Beaver Hour Index Matthew Good Band’s Beautiful Midnight

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: Matthew Good Band’s 1999 album Beautiful Midnight, released on Universal Records in Canada. The album debuted at number one on the Canadian Albums Chart and has been certified two-times platinum since 2000.

Part of our heritage because: “K-I-C-K-A-S-S! / That’s the way we spell success!” Despite sampling a legitimate cheerleader chant on one of the best selling Canadian rock albums of the late ’90s, Matthew Good remains the Holden Caulfield of the Canadian music industry. The musician refused to play the United States due to his nationalist loyalties, and he decried the Junos (despite his band being nominated for a whole bunch of them), calling the industry event “marketing warehouses for the United States.” Matthew Good is a blowhard who took every opportunity on MuchMusic to proselytize against consumerism, corporate America, weapons, George W. Bush, gas emissions, the Darfur conflict, and Gap crewneck sweaters—a human blogger before the Internet who hated all phonies. For anyone feeling out their Adbusters subscription during a pivotal coming of age, he was a Canadian rock idol on a soapbox who was legitimately backed up by pithy rock ’n’ roll. Here’s a quotable from Good that sounds like it could have been lifted from the outstretched pamphlet of a homeless man: “It is the lackadaisical pleasure of the imperial elite to reject parts of things in favor of portions that are agreeable, but ultimately fantasy becomes your master, and then planes start flying into skyscrapers.”

When he railed against the mass marketing machines of corporate rock (despite being signed to corporate rock label Universal) and then split a sushi boat with a fan who won the MuchMusic contest Gonna Meet A Rock Star, Matthew Good made being a humorless politico seem sort of punk rock. (Fun trivia fact: he also coined the term “first world problems” in a lyric he penned for the song “Omissions Of The Omen” off Matthew Good Band’s debut 1995 album, The Last Of The Ghetto Astronauts.) As a solo artist, he’s made four albums since the band’s breakup in 2002 (2003’s Avalanche is sorely underrated), has suffered several psychotic episodes, and does some political blogging that includes the musician’s famous “manifestos.”

Of the four proper Matthew Good Band records, Beautiful Midnight is the behemoth, and their last successful effort before the band’s unfortunate breakup album, 2001’s The Audio Of Being. With 14 tracks that span an hour and seven minutes (remember when musicians still did that?), it is an exhausting, emotional listen. Not all of it is “good” (it has the best five-song opening sequence of almost any album, and then the crappiest resulting nine tracks), but for anyone who loved Vancouver’s subcultural movement of the late ’90s, a guitar hook even better than Gob’s “I Hear You Calling,” and the brilliant angst of an actual insane person who posed for almost every press photo in a gorilla mask, Beautiful Midnight is a canonized classic for a reason.

Most Canadian moment: It’s a toss up between the pristine pop punk of “Load Me Up” (which bests even the better efforts from Sum 41, Gob, and Treble Charger) and the talky “The Future Is X-Rated” which discusses ’90s social politics with little regard for subtelty. Laden with live samples from a porno (and with a music video that’s equally didactic), Good describes a culture “where things just keep getting weirder and weirder / and now Christmas is for shopping / and shopping God is everything.”

1999 was a big year for social critique. The Internet hadn’t yet amalgamated our cultural sensibilities into a general dissociative feeling of weirdness, so it felt reasonable to get mad at a mall just for selling mainstream clothing. Identity politics were everything, sampling porn was way subversive (actual dialogue from the song: “Oh you want me to take my pants off? / You’re a saucy little monkey boy”) because you couldn’t watch it at work on your iPhone. Listening to the song 12 years later, you can't help but wonder if our future was really X-rated, or if it was just a convenient slogan to stencil onto your black spot sneakers? (The late ’90s were as slogan-oriented as they were anti-slogan-oriented.) “The Future Is X-Rated” seems equally indebted to fellow Vancouverite Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X, who among other feats, gave us the term “McJob.” It’s a heady statement that actually means nothing, the tweet-length equivalent of a Jenny Holzer installation.

Legacy: Since Good was a victim of his own success and refused to give himself over to any press or publicity, Beautiful Midnight lives on in obscurity. It is sad to think that the current population of 25-year-olds might be the last generation to idolize Good as the tortured rock genius he was. With tracks that run between aching love songs (“Strange Days”), tirades against Gen X (“The Future Is X-Rated”), and two of the most perfect rock songs of all time (“Load Me Up,” “Hello Time Bomb”), Beautiful Midnight is an overloaded, epic screed of sex, pain, and death that goes from wry remarks about how nice it would be to get “laid in a lawn chair” to rare moments of self-aware immolation (“used to ride around here on my high, high horse,” sings Good). Sonically it deviates between lush string-laden slow songs (“Suburbia,” “Strange Days,”), upright pop songs (“Hello Time Bomb,” “Load Me Up”) and porny grunge anthems (“The Future Is X-Rated,” “Going All The Way”), centered roughly by Good’s rich, emotional vocals, always laid prostrate in the mix.

But is there a greater opening track than the cold-call cheerleader choral set to a drifting wave of feedback that kicks off “Giant”? Setting the tone for Beautiful Midnight (which has a fervent passion for youth and suburbia, like the green Vancouver soccer field of the “Load Me Up” video), “Giant” sets up the expectation that every song on this album is going to slay you, and that is true until the halfway point with the aptly titled “Failing The Rorschach Test.” You see the first five songs has “Hello Time Bomb,” the tender piano-laden ballad “Strange Days,” the myopic “I Miss New Wave” and the epic, positively perfect “Load Me Up.” From there the album subsides to poor man’s psychedelia (“Hey Alice / I’m caving in,” sings Good on “Failing The Rorschach Test”), over-emotional sexual deviance (“Let’s Get It On,” not a Marvin Gaye cover), awkward Alice In Chains grunge posturing (“A Boy And His Machine Gun”), and the painful “The Future Is X-Rated” which had the audacity to sample audio from a real-life porn.

There are some moments of hope (“Jenni’s Song” is about a runaway teen who murders her abusive dad and then possibly sleeps with Good), but mostly the album wrestles with how to conflate politics with sex, like some political science grad student who can’t decide whether he wants to attempt fight or flight. Matt Good doesn’t have a lot of hope for humanity, he mentions the devil more than once as a metaphor and as an actual person he’d like to get to know (“you’re sleeping in my memory / like Satan,” sings Good on “Born To Kill”), but in that way that every crazy person eventually associates themselves with the devil when they lose their faith in God.

Even the album art, with that stark flash of lightning against neon roadway flanked by the shadows of the Vancouver Mountains, wants to posit that there’s something beautiful in the battle between good and evil. Matthew Good might have the most biblical name in all of Canadian rock ’n’ roll, and he sees the world in equally black and white terms. By putting his faith in sex and violence while railing against a culture of porn and politics, Beautiful Midnight is a lost cultural artifact of the ’90s, where Britney Spears and the War on Iraq were under equal scrutiny. Had he summoned the actual balls to take his critique of American culture to U.S. audiences, maybe Matthew Good could’ve kick started a revolution. Instead he became a MuchMusic talking head and our cross to bear.

Cultural cringe factor:  6 out of 10 for the catchiest manifesto from the sickest puppy that ever wore a gorilla mask on the cover of Chart Attack.