by Daniel Colussi | Call me old fashioned, but I grew up with the clear understanding that you were one of two things: a rock ‘n roller of some stripe – a punk, a goth, a metalhead, a teddy boy, whatever – or you were a jock.  Sure, there were other clans in high school, but we won’t worry about them now.  What concerns me today is how this simple demarcation of identity has lately become obscured, perhaps even irrelevant.  As the Stanley Cup finals progress and Vancouver falls deeper into a drug-like trance of Canucks worship, a new atmosphere has opened up in which Vancouver’s musicians and music lovers have all revealed themselves to be die-hard, jersey-wearing sports fans.

I can’t convey my confusion and sense of betrayal.  I can’t give up the straightforward us vs. them mentality of rockers vs. jocks that once served me so well back.  In those days, there were basic visual clues with which to identify everyone’s allegiance: rockers had long hair and over-sized rock t shirts (usually Nirvana), while jocks wore baggy jeans, jerseys and short cropped hair that coalesced into bleach-tipped crests.

But nowadays, all previous lines of understanding have been obscured. Walk into any jamspace in this city and you’re as likely to see a poster of Roberto Luongo or a Sedin tacked to the wall as you are of Bowie or The Stones.  Last weekend outside The Cobalt, the talk wasn’t of the bands that had just played but of Malhotra’s miraculous return to the ice.

Sure, I could anticipate a few musicians succumbing to the paranoid grip that hockey holds over Vancouver – a city whose very pulse can be monitored by the Canucks’ scoring (car horns, vuvuzela’s and wild hollering in the streets indicates robustness while silent streets on game night are a flatline on the EKG), but I never thought I’d see the day when Vancouver’s rock scene wholeheartedly embraced The Game.

But maybe I’ve had it wrong all along.  Vancouver has long maintained an uneasy alliance between punk rock and hockey.  I’m thinking of D.O.A.’s blasphemous 1987 music video cover of BTO’s Takin’ Care Of Business in which hockey and punk rock were portrayed as two sides of the same rebellious coin.  And then there’s Nomeansno’s dark twin, the Hanson Brothers, who traded their guitars for hockey sticks and celebrated the brutal sport with their treatment of The Hockey Song?  More recently, local 90’s rockers The Odds have stepped onto the ice and upped their exposure to previously unheard of levels.

Perhaps I’ve had it wrong all along. Maybe it’s not so bad.  Maybe it just goes hand in hand with our being a world class city. Maybe it gives Vancouver a more European quality.  I mean, how many English rockers are also full blown footballers? Pretty much all of them, I think.  Pink Floyd loved their football, and of course there was the legendary match between Oasis and Blur, the two biggest UK bands of the 90’s.  If they’re OK with it, then why shouldn’t I be too?

It seems I may have succumbed to the same faulty, binary logic that still pits The Stones against The Beatles in my brain.  It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve had to reassess my old hypotheses about the world…

——————————————–

Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.