starting in the early 1970s, forced commercial radio to play a percentage of Canadian recordings. He follows up with a chapter on how in the 1990s these regulations came under fire. The issue was not that radio stations, kicking and screaming as they were dragged by the crtc into the Cancon era, found it irksome to accommodate Canadian rock. By using heavy rotations of a short list of well-entrenched popular acts that never needed Canadian radio in the first place, Canadian radio stations have filled their Cancon quotas handily. Only a few stations–most of them in Quebec–ever went out of their way to make it their business to feature younger bands and soloists. The problem was that the 'points system' established by the crtc obliged Canadians to write, to perform, and, finally, to record their music in Canada. By the 1990s, Canadian musicians like Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and Bryan Adams, who lived abroad with flourishing careers, had foreign collaborators, and recorded in Los Angeles or New York, were firmly established and no longer qualified for points. It was particularly Adams's failure to be included as a Juno Awards candidate in 1992 that agitated him (and his management) enough to stir up controversy around the content rules and bring about their modification.

As Edwardson has no trouble proving, numerous Canadian musicians made their professional careers in the United States from the 1960s on, and long before Bryan Adams, simply because there was no recording industry of any scope in Canada. For example, it was an American folksinger, Judy Collins, who first established the reputations of Joni...