What do you get when an Australian alternative band get together with the Australian cartoonists who make Oglaf to create a rock video about Canada?
The truth, man, the really deep truth.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I didn’t understand that at all. Are you sure they haven’t mistaken Canada for Switzerland?
That was incomprehensible, so I looked up the lyrics. Didn’t help.
Yeah, not sure I get it either, and I’m Canadian.
But the end, with Alanis Morrissette as some sort of female god, was rather ironic.
Pierre Le Fou
Morrissette played God in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)
Morissette
What? No, it . . . Oooooh, now I get it!
I don’t.
Jeezus. And people have the nerve to complain about Nickleback. What language was that supposed to be?
Another one who had no fecking idea what was going on, I turned it off about 1/3 of the way through once it was clear coherence is an unknown concept.
@chigau: Alanis’ song, Ironic, is rather famous for containing examples of things which were called ironic but which were actually not.
So calling Alanis’s appearance as God, reprising her role from Dogma, is not ironic, but calling it ironic anyway humorously references the non-ironic examples in her song Ironic.
It’s a bit meta, I guess.
But not really ironic.
@10 Owlmirror
If you listen to the lyrics Alanis sings various things in the chorus and at the end asks “isn’t it ironic?” – to which the answer is
It’s like rain on your wedding day – not ironic
It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid -ironic
It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take – not ironic.
Owlmirror
Thanks.
It was so far over my head, there wasn’t even a chemtrail.
banga banga banga banga banga mumble mumble mummmbell munumbel
@13, That is more understandable and coherent than the video in the OP.
Maybe we’ve all got it backwards. It’s actually a video with music and some background chatter, not a song accompanied by music and a video. Seems a bit wasted, though. Oglaf comics and videos may overall be weird nonsense, but they are usually just coherent enough to be fun. Pity.
I mostly noticed the cars were driving on the left side of the street. What was up with that, eh? (shout out to my hubby’s Canadian grandmother who said “eh” all the time, the French-Canadian accent was a bonus)
So, the deep truth of Canada is that there are 24 men for every woman, unless you count god as a woman, and then it’s 16:1?
That doesn’t exactly jibe with my experience, but okay. IANADemographer after all.
@16, I have an unusual / hard-to-place accent. USAians generally guess “British”, most Britons guess “Canadian”, the Irish were confused (and refreshingly forthright honest about it), and the French can instantly detect I’m an anglophone (which is actually rather common for native English speakers) but otherwise don’t have a clew. My normal reply to the typically-British “Canadian” guess was “No, eh, as I, eh, don’t, eh, say eh, eh.”
In the hundreds of gigs I did in my motherland I never once rode a caribou while playing. I guess it’s a good thing I emmigrated to Australia, apparently I wasn’t a real Canadian.
Laughed out loud seeing Alanis show up as God (recalling Dogma). A nice bunch of Canadian things to reflect Canada, but the illustrator definitely didn’t know which side of the road we drive on and that our police don’t wear those British caps. You don’t often see Mounties in dress reds helping little old ladies across the street. Toronto Raptors but not hockey? Maybe the song writer landed in Toronto for a week and felt inspired.
@19, “In the hundreds of gigs I did in my motherland I never once rode a caribou while playing.”
Yeah, yeah, but what about Teh Moose ?
So the cops and much of the video where the bad stuff happens are Australian and the band is dreaming about a more utopian life in a fantasy of Canada that they’ve built up in their minds.
Chris Jericho is a popular Canadian professional wrestler in case anyone is wondering about that lyric.
@22
I rather think that Jericho refers to Vancouver’s Jericho Beach. Not far from Kitsilano.
The 16 men are obviously the husbands of Alanis.
(BTW I am disappointed she did not use her divine powers to create a boreal version of the drop bear. Why should Australians have all the cool animals of the Commonwealth?)
-For artsy boreal music I listen to Björk.
But if you want a northerly band that has a faster pace, you can try the Russian group Messer Chups. They are weird.
@ 20 RoughCanuk
You don’t often see Mounties in dress reds helping little old ladies across the street.
Clearly the producers have been watching that great documentary “Due South”.
I think I have seen an RCMP officer in red serge once, if we exclude the musical ride.
Is Canada really a violent cops country ? They’re supposed to be so polite… Well, maybe because they’re policed.
Could be wrong, but I was under the impression it was a bit more like this (2:41) or this (6:05).
In any case, I’m pretty sure that means the US should invade/bomb the place, before things really get out of hand.
damien75 @26: Not as bad as the US, but there are definitely issues, mostly with the treatment of indigenous and black people.
damien75 @26:
As a nation Canada tends to keep its racist violence aimed at natives so it doesn’t get as much airtime as American cops killing black kids. But Constable Friendly also walks his downtown beat geared up like he’s doing a tour of Iraq.
consciousness razor @27
Rick Mercer did a man-on-the-street thing a few years back where he asked Americans if the USA should bomb Saskatchewan because, well, stuff. The number of answers in the affirmative was chilling.
@ consciousness razor#27
“Could be wrong, but I was under the impression it was a bit more like this (2:41) or this (6:05).”
So was I, but see below.
@Rob Grigjanis#28
“Not as bad as the US, but there are definitely issues, mostly with the treatment of indigenous and black people.”
I may offend a lot of American readers here, but not as bad as the US seems to me a pretty low bar. (See below.)
@William George#29
“As a nation Canada tends to keep its racist violence aimed at natives so it doesn’t get as much airtime as American cops killing black kids. But Constable Friendly also walks his downtown beat geared up like he’s doing a tour of Iraq.”
OK, I was not aware of that.
Thant you to all three for your answers.
I looked up this page :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country
and that page :
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124039/police-killings-rate-selected-countries/
[Nothing to see with Canada, but it is interesting that Russia is on none of those pages, Yet it is the only country where I met anyone who presonaly knew somebody who, alledgedly, had been killed by a policeman.]
I was flabbergasted that Canadian cops kill more people per capita than cops do in France (my country). Worse than France seems pretty bad. Then I remembered that we do not have as much of a gun culture as North America.
The thing is, bodies are easy to count, punches in the face much less so. Unfortunately I only found homicides statistics.
In any case, it is worse than I thought. I never heard a Canadian complaining about police violence, and being who I am, I mostly met left wingers, as most of you tend to I guess. I knew a woman who had been married to a native. She never mentioned any lopsided use of violence. They look like such a non-violent country bent on fighting racism…
I may have done an incorrect use of English in that longuish comment. If I did, I’m sorry.
@consciousness razor#26
Come to think of it, you forgot one :