Quebec’s striking students received some high-profile musical support last night when Montreal’s Arcade Fire appeared on “Saturday Night Live” wearing the symbol of the student movement, a red square.

The Grammy-winners, along with Nick Fraiture of The Strokes, accompanied host Mick Jagger on a version of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 single, “The Last Time.” They aren’t the first Quebec artists to offer the symbolic endorsement while on an international stage: earlier Saturday, filmmaker Xavier Dolan and the stars of his new movie Laurence Anyways wore the carré rouge on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.

While Arcade Fire performed, protestors once again flooded the streets of Montreal, testing Quebec’s new Bill 78, intended to clamp down on the strike. Among other strictures, the law requires that police be given eight hours notice of any gatherings involving more than 50 people. They have reportedly been flooded with calls, including prank notices of children’s birthday parties.

Canadian literature and music legend Leonard Cohen, awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in Toronto last night, has chosen to donate the $50,000 that comes with it to the Canada Council for the Arts. The Montreal native is the ninth winner of the honour that has been called “The Nobel Prize of the Arts.”

As a young poet, Cohen received a $25 grant from the Canada Council, in the form of reading fees. At last night’s ceremony, he recalled another “highlight” of his early years: interviewing Gould, the pianist who was Canada’s first musical superstar, for a magazine profile, only to be “so engrossed by what he was saying, I stopped taking notes.” The article was never completed.

Recipients of the award, given every three years, are asked to choose a young artist to receive the $25,000 Glenn Gould Protegé Prize. Cohen chose a collective giftee: the students of Sistema-Toronto, a school using music education to teach cooperation and social responsibility.

Previous laureates have included Dr. José Antonio of Abreu, Venezuela, who founded a national system of young peoples’ orchestras in Venezuela, and Sir André Previn, the German-born composer and conductor.

But Leonard Cohen: He’s our man.

- Emily Olesen

London, Ontario’s Bethesda Centre announced on Saturday that Canadian-born pop star Justin Bieber will donate a portion of the sales of his new single to its Save the Bethesda campaign. The Centre is a Salvation Army-run centre for teenage mothers that provides prenatal care and daycare services. Bieber’s mother, Pattie Mallette, lived there when she was pregnant with him. The new song, “Turn to You,” was written for Mallette as a Mother’s day tribute.

The Bethesda Centre requires $1.5 million by May 31st to keep the doors open. So far it has raised a mere $108,656 from 341 donors, just 7% of the goal. The good news is that Bieber has 21,679,314 twitter followers, many of whom spread the news of his gift, and Bethesda’s campaign, over the weekend. They included Mallette herself, who tweeted, “@justinbieber wrote me a song for Mother’s day! So excited 4 #TurnToYou out 2morrow, it made me cry… Proceeds going 2 help single moms!”

Bieber may have been thinking about himself and his mother when he famously told Rolling Stone last year, “I really don’t believe in abortion, it’s like killing a baby.” Naturally, that created a ruckus. However, you don’t have to like his views on the subject — or his music — in order to think that donating to the Bethesda Centre is a good idea. To do so, click here. Or, to read more about the Centre and what it does, here.

Meantime, the new song is on youtube:

Though if you really don’t like Bieber’s music, maybe you should donate before you listen.

- Emily Olesen

A motley of young electronic musicians led by Grammy-winning dubstep artist Skrillex, who is arguably more known for his half-shaved hairstyle, will be touring Canada via private train this summer. Accompanying Skrillex, whose real name is Sonny Moore, is indie pop maven and former Vancouverite Grimes, and American artists DJ Diplo and Pretty Lights. “We wanted to do it as well and share this music with people across Canada. Just to do it and have fun,” said Moore in a release.

The idea for the tour was inspired by 1970′s Festival Express tour which saw Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and The Band cohabiting in a chartered Canadian National railways train.

