Five Songs About: historical figures

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      Welcome once again to Five Songs About, our new weekly (so far, so good!) feature in which we pick a topic and then dig through music history to find relevant songs by some of our favourite artists. It's sort of like a musical parlour game, but mostly it's designed to keep us from finally going insane in this batshit era in which we live. 

      This week we learn that songwriters are not the most trustworthy sources of historical information.

      1. The Evaporators, "Gassy Jack" (2007)

      Far be it for us mere mortals to question the research skills of Nardwuar the Human Serviette, but parts of "Gassy Jack" leave us wondering if the Evaporators frontman totally did his homework. For example, the garage-rock nugget finds him positing that the English-born John Deighton spent time panning for gold in Barkerville, and later had workers build a saloon in what's now known as Gastown in exchange for free beer. According to our exhaustive research—which admittedly consisted of spending one minute and seven seconds on Wikipedia—the man who'd become known as Gassy Jack spent time unsuccessfully panning for gold in the Fraser Canyon. And to get his saloon built, he offered worker all the whiskey they could drink, rather than beer. But whatever—if we had to bet, Nardwuar is probably a better go-to source than Wikipedia for the facts on one of our city's most colourful pioneers. Watch and learn, with key, Wikipedia-confirmed lessons including that Gassy Jack's name came from his penchant for talking a blue story-telling streak, instead of farting and blue-flaming.

      SAMPLE LYRIC: Talking and talking, and telling jolly tales/Led to a name that didn't affect sales/Gassy Jack stuck like glue/And how he's got his own bronze statue

      2. "Weird Al" Yankovic, "Hamilton Polka" (2018)

      Like pretty much everyone else who has ever seen it, "Weird Al" Yankovic is a fan of Hamilton. In fact, Yankovic told Rolling Stone that, upon seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical based on the life of U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton, "I thought it was maybe the greatest piece of art I’d ever seen." Turns out the admiration is mutual; Miranda is a lifelong "Weird Al" fan. "The Hamilton Polka" is the natural result, condensing an entire Broadway show into an irreverent five-minute medley. Of course, that renders the story impossible to follow, but you don't listen to a "Weird Al" song to get an in-depth history lesson, do you?

      SAMPLE LYRIC: Hamilton!/No one has more resilience/Or matches my practical tactical brilliance

      3. Brad Neely, "George Washington" (2009)

      As a historical figure, George Washington looms very large indeed. In Brad Neely's song about him, the first president of the United States is literally a giant, one with two nutsacks and penises on his feet. He also invented cocaine and hated the British so much that he wouldn't raise so much as a finger to help their drowning children. So, you know, it's 100 percent historically accurate.

      SAMPLE LYRIC: On a horse made of crystal he patrolled the land/With the Mason ring and schnauzer in his perfect hands

      4. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, "Cortez the Killer" (1975)

      Neil Young drew inspiration from high-school history classes to write this meditation on the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Well, partly. He also just made a bunch of stuff up, as he has freely admitted. In Young's version of history, Hernán Cortés is a ruthless bringer of destruction, slashing a bloody trail into the New World. Fair enough! But the song portrays the Aztecs as a people who never knew hate or war before the Conquistadors showed up, which is pretty far from the truth. Young even manages to make ritual human sacrifice sound like a quaint cultural practice. Mind you, even if you consider "Cortez the Killer" to be nothing more than an excuse for an epic guitar solo, it's more than worth putting up with all the noble-savage triteness.

      SAMPLE LYRIC: He came dancing across the water/With his galleons and guns/Looking for the new world/In that palace in the sun

      5. Stan Rogers, "Northwest Passage" (1981)

      History has its great victories, but it also has its epic failures. Sir John Franklin may fall into the latter category, but the guy certainly gets points for trying. In 1845, the British Royal Navy officer led an expedition of two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, to the Arctic to chart the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage. As Wikipedia succinctly informs us, "The icebound ships were abandoned and the entire crew died of starvation, hypothermia, tuberculosis, lead poisoning, and scurvy." The great Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers also died young under tragic circumstances—he perished at 33 in a fire onboard an Air Canada plane in 1983—but he left behind some great songs, including this one.

      SAMPLE LYRIC: Ah, for just one time/I would take the Northwest Passage/To find the hand of Franklin/Reaching for the Beaufort Sea/Tracing one warm line/Through a land so wild and savage/And make a Northwest Passage to the sea

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