Middle Class Rebels

The Reading List for 27 Sep 23

Let it all fall is Mike Heffernan’s history of the local music scene in St. John’s in the 20 years from the mid-1970s through to the mid-1990s.

Heffernan has put together a masterful piece of oral history that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in Newfoundland and Labrador’s society and culture. The book is full of rich detail and personal memories of what was, in its own way and own right, a distinct and creative time in Newfoundland and Labrador. It ran along with other tides of change that were perhaps more substantive but that were, like the creative energy that Heffernan documents, drowned ultimately by the oil money that flowed after the late 1990s.

The society of 21st century Newfoundland and Labrador has been no less rich a mine for music, comedy, and political action than was the 20 years or so of this book, but we should notice as we dive into Heffernan’s book that no one will be writing the history of a rebellious culture of any kind that thrived over the past two decades.

The subtitle says the book is about underground music and a culture of rebellion but this is a bit much. They were a conspicuously different group but generally they merely aped the styles and attitudes of other places. There are far too many Churchill Park kids in the book - sons and daughters of lawyers, judges, government officials, professors, managers and so on - for this time to represent a genuine rebellion of any meaningful kind.

This period might be more aptly described as the way local elites absorbed ideas from other places and parroted them, but we should all be aware that this is not in the least bit a rebellious act let alone a novel one. The publisher’s blurb is right, though, in that this time saw the growth of “a vibrant community… [that with] few resources, dozens of bands produced a staggering amount of music.” It was a staggeringly large amount of very good music.

There is too much made of a party in a house on Fleming Street that, while it has some minor legal notoriety for the aftermath, is not really an example of any fundamental social, political, or legal upheaval. Many’s the wild party in the 1980s that got out of hand and either had the police break it up after multiple visits or sometimes send a few people to the lock-up.

The Fleming Street Massacre is a single incident, nothing more. Overall, there was no substantive challenge to social norms and social and economic inequity in the province, as much as the blurb claims otherwise. One would have great difficulty in connecting this local culture to any genuine social and political transformation that was not itself really just the local version of changes in national or western culture generally.

And right behind that one would be struck by the way the community fell to pieces as its members disappeared into entirely conventional middle class society. Look away from music to the related world of local comedy, for example, and someone like Rick Mercer, whose reminiscences are in part of the book. A seat-of-the-pants performer with edgy, politically driven comedy in the early 1990s became within five years a house pet of the corporate comedy bureaucrats from CBC in Halifax. As CODCO had been politically and socially neutered in the process, so too were Mercer and others.

Even if there is some natural generational evolution that makes all comedians dull up as they get older - seriously, just pretend such a thing were possible for a real comedian - it’s hard to notice how quickly Mercer and his contemporaries and successors ditched anything as savage as either CODCO’s infamous Roman Catholic priests sketch or even Mercer’s show built on the idea that mainland columnist Charlie Lynch ought to be lynched over his stance on Meech Lake and Newfoundland and Labrador’s dissent once da b’ys went to work for the taxpayer, one way or anudder.

These days, the ersatz Che G’s and their successors are part of the local celebritocracy, of course, which is intermeshed with the political class as well. Sheilagh O’Leary who appears prominently in Heffernan’s book is a good example. They are in many respects even more conservative than the parents… errr… the society they supposedly rebelled against. This is not surprising since their underground culture was, for the most part, merely a temporary affectation, a bit of chic as trendy in its own way as the stuff from Le Chateau that the other kids of the time also dolled themselves up in. In that respect, they merely continue to import trends from elsewhere while remaining as fundamentally disconnected from the province’s society as they ever were. Given the music and comedy and other creative energy of that time, which undeniably exists as heffernan documents, one wonders what might happen were someone to put that creativity to use in a genuinely revolutionary way. To do so would have required a deeper political, social, and economic conscience than anyone at the time ever showed signs of. Still, it’s fun sometimes to imagine.

On to the list:

• Trudeau in India

• The Waffen SS were not Nazi-adjacent, no matter what drivel national media types want to pretend. They *were* f&cking Nazis.

• Just click the links in the first paragraph of the third link for the Star Wars jizz-censoring at Disney, yearnposting, and a host of modern Internet stuff

• The blogging world has moved to Substack.

• Some worthwhile introspection for those of us shifting and changing in life.