This Is Our Life

The Tragically Hip “Ahead By A Century”

Like pretty much all other Americans, I had ignored The Tragically Hip through their entire career. I knew about them. I knew they were hugely popular in Canada, but were at best a cult act in the United States. I was dimly aware of a song of theirs called “Butts Wigglin’” in the ‘90s, and must have decided they were basically another Barenaked Ladies and did not give them any thought at all until just recently, when they played their final run of shows after their frontman Gord Downie was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. After reading a few rather heartfelt tributes to the band, I decided to actually listen to them. As it turns out, they’re…not like the Barenaked Ladies. Their music generally falls into this post R.E.M./U2 aesthetic – really, more like Live than either of those two bands – but even the most blah songs are lifted up by Downie’s words, which are genuinely poetic and thoughtful, and uniquely obsessed with Canadian culture and life. The song that really grabbed me and got under my skin was “Ahead By A Century,” which turns out to be their biggest chart hit. It’s a little like encountering R.E.M. for the first time in 2016 and being like “wow, you guys, this ‘Losing My Religion’ song is just terrific!” But that’s how it happened.

“Ahead By A Century” has a peculiar emotional resonance, mainly because the band is mixing overt sentimentality with this sort of oblique tone. The main guitar part is lovely but would be extremely cloying if it weren’t played in an open tuning that brightens the first half of the riff but darkens the hammered notes at the end. Downie’s words fall in an intriguing gap between the universal – small moments in our youth that in retrospect are crucial to our development into adulthood – and the enigmatic in their strange specificity. You relate to the broader experience of having had experiences, but it’s hard to say what these particular vignettes are supposed to add up to. But then, if someone pushed you to explain why odd little moments from your own life have stuck with you, you’d probably have a hard time explaining them too.

The most ambiguous thing about “Ahead By A Century” is the chorus, and the question of who Downie is addressing, and what “you are ahead by a century” actually means. It’s such an evocative phrase – self-effacing and guilt-ridden, but also full of awe for whoever it is he’s singing about. This is never resolved in the song, but he adds “and disappointing you is getting me down” at the end of the last chorus, which at least clarifies that the phrase is intended to communicate a feeling of inadequacy. It’s such a potent feeling, but Downie doesn’t oversell it. He’s presenting a complicated set of feelings but refuses to connect the dots, just trusting the listener to recognize this pattern of thoughts and emotions.

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