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I only met one person in Canada who dislikes The Tragically Hip, and his opinion was already really shitty.

I love the Hip; my appreciation grew after a night spent doing shots of whiskey and getting high and blasting The Tragically Hip along with Neil Young. "Bobcaygeon" really hits me in the soft spot of my heart, and "38 years old" is a great story. "Wheat Kings" is my favorite song from them though.

I think saying "The Tragically Hip are Canada's REM" is fair but I don't think saying "The Tragically Hip ripped off REM" is fair at all.

Yeah when the author said "But, despite R.E.M.'s success, do you know anyone who's a R.E.M. fan? I don't." I thought, hmmm, this David Mathews guy must not know many people. Then I read that his friend likes Phish. "All things considered, [they're] about distilling peak positivity experiences." I thought, hmmm, fuck you, I should of read this before I linked it. Dammit.

I am an R.E.M. fan and I know other R.E.M. fans. In their early years, R.E.M. really brought something new and vital to both Southern rock and American indie/college rock in general. I mean... Nirvana were all huge R.E.M. fans, that speaks pretty loudly I think Murmur is pretty much perfect and Reckoning isn't far off. The whole first side of Murmur anyway is literally perfect.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if The Hip took a few pages from R.E.M.'s book; I mean, the comparison is totally natural. But to me The Hip are more visceral, more bluesy. If you listen to something like "Grace, Too," I don't see R.E.M. doing something like that. There's a little more Zeppelin in there. Ditto "New Orleans Is Sinking," honestly, these songs have more in common with a blues rock band like Big Sugar than with American college rock in the '80s/'90s.

That's just my take...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8Fi46BFAF0[/youtube]

This would be one their songs that sounds the most like R.E.M. to me, if pressed. From the mid-'90s, a few years after R.E.M. released "Losing My Religion." So I'm not saying there's no influence. Obviously there is.

I watched the Long Time Running documentary earlier with my girlfriend. I haven't cried that much in a long time. I don't think it's really hitting me until now. We lost a true icon.

Edit:
This is a man missing his frontal lobe and part of his hippocampus due to brain cancer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi-01K44r6o[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX-PqWQsgfE[/youtube]

I was in Montreal on the day he died and you picked up on a sense of legitimate, shared mourning. People playing the songs on their phones. "Bobcaygeon" coming out of every bar. I stopped one guy and said, "You're bumming me out, dude," and we laughed. "He's American," he said, motioning to his friend, "he's never heard them." The friend offered that he liked the lyrics and he "got it" right away. When I woke up that day I got a barage of texts that he'd died and when I showed up at the conference I was attending I was told by everyone I knew that I bumped into. "Say, did ya hear—?"