Beaver Hour Index Clumsy

For every Justin Bieber and Alex Trebek who manages to gain acceptance in the larger apparatus of pop culture, there are plenty of Canadian bands, films, TV shows, and would-be celebrities who seem uniquely, even despairingly Canadian. The A.V. Club’s Beaver Hour Index looks back on these Canuck curios, from cultural crossovers to indigenous oddities.

This week: Clumsy, the chart-topping second record from the once and future kings of Toronto (and Canadian) alt-rock, Our Lady Peace, released in 1997. Oh, 1997; so definitive. It’s like the ’90s of the 1990s.

Part of our heritage because: OLP’s—can we call them OLP? Sure, we can—most successful album to date (they have other ones?), Clumsy sold over one million units in Canada. This makes it a certified diamond record. It also did similar numbers in the U.S., though moving one million units Stateside only translates into platinum status.

Granted, the band had already secured a measure of success by 1997. After the success of their debut studio record, 1994’s Naveed, the band secured opening dates for Page & Plane and a Sammy Hagar-fronted Van Halen—where the band was consistently booed and jerked around, causing frontman Raine Maida to snap in a moment of Roger Watersian onstage antipathy. But Clumsy put them over the edge. If you were a member of Columbia House in the late ’90s, chances are it was one of the discs (cassettes, even) you picked up for a penny while scamming the well-meaning mail order service. And chances are you listened to it, again and again and again. So much so that “Superman’s Dead” and “4 a.m.” became suitable fodder for those Oh Henry-sponsored Much Music Video Dances, despite having no real rhythms and being impossible to dance to. But dancing be damned. When OLP came on, it was the wallflowers’ turn to shine, if only for a brief four and a half minutes before they returned to the comforting obscurity afforded by their preadolescent acne and oversized South Park T-shirts they bought at the It Store. Because, you know, “Ordinary’s just not good enough to-day-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay,” and everything.

Most Canadian moment: Well we already used the Much Video Dance example. So that’s shot. How about the Summersault Festival? Remember that? Circa 1998, OLP was popular enough that it formed its own headlining music festival that toured across Canada, kind of like Lollapalooza. The inaugural Summersault lineup brought then-popular Canadian alt-rock acts like Moist, The Gandharvas, I Mother Earth, Hayden, and Sloan—suggesting that, yes, there was a time when Our Lady Peace was more adored than Sloan—together with American comparables like Fuel, Harvey Danger, and Eve 6.

By 2000, when Summersault hit the road again to entertain stoned high schoolers in Ottawa, Barrie, Halifax, and beyond, OLP had been deposed (at least unofficially) from the headline spot of its own festival by the Smashing Pumpkins, who were making their last string of Canadian dates before the original lineup folded. It doesn’t get more cultural-cringey than a Canadian band minting its own touring music festival only to, at the peak of its fame, cede the spotlight to an American band who was on its way out. Sometimes we wish we could make this stuff up.

Legacy: It’s weird, downloading Our Lady Peace’s Clumsy in order to critically re-evaluate it almost 15 years after the fact. We half-expected some of the MP3 files to skip, or not be included at all. Or for the folder to have a bunch of our friend’s older brother’s weed stems and old dope dust smeared across it. You can’t crack a digital file like you can a jewel case, so that one of the corners always hangs off and you have to snap it back into place because you’re 12 and you pretend to take pride in taking care of your things. But alas, there it is. Clumsy. Out there in the ether, available neatly zipped at 192 kbps and downloadable in seconds. Just like anything else.

How does it hold up? It’s kind of hard to say. We probably need another half decade to get far enough away from Clumsy to be able to listen without embarrassing visions of our adolescent selves intruding. Because while the ’90s are currently enjoying a widespread cultural reevaluation—like every decade, people seemed to decry the 1990s as the worst of all possible decades, only to later remember The Simpsons and Soundgarden and Reservoir Dogs and totally come around on it—the late ’90s haven’t been so lucky.

Generally, the period between about 1996 and the new millennium is understood (at least on our end) as the period when so-called “alternative rock” reached the peak of its commodification; where canon-forming pop music institutions like MuchMusic and 102.1 The Edge tolerated squeaky, nasally frontmen like OLP’s Raine Maida to say “fuck” and “shit” as long as they threw in a hook-y chorus and muted all that distortion. That these guys had terrible soul patches and dressed up in denim-on-denim accented with thick distressed leather wristlets like living Bootlegger mannequins only helped streamline alt-rock into a manageable aesthetic framework. For all intents and purposes, 1997 was the year alt broke; when the race-to-the-bottom to produce the biggest, shiniest tunes became a national concern. Clumsy seems a bit like patient zero for this whole epidemic, at least in Canada. Without the runaway success of Clumsy, it’s hard to imagine an album as terrible as Econoline Crush’s The Devil You Know (released later in 1997) going platinum. And without The Devil You Know, well, we’d probably all be better off. Does anyone really miss shrill, songwriter-driven, overproduced, industrial alt-rock? Can anyone but OLP’s most diehard fans look back on “Big Dumb Rocket” or “Automatic Flowers” and think, “Boyo, they don’t make ’em like that anymore?” Can Raine Maida?

Truth be told, though, “Automatic Flowers” is actually still pretty sufferable, albeit in an ironic “Hey remember this fucking song?” kind of way, where you and all your idiot friends affect your best cracked, half-baleful Raine Maida impressions for the “do-do, dew-do-do” part so you can feel superior to a CD. Otherwise, Clumsy is one of those albums that you feel embarrassed listening to, even if you’re certain nobody can hear you.

Cultural cringe factor: 9 out of 10. This is no good. We think. Well, we’re pretty sure, anyway. Ask us again in five years when our Summersault ’98 tour shirt is fetching triple figures on eBay.