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charlene · 07-05-2023, 09:08 AM

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...x8S0xU8mrS82b0
PHOTOS at link.

From its sweet-ass health care system to its foxy nepo-baby prime minister to its absolutely banging national anthem, Canada has always had it going on. Sure, this hellish summer-wildfire shit has kind of been an unexpected plot twist — but no country is perfect, right?

Canada has about a tenth the population of the United States, which only makes its outsize impact on the history of music that much more incredible (excellent arts-education funding, eh?). The stats here are astounding. Three of the five or so greatest songwriters who ever lived are from Canada, as is the most beloved prog-rock band, most significant country singer of the Nineties, the biggest hip-hop artist of the past 20 years, and the quintessential R&B star of our era. Get this: the greatest Americana roots rock band of all time? You guessed it: Canadian! (Well, four fifths at least.)

To honor Canada Day, here is the CanCon our friends in the Great White North deserve: Rolling Stone’s definitive rundown of the greatest Canadian artists in the history of pop music. Is every single significant Canadian musician on here? Nope. The 50 we like the most are, though. So, please allow us to preemptively extend our sincere and respectful condolences to members and fans of the Cowboy Junkies, DeadMau5, Bruce Cockburn, Skinny Puppy, the Pointed Sticks, Voivod, Bran Van 300, Buck 65, Chilliwack, the Weakerthans, Toronto, and many other very worthy acts. There’s a lot of Canada out there.

50
Snow
UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 01: REGGAE SUNSPLASH Photo of SNOW (Photo by John Lynn Kirk/Redferns)
John Lynn Kirk/Redferns/Getty Images

If Snow had never done anything other than be a reggae-influenced Canadian rapper named Snow, it would be enough to wholly solidify his historical legacy. An Irish Canadian kid from Toronto who got into reggae via his Jamaican immigrant neighbors, Darrin O’Brien took on his outrageously brilliant stagename and made his debut LP, 12 Inches of Snow, in 1992. Upon the album’s release, he was doing jail time for his involvement in a brawl, but when he got out his wonderful one-hit-wonder juggernaut “The Informer” was a massive, if somewhat unlikely, worldwide hit. A fun hip-hop/reggae jam perfectly fit the casually eclectic vibe of the hey-whatever Nineties, and its culture-bridging legacy remains strong. In 2019, reggaeton king Daddy Yankee brought Snow on for “Con Calma,” a “The Informer”-tinged hit that was nominated for a Latin Grammy. —J.D.

49
Martha and the Muffins
Peter Noble/Redferns/Getty Images

Martha and the Muffins blew out of Toronto’s New Wave scene with their classic 1980 club hit “Echo Beach.” Martha Johnson sings in the relatable voice of an office clerk, bored at her 9-to-5 job, fantasizing of a romantic beach escape all by herself, over herky-jerky guitar/synth churn. These Muffins had other excellent hits with extremely New Wave titles: “Women Around the World At Work,” “Several Styles of Blonde Girls Dancing,” and the anthem “Be Blasé.” But their finest moment came in 1984, when they shortened their name to M+M and dropped the 12-inch bombshell “Black Stations/White Stations,” a prescient attack on Eighties radio segregation, with the party chant: “Black stations, white stations, get on the floor/Stand up and face the music, this is 1984!” They were so ahead of their time. —R.S.

48
Terri Clark
Paul Natkin/WireImage

The much-revered era of Nineties country just wouldn’t have been the same without the contributions of Terri Clark. The Alberta-born singer got her start playing for tips (and a $15 flat rate) at Nashville’s famous honky-tonk Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in 1987, and raced into the Top Three just a few years later with her 1995 debut single, “Better Things to Do.” With a powerful voice and a cowgirl swagger, Clark was a more rough-hewn counterpoint to Nineties vixens like Shania Twain and Faith Hill — brave enough to cover Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and, like Linda Ronstadt before her, turn it into a hit. She carried that momentum into the 2000s too with radio staples like “I Wanna Do It All” and “Girls Lie Too.” There’s a good reason Reba chose her to open her recent tour: Clark rules. —J.H.

47
April Wine
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Pioneering arena rockers April Wine moved from Halifax to Montreal at the start of the Seventies, and then spent the rest of the decade churning out tuneful, middle-of-the-road rock hits, alternating between sentimental, keyboard-sweetened love songs, and upbeat, guitar-heavy love songs. The band enjoyed a number of firsts — their fourth album, Stand Back, was the first Canadian album to sell 100,000 units; they were also the first Canadian band to gross $1 million from a single tour — but of the 10 Juno nominations the band accumulated, there was not a single winner. As singer Myles Goodwyn later admitted, “I’ve written so much god-awful crap it’s ridiculous.” —J.D.C.