In Festival Express, a documentary about the 1970 trip, Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead comments that “Woodstock was a treat for the audience, but the train was a treat for the performers.” Footage from the film, which premiered at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, portrays the journey as a non-stop jam session fueled by alcohol. Vocalist Janis Joplin died of drug overdose just two months after the tour ended.

The “Full Flex Express Tour” opens July 13th at Fort York in Toronto, before hitting the rails:

07/14 – Ottawa, ON – Ottawa Blues Fest *
07/15 – Montreal, QC – Parc Jean Drapeau
07/18 – Winnipeg, MB – Shaw Park
07/20 – Edmonton, AB – Kinsmen Park
07/22 – Vancouver, BC – PNE Coliseum
* = w/o Grimes

- Emily Olesen

By Frank Moher

The sacking of four instructors in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Keyano College in Fort McMurray is creating an uproar well beyond the city better known for its resource extraction talents. Artists, of course, are well aware that their masters — whether they be cabinet ministers or academic administrators — can swoop in at any moment and remove the struts that support not only individual work but entire cultural communities. What’s prompting the shock in Alberta’s artistic community (and give it a day and I expect it will be nationwide) is the way in which the swooping was reportedly done.

According to this blog post, the four were given 15 minutes to gather belongings from their offices, then escorted off campus by security. An anonymous comment confirms the account. It adds that a total of 19 staff were given notice — or whatever you call being told the job you thought you had when you woke up that morning is gone — with more targetted for tomorrow, Monday. So before artists start venting, we’d do well to remember that we’re not the only ones considered expendable in the halls of power these days. But since this is the Arts section of backofthebook.ca, I’ll focus on the VPA Department purge.

In an “open letter” published on Keyano’s website today, the school’s Vice President Academic, Ann Everatt, denies that the employees were marched off campus, at least by guards. “In only one instance was security asked to assist in escorting a faculty member off the premises and that was only because the human resource manager involved had another appointment to tend to.” She didn’t address the 15-minutes-to-get-out allegation. Russell Thomas, the College’s Director of Marketing and Communications (who happens also to be an actor, not to mention a blogger), couldn’t tell me if it was true, though he did acknowledge that the faculty had been advised of their firing that morning. I spoke with one of them this evening, who would not confirm the information, off-the-record or on, because “it might affect my severance package.”

In any event, Keyano’s open letter contains enough information and self-justfication to tell us what’s happening here. “If we left the VPA courses as they were,” says College President and CEO, Kevin Nagel, “declining low enrolments would eventually continue to all-time low levels, our theatre and arts related assets would continue to be under-utilized while concurrently, we would not be able to deliver the new engineering technology programs or the 4-year business degree program that we are planning to introduce this coming September.” Of course, a lot of this is projection, or, as the psychologists like to call it, “catastrophizing” — there are ways to arrest declining enrollments in particular areas, some of which Thomas tells me they’ve tried — but the Prez’s priorities are clear, and they aren’t the school’s arts “assets.” And is anyone surprised by this, coming from the President of a college plunk in the middle of the most avaricious example of asset exploitation on the planet — especially one who was, before this, Dean of the JR Shaw School of Business and who bills himself on his linkedin page as “a transformational leader, business consultant and post-secondary education administrator who brings extensive experience and a global business perspective into the board room and classroom”? (By the way, that grin-and-grip photo to the right shows him meeting oil sands apologist Ezra Levant, when the SUN News Network jihadist visited Fort McMurray in January to give a speech. Dr. Nagel seems very, very pleased to be shaking Levant’s hand.)

Keyano claims they will shuffle any remaining arts offerings into their “Conservatory” program, which is what they call Continuing Ed. courses in these areas. (Interestingly, the URL for the “Conservatory” is http://keyano.ca/business/academicscareers/workforce-development/visual-performing-arts. Yes, folks, it all comes down to workforce development.) The problem is that, when Keyano similarly decided a year ago to “suspend” its music program, it was supposedly in order to redesign and reintroduce it. Thomas tells me that never happened. So why they expect anyone to believe them about what will happen with their visual and performing arts programs beats me.

