Possibly Downie was simply drawing a parallel between the inexperienced Henry Hudson, who piloted the ill-fated flight that went down with Barilko, and the neophyte pilots of the Allied Air Forces. However it’s troublesome to disregard the imperfections on this picture of elite navy pilots, these dashing and supposedly unquestionable heroes. A few of them had been simply youngsters. A few of them weren’t heroes in any respect—at the very least not but. They had been working it in. And if that picture of Canadian historical past may very well be sophisticated so rapidly, as a chaser to a narrative a couple of vanished hockey participant, every little thing was questionable.
Elsewhere the lyrics had been extra straight adversarial. “Wheat Kings” was torn straight from the headlines, an acoustic monitor about David Milgaard, a 17-year-old wrongly convicted of a brutal rape and homicide in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Milgaard served 23 years in jail earlier than being launched earlier that summer season of 1992, and finally absolutely exonerated. The music begins in a watercolor picture of rural Canada, Downie singing of “sunset within the Paris of the Prairies,” however the veil is rapidly pulled again to disclose the nightmare in Milgaard’s thoughts, “the place the partitions are lined all yellow, gray and sinister/Hung with photos of our dad and mom’ prime ministers.” 5 of them had served within the time it took Milgaard to be convicted, endure behind bars, and discover freedom.
Most pressing of all was “Searching for a Place to Occur,” which instructed the bloody and bitter story of European annexation of Place of birth from two views. First, Downie gave voice to French explorer Jacques Cartier, who callously wished “To discover a place, an historic race/The sort you’d prefer to gamble with,” earlier than shifting the main target to an indigenous particular person fleeing for his or her life: “I’ll paint a scene, from reminiscence/So I’d know who murdered me.” The Hip weren’t telling the story of a harmonious nation. In all places on Absolutely Fully, there appeared to be injustice and loss of life, a beautiful-seeming facade melting away to disclose one thing grotesque and disturbing.
Absolutely Fully exploded upon launch in Canada, promoting 200,000 copies in its 5 weeks. Within the States, it carried out so poorly that MCA pulled their advertising and marketing finances for it only a fortnight after its launch. “Two weeks earlier than the file comes out, all of the file firm is saying is, ‘It’s gonna be large boys, look out!’ Then the week after, nobody returns our calls,” Sinclair mentioned. “That’s the way in which it’s.”
By July 1993, the band’s personal optimism had curdled. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, drummer Gord Sinclair put it all the way down to an angle south of the border. “I feel Individuals have this bizarre factor about Canada,” he mentioned. “They give the impression of being north and determine it’s simply the 52nd state. Being from Canada actually doesn’t have a lot of an impression for them. They simply type of assume that you simply’re a second-class American or American with a humorous accent or French.”