46
Daniel Caesar
FilmMagic

The covers of Daniel Caesar’s LPs are a helpful framework for understanding the Torontonian’s music. 2017’s Freudian shows Caesar climbing up the side of a monument; on 2019’s Case Study 01 and this year’s Never Enough, he’s blurred, mid-action, moving but unhurried. His music, when it focuses, can be rapturous, netting Grammy noms for slow-blooming torch songs like “Best Part” and “Get You.” But those moments are idylls for a musician whose music seems to wander from relationship to relationship, place to place, mood to mood. Like those album covers, his music captures him in an act of searching.” —C.P.

45
Barenaked Ladies
Bob Berg/Getty Images

Hailing from Scarborough, the same Toronto suburb that gave the world Mike Myers, BNL emerged in the early Nineties as a tuneful, self-effacing alternative to college-rock cool. Coming on like a cross between Lennon and McCartney and Doug and Bob McKenzie, frontmen Steven Page and Ed Robertson parodied pop-song tropes even as they quietly embraced them, an approach that hit its apex with the 1998 earworm “One Week.” The two fell out in the aughts, sparked both by a royalties dispute over the theme to Big Bang Theory and, later, Page’s 2008 arrest on cocaine charges. Page departed in 2009, returning only for a “one-time” reunion at the 2018 Juno Awards. —J.D.C.

44
Death From Above 1979
Michael Hurcomb/Corbis/Getty Images

At the peak of the early 2000s disco-punk revival, Death From Above 1979 stormed down from Toronto with an especially noisy take on the genre, since the lineup was just a drummer and a bassist-vocalist using guitar distortion. Their 2004 album, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, featured an illustration of the duo with elephant trunks instead of noses on the cover, and the music felt like an elephant dance party. They broke up a couple of years later, and bassist-vocalist Jesse F. Keeler formed the electro-focused Msterkrft. He reunited with drummer Sebastian Grainger in 2011 and now splits duties between Msterkrft and rumbling the earth with DFA79 on three reunion albums. —K.G.

43
Sum 41
Scott Harrison/Getty Images

Formed during a 1996 summer vacation from high school, Sum 41 hit big with the sneering, mosh-pit-ready rock-rap earworm “Fat Lip” in 2001, and rode the Warped Tour wave to more radio and MTV success over the course of a decade. The Ajax, Ontario, band — which announced its breakup in May, after 27 years — often resisted the “punk” tag, and with good reason; on later records, they augmented punk’s three-chords-and-the-truth building blocks with flourishes of piano and prog-rock ambition, while their massive riffs were clearly the result of their closely studying metal’s stadium-shaking sonics. —M.J.

42
Peaches
David Wolff - Patrick/WireImage

Blending the in-your-face attitude of punk with the hard-hitting beats of 21st-century electro and a grad seminar’s worth of gender theory, Toronto’s Peaches has been putting forth an ever-evolving art project that’s as confrontational as it is catchy. “Fuck the Pain Away,” the 2000 single that updated L’Trimm for the electroclash age, remains as head-swiveling a cut as ever two-plus decades after its release, thanks to Peaches’ brash delivery and incessant dime-store-synth beat. She’s brought her sex-positive, humor-laced brand of feminism to TV shows like OrphanBlack and records by Christina Aguilera and P!nk, pushing forward pop in her own way. —M.J.

41
Metric
Wendy Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

While members of Metric have lived in both Canada and stateside, Toronto is their base and a part of the band’s fabric. Emily Haines and James Shaw met in that city and formed the band more than two decades ago, and several of their eight studio albums were recorded at Shaw’s Giant Studios in Toronto. They are also part of Broken Social Scene’s musical collective (Haines takes the lead on the beloved indie classic “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.”). Together with Joshua Winstead and Joules Scott-Key, their New Wave-tinged music — like the propulsive “Gold Guns Girls” and “Black Sheep” — has earned them Juno Awards and flavored soundtracks. At the center of their sound is Haines’ versatile singing, which can range from ethereal and sultry to soaring, empowering the lyrics she’s written for Metric, other artists, and her own piano-buoyed solo work. —A.L.