Fort McMurray got itself all into a tizzy when, in March, the British edition of GQ magazine published an article that depicted it as nothing but a drug- and prostitution-riddled magnet for hosers on the make. And quite rightly — as drive-by journalism goes, it was too easy. But Keyano’s actions don’t do much to help us see past that caricature. In fact, if this keeps up, pretty soon it won’t be one.

When it comes to pop cultural infections, the only thing worse than hearing “Born This Way” AGAIN (again from when I heard it this morning, but also again from when I heard it in 1989) is getting a facebook notification that Jodie just bought me a cow and would I like to feed that cow or buy Jodie a cow in return. And ze “hide all Farmville updates” button, eet does nozzing!

Now unignorable force will meet ubiquitous object on May 17^th when Lady Gaga’s GagaVille Farm launches. A Farmville spinoff, GagaVille will allow couch-farmers to facebookplant such WACKY materials as crystals and unicorns. Plus there will be sheep riding motorcycles. Sheep! On motorcycles! How droll, because sheep are not people. Look at you, thinking outside the box of who can ride motorcycles.

The GagaFarmers will also be able to harvest songs from Lady G’s as-yet-unreleased album but seriously, guys. You’ll be able to hear it about 20 minutes later (and every 20 minutes following), and without descending to the depths of the Ville, from which I hear there is no return.

It’s difficult not to see this as another attention-grabbing stunt, for which her Ladyship is (in)famous. Her fame-mongering has been compared unfavorably to fur-and-feather-and-face-paint-wearing pop-tart, Ke$sha, but at least Ke$ha mongers her fame shamelessly and doesn’t try to pass her antics off as art. I’m not sure how much longer I can take boob-tape X’s as a symbol of sexual censorship.

And the whole enterprise also reeks verrrrry slightly of corporate-shillism, only it isn’t even like letting Home Depot buy one of your songs to hawk its Burnt Sienna. This is like hiring Home Depot to play your zippy new tune, “Burnt Sienna.” There’s a reason, Gag-ling, that this sort of thing has, as you say, “never been done before.”

But then, this also might stick it to the man in a way I do not foresee. I have been wrong before. So what say ye, readers? Is this innovative or desperate? Ironic or obvious? Subversive — or soulless?

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been making the internet rounds to guffaws and heaps of ridicule, and there’s no denying that it’s that bad.  But is it not ALSO a scathingly accurate anthem for our disaffected youth?  To wit:

The opening lines of the song have taken heat for being needlessly and idiotically itemizing.  Every event of Rebecca’s morning is listed, with separate lines being given to both the “bowl” and the “cereal,” to both getting to the bus stop and having to catch the bus.  Yet aren’t the teen years just one damn thing after another?  I mean, “7:00 am waking up in the morning/ gotta be fresh/ gotta go downstairs/ gotta have my bowl/ gotta have cereal” when all you want to do is sleep till noon?  Get off my back, mom.

Arriving (finally) at the bus stop, Rebecca “see[s her] friends kicking in the front seat/ sitting in the back seat” of Hot Johnny’s car.  Plaintively she cries, “Gotta make my mind up/ which seat can I take?”  Oh Rebecca, how deftly you capture the fears of adolescence.  What if she were to chose the front seat, and something awesome happened in the back seat, like, a really funny joke, or something?  Or if she chooses the back seat, and Hot Johnny puts his arm around Slutty Ashley instead of her?  The horror, you guys.

The chorus consists simply of “partyin’ partyin’” to which her friends respond insipidly “yeah.”  The clear subtext to the monotonous, auto-tuned “fun, fun, fun fun” highlights the unvarying nature of this entertainment, a fact only underscored by Rebecca’s dead eyes.  Woe to the teens, with nothing to do on weekends but get sneakily drunk and paw at each other.  Fun fun fun indeed.

