Watching Canada’s Biggest Rock Band Say a Dramatic Goodbye - The New Yorker
There was a time, not any longer, when our capacity to take in a culture and a feeling was so great it would happen by osmosis, when the background music of our childhoods, looping quietly through the department store or filling the empty kilometers of a road trip, would affix itself like a plank in the stage on which years later we would play grownups.
We are at the start introduced to a world that seems fixed, that seems to know what it is doing, and we make the childhood assumption that it is all just so for various good reasons. We want to believe in the existence of unchanging truths, ever present people, and songs that never end. Until it ceases to be so, sometimes for senseless and tragic reasons, and everything after forever exists in the shadow of unjust and indifferent peril.
A terminal diagnosis turns the tables by making us the most impermanent thing in our lives. From what must be a substantially altered perspective, daily choices take on momentous proportions. Perhaps, Downie seems to suggest, the thing to do is the very things we’ve always done. Wouldn’t that be the best evidence of a life well lived?
Downie’s performance this weekend seemed appropriately every bit a concert that was planned before his diagnosis (it was). The poignancy came not from morose lighting or a slideshow retrospective, but simply from him, his smirk, his scream.
On those childhood road trips, I usually heard the lyrics wrong (“I dream of a morning when high school didn’t start…”) and wouldn’t have understood them anyway, but they nevertheless formed part of the firmament, like the country roads and corn fields and blue sky. On Saturday I heard the roads and fields and sky scream back, as if to say they were not done yet, and I have to agree.
In two sets and three encores Downie charted a tentative beginning giving way to youthful righteousness, the first hints of self doubt, an eruption of despair, and a final salute to a future none of us will fully see. Downie’s show was simply a man refusing to let us ignore how conflicted we feel about our existence, how it changes, and that it ends.