07-05-2023, 09:08 AM	#1
charlene Moderator Join Date: May 2000 Posts: 16,001	Rolling Stone Magazine-Top 50 Canadian Artists https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...x8S0xU8mrS82b0 PHOTOS at link. From its sweet-ass health care system to its foxy nepo-baby prime minister to its absolutely banging national anthem, Canada has always had it going on. Sure, this hellish summer-wildfire shit has kind of been an unexpected plot twist — but no country is perfect, right? Canada has about a tenth the population of the United States, which only makes its outsize impact on the history of music that much more incredible (excellent arts-education funding, eh?). The stats here are astounding. Three of the five or so greatest songwriters who ever lived are from Canada, as is the most beloved prog-rock band, most significant country singer of the Nineties, the biggest hip-hop artist of the past 20 years, and the quintessential R&B star of our era. Get this: the greatest Americana roots rock band of all time? You guessed it: Canadian! (Well, four fifths at least.) To honor Canada Day, here is the CanCon our friends in the Great White North deserve: Rolling Stone’s definitive rundown of the greatest Canadian artists in the history of pop music. Is every single significant Canadian musician on here? Nope. The 50 we like the most are, though. So, please allow us to preemptively extend our sincere and respectful condolences to members and fans of the Cowboy Junkies, DeadMau5, Bruce Cockburn, Skinny Puppy, the Pointed Sticks, Voivod, Bran Van 300, Buck 65, Chilliwack, the Weakerthans, Toronto, and many other very worthy acts. There’s a lot of Canada out there. 50 Snow UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 01: REGGAE SUNSPLASH Photo of SNOW (Photo by John Lynn Kirk/Redferns) John Lynn Kirk/Redferns/Getty Images If Snow had never done anything other than be a reggae-influenced Canadian rapper named Snow, it would be enough to wholly solidify his historical legacy. An Irish Canadian kid from Toronto who got into reggae via his Jamaican immigrant neighbors, Darrin O’Brien took on his outrageously brilliant stagename and made his debut LP, 12 Inches of Snow, in 1992. Upon the album’s release, he was doing jail time for his involvement in a brawl, but when he got out his wonderful one-hit-wonder juggernaut “The Informer” was a massive, if somewhat unlikely, worldwide hit. A fun hip-hop/reggae jam perfectly fit the casually eclectic vibe of the hey-whatever Nineties, and its culture-bridging legacy remains strong. In 2019, reggaeton king Daddy Yankee brought Snow on for “Con Calma,” a “The Informer”-tinged hit that was nominated for a Latin Grammy. —J.D. 49 Martha and the Muffins Peter Noble/Redferns/Getty Images Martha and the Muffins blew out of Toronto’s New Wave scene with their classic 1980 club hit “Echo Beach.” Martha Johnson sings in the relatable voice of an office clerk, bored at her 9-to-5 job, fantasizing of a romantic beach escape all by herself, over herky-jerky guitar/synth churn. These Muffins had other excellent hits with extremely New Wave titles: “Women Around the World At Work,” “Several Styles of Blonde Girls Dancing,” and the anthem “Be Blasé.” But their finest moment came in 1984, when they shortened their name to M+M and dropped the 12-inch bombshell “Black Stations/White Stations,” a prescient attack on Eighties radio segregation, with the party chant: “Black stations, white stations, get on the floor/Stand up and face the music, this is 1984!” They were so ahead of their time. —R.S. 48 Terri Clark Paul Natkin/WireImage The much-revered era of Nineties country just wouldn’t have been the same without the contributions of Terri Clark. The Alberta-born singer got her start playing for tips (and a $15 flat rate) at Nashville’s famous honky-tonk Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in 1987, and raced into the Top Three just a few years later with her 1995 debut single, “Better Things to Do.” With a powerful voice and a cowgirl swagger, Clark was a more rough-hewn counterpoint to Nineties vixens like Shania Twain and Faith Hill — brave enough to cover Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and, like Linda Ronstadt before her, turn it into a hit. She carried that momentum into the 2000s too with radio staples like “I Wanna Do It All” and “Girls Lie Too.” There’s a good reason Reba chose her to open her recent tour: Clark rules. —J.H. 47 April Wine Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Pioneering arena rockers April Wine moved from Halifax to Montreal at the start of the Seventies, and then spent the rest of the decade churning out tuneful, middle-of-the-road rock hits, alternating between sentimental, keyboard-sweetened love songs, and upbeat, guitar-heavy love songs. The band enjoyed a number of firsts — their fourth album, Stand Back, was the first Canadian album to sell 100,000 units; they were also the first Canadian band to gross $1 million from a single tour — but of the 10 Juno nominations the band accumulated, there was not a single winner. As singer Myles Goodwyn later admitted, “I’ve written so much god-awful crap it’s ridiculous.” —J.D.C. 46 Daniel Caesar FilmMagic The covers of Daniel Caesar’s LPs are a helpful framework for understanding the Torontonian’s music. 