The bridge brings ostensibly the most banal, but secretly the wisest, of Rebecca’s claims.  “Yesterday was Thursday . . . tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.”  Is that so different from Shakespeare’s “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”?  I think not, friends.  It speaks to the plodding inevitability of life!

Is the musicality abhorrent?  Sure.  Does Rebecca’s voice straddle the border between “nasal” and “unlistenable”?  You betcher.  But if we peer deep into the song’s gray matter we might find a more accurate reflection of our own teenage years than we are prepared to face.

Either that, or we’ve all been punk’d.

We want our/We want our/We want our faggot in the lyrics.

Is it censorship or sensitive to our times that the old biddies on the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council have designated the Dire Straits ’80s classic “Money for Nothing” unacceptable for play on Canadian radio because of its use of the word “faggot?”

It would be interesting to learn the age of the “listener to radio station CHOZ-FM in St. John’s, N.L., [who] complained last year that the song includes the word ‘faggot’ in its lyrics and is discriminatory to gays.” Not only would I like to the know the individual’s age, but their sexuality, too, because his or her complaint has obscured the meaning of this ’80s gay liberation anthem just a surely as the editing of the n-word from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has diminished the power of his American classic. (If the complainant is a little faggot, he should know his history better.)

Not only is it censorship, the decision ignores the sensitivity of the time when, rather than being discriminatory, the lyric, in context, was empowering to us young, in-your-face faggots of the ’80s.

This was our time. We had healed from the assassination of human rights champion Harvey Milk two years earlier. We did not retreat. We were on the streets. Our packed clubs played the beats. We danced to this song.

 
The complaint and the Council’s decision not only ignore the word in the context of the song, but the song in the context of gay history. I would venture to say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of us “old faggots” who were there and were fighting for our rights and freedoms are pissed off that they’re messing with our song. Faggots don’t like censorship.

“Money for Nothing” was the first hit song and hit video that said our name – it was what we called ourselves then and do to this day. It recognized us as a reckoning force of social change and anticipated our future economic power. The faggots were taking over the music industry. MTV was ours. The song satirically mocked the new MTV generation as lazy, looking for the easy way, couch-potatoes who jeered many of the new, emerging video stars as faggots.

See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy that’s his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he’s a millionaire

What’s discriminatory about that? If I had my own jet airplane and if I had been a millionaire back in the ’80s – and more and more of us faggots had planes and were becoming millionaires then – you could call me anything you want. We were having too much fun to care.

One of my first acts when I return to the airwaves with a new radio broadcast will be to play “Money for Nothing,” not as the Council deems suitably edited, but unedited and in-your-face.

Dave Brindle is a new media broadcaster, writer, and journalist living in Lund, B.C.

You will have heard that an American publishing house has plans for an edition of Huckleberry Fiinn in which the character “N***** Jim” is to be renamed “Slave Jim.” Now comes word that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits is unfit for Canadian ears because it contains the word . . . well, I won’t write it, but it starts with “F” and rhymes with “shag it.”

Quite right. I, too, find these words to be unhearable and unreadable. In fact, they offend me so much — not on my own behalf, mind you, but on behalf of others — that I will not even refer to them as “The N Word” and “The F Word.” I prefer “The Letter After ‘M’ Word” and “The Letter With Which ‘Fish’ Starts Word” — just to further avoid offence, you understand.

But let us not stop now. So much of our cultural heritage needs to be edited. Let’s get at it.

For example, I am particularly interested in drama — or, as I like to refer to it, The Drama. But what a cesspool of offensiveness it is. Take David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross — a potpourri of profanity and racial epithets. But not irredeemable. Below I have indicated how it might be cleaned up for civilized consumption:

MOSS: You missed an intercoursing big sale. Big deal. A dead-beat Person of Polish Persuasion. Big deal. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what else. Don’t ever try to sell a South Asian Individual. They like to feel superior (except of course they don’t, I am merely saying that for reasons of bigotry), I don’t know. Never bought an intercoursing thing.”

Much better. And I bet you can’t even tell where I made changes.

