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December 26, 2007
Retrohump: Boxing Day
According to our friends at Wikipedia, "Boxing Day is a traditional celebration, dating back to the Middle Ages, and consisted of the practice of giving out gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class." Here at Merry Swankster dot com, Boxing Day is an opportunity to misinterpret the name of a non-American holiday and use it as an excuse to post some videos that we've wanted to post anyway. In this case, it's a group of alt-rock videos from Canada, where at this very moment, people are celebrating Boxing Day.
Since many of our puck-pushing brethren will spend today waiting in long-ass lines at department stores, I think it's fitting that we start things off with a long-ass Canadian rock song.
Neil Young - "Down by the River"
Treble Charger is, by most accounts, a generic late-'90s pop-punk band from Sault Saint Marie, Ontario. They're not much different from Stroke 9, Sum 41 or Blink 182... if Tom DeLonge went onto Broken Social Scene instead of the more-alliteratively named Angels & Airwaves. (Guitarist Bred Piddle pulled duty for TC and BSS.) Here is the video for "American Psycho", from the 2001 album Wide Awake Bored, that sadly has nothing to do with the 1991 novel nor the 2000 film of the same name.
Treble Charger - "American Psycho"
Of course, the whole "American girls are effin' nuts!" thematic is about as overplayed in Canadian rock as "Boy loves girl, but boy also loves to surf!" was in 1950s and '60s California. Here is perhaps the most well-known of that ultra-specific genre:
The Guess Who - "American Woman"
You're frequently good for some Velvet Underground love here at MS, and good for the intents and purposes of this post, the Cowboy Junkies, who hammered out a pretty solid cover of "Sweet Jane" for 1988's The Trinity Sessions, hail from Toronto.
Cowboy Junkies - "Sweet Jane"
And since, you know, it's Boxing Day and all...
Posted by Randall Monty at December 26, 2007 01:02 PM
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