2017’s Freudian shows Caesar climbing up the side of a monument; on 2019’s Case Study 01 and this year’s Never Enough, he’s blurred, mid-action, moving but unhurried. His music, when it focuses, can be rapturous, netting Grammy noms for slow-blooming torch songs like “Best Part” and “Get You.” But those moments are idylls for a musician whose music seems to wander from relationship to relationship, place to place, mood to mood. Like those album covers, his music captures him in an act of searching.” —C.P. 45 Barenaked Ladies Bob Berg/Getty Images Hailing from Scarborough, the same Toronto suburb that gave the world Mike Myers, BNL emerged in the early Nineties as a tuneful, self-effacing alternative to college-rock cool. Coming on like a cross between Lennon and McCartney and Doug and Bob McKenzie, frontmen Steven Page and Ed Robertson parodied pop-song tropes even as they quietly embraced them, an approach that hit its apex with the 1998 earworm “One Week.” The two fell out in the aughts, sparked both by a royalties dispute over the theme to Big Bang Theory and, later, Page’s 2008 arrest on cocaine charges. Page departed in 2009, returning only for a “one-time” reunion at the 2018 Juno Awards. —J.D.C. 44 Death From Above 1979 Michael Hurcomb/Corbis/Getty Images At the peak of the early 2000s disco-punk revival, Death From Above 1979 stormed down from Toronto with an especially noisy take on the genre, since the lineup was just a drummer and a bassist-vocalist using guitar distortion. Their 2004 album, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, featured an illustration of the duo with elephant trunks instead of noses on the cover, and the music felt like an elephant dance party. They broke up a couple of years later, and bassist-vocalist Jesse F. Keeler formed the electro-focused Msterkrft. He reunited with drummer Sebastian Grainger in 2011 and now splits duties between Msterkrft and rumbling the earth with DFA79 on three reunion albums. —K.G. 43 Sum 41 Scott Harrison/Getty Images Formed during a 1996 summer vacation from high school, Sum 41 hit big with the sneering, mosh-pit-ready rock-rap earworm “Fat Lip” in 2001, and rode the Warped Tour wave to more radio and MTV success over the course of a decade. The Ajax, Ontario, band — which announced its breakup in May, after 27 years — often resisted the “punk” tag, and with good reason; on later records, they augmented punk’s three-chords-and-the-truth building blocks with flourishes of piano and prog-rock ambition, while their massive riffs were clearly the result of their closely studying metal’s stadium-shaking sonics. —M.J. 42 Peaches David Wolff - Patrick/WireImage Blending the in-your-face attitude of punk with the hard-hitting beats of 21st-century electro and a grad seminar’s worth of gender theory, Toronto’s Peaches has been putting forth an ever-evolving art project that’s as confrontational as it is catchy. “Fuck the Pain Away,” the 2000 single that updated L’Trimm for the electroclash age, remains as head-swiveling a cut as ever two-plus decades after its release, thanks to Peaches’ brash delivery and incessant dime-store-synth beat. She’s brought her sex-positive, humor-laced brand of feminism to TV shows like OrphanBlack and records by Christina Aguilera and P!nk, pushing forward pop in her own way. —M.J. 41 Metric Wendy Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images While members of Metric have lived in both Canada and stateside, Toronto is their base and a part of the band’s fabric. Emily Haines and James Shaw met in that city and formed the band more than two decades ago, and several of their eight studio albums were recorded at Shaw’s Giant Studios in Toronto. They are also part of Broken Social Scene’s musical collective (Haines takes the lead on the beloved indie classic “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.”). Together with Joshua Winstead and Joules Scott-Key, their New Wave-tinged music — like the propulsive “Gold Guns Girls” and “Black Sheep” — has earned them Juno Awards and flavored soundtracks. At the center of their sound is Haines’ versatile singing, which can range from ethereal and sultry to soaring, empowering the lyrics she’s written for Metric, other artists, and her own piano-buoyed solo work. —A.L.