Similarly, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and its insensitive use of “The Letter That Comes Before ‘X’ Word That Rhymes With ‘Rich’ But Is Spelled More Like ‘Ditch.’” Surely it is time we replaced this hateful slur with the more contemporaneously acceptable “Solstice Sprite.”

PUTNAM: Don’t you understand it, sir? There is a murdering (but not really) Solstice Sprite among us, bound to keep herself in the dark (or so I believe in my unenlighted 17th-century view, for which I am deeply sorry.) Wait for no one to charge you — declare it yourself. You have discovered Solstice Spirittwittery!”

You’re welcome, Mr. Miller.

In fiction, Catcher in the Rye has, of course, been asking for it for years. Time to change it up:

“Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a Solstice Sprite’s Baby-Feeding Mechanism. The week before somebody had stolen my camel’s-hair coat (which I deeply regret wearing, now that I better understand the suffering of cold camels). Pencey was full of People of a Thief-Like Persuasion (though in saying that we must take into account the possibility of childhood trauma which may have led to their anti-social behaviour).

And now our own Canadian watchdogs have recognized the need to move on to music. I suggest, once we have combed the entire Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler canon, we launder the discography of that incorrigible sexist, Elvis Presley. As a start:

Well long tall Sally, she’s built for speed
But Uncle John also respects her keen insights into the work of Schopenhauer

By the way, while the publishers of the new Huckleberry Finn have done fine work there, they also propose bringing out a new edition of Tom Sawyer in which “Injun Jim” becomes “Indian Jim.” But I am from B.C., where the latter has been further replaced with “First Nations.”

Hence I will have to wait for the expurgated version of the expurgated version. It’s not easy being enlightened.

My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to like Justin Bieber.

I’m quite serious.

My first reaction to the news that The Bieber caused a near-riot when he appeared at a Kitchener, Ont. mall on Boxing Day, there to buy some shades (because, after all, his future really is so bright he’s gotta wear them), was the standard derision: Oh how ridiculous, he’s this generation’s David Cassidy, or is that Shaun Cassidy, get a grip people (and by “people,” I mean you, 13-year old Kitchener-area girls).

Or, as the manager of the Sunglass Hut put it, with admirable southern Ontario laconicism: “I thought, my God it’s a 16-year-old boy who’s shopping — what’s the big deal here?”

But it happened that I had just finished watching Michael Bublé on HDNet, playing Madison Square Garden.  And just days before, at my end of the country, Diana Krall and hubby Elvis Costello had shown up at a mall in Nanaimo, B.C. to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, causing, if not a near-riot, a lot of texting and twittering among my son’s friends. And I thought how great it is that Canadians, particularly young Canadians, have these undeniably international and A-list celebrities to call their own. (Yes, I know Elvis isn’t a native son, but we’ve adopted him.)

In my day we had Gordon Lightfoot and The Guess Who. Good, but not the same thing.

So why not add Bieber to the list of Canadian mega-things in whose halos we bask? After all, he’s the biggest star of them all at the moment. And he himself put his finger on why they really matter to us: according to that same store manager, “he said he keeps some of his money in Canada.” These one-person industries bring some big coin back to the homeland. And not just when they go Christmas shopping or pay the taxes on their local manses; Bublé has already laid-out the bucks to buy a piece of the WHL Vancouver Giants and before long he’ll be able to afford the Canucks.

So I apologize for all the nasty things I’ve said about Bieber in the last year. Sure, I thought “Baby, Baby” made The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” sound like “Appalachian Spring,” but the kid won four American Music Awards in November, including Artist of the Year, so what do I know? I’m out of the Lightfoot/Guess Who era. I’ll be doing my best in 2011 to understand the error of my ways.

However, I still refuse to like Nickelback.

Update: Here’s video of the visit (guaranteed 100% importance-free):

But I prefer this, of The Biebs escaping — or rather, not escaping — a horde of teenage girls on a . . . well, you’ll see: