I liked Part One of Rise Up: Canadian Pop Music in the 1980s a lot more than I did either part of This Beat Goes On: Canadian Pop Music in the 1970s.  Although the general Shakin’ All Over/This Beat Goes On formulae are repeated, the first half of Rise Up has tons of genuine hits – Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance,” Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” The Parachute Club’s “Rise Up,” Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night,” Bryan Adams’…well, Bryan Adams, Triumph’s “Magic Power”…can I stop now?

There isn’t much proselytizing on Rise Up.  The name-checked bands, with few exceptions, are important to Canadian music history – The Pursuit of Happiness, Slow, hell, even Gowan.  I don’t understand why CBC continues to sell me on the merits of Jane Siberry, and I’m not convinced that Daniel Lavoie should have been featured on Rise Up.  Still, it’s the first hour and no one’s even mentioned k.d. lang, Cowboy Junkies, Blue Rodeo, Mitsou or Alannah Myles.  That has to count for something.

The 1980s music videos make Rise Up entertaining.  There’s the odd bit of concert footage, like Triumph at the 1983 US Festival, but the videos really sell the documentary.  It’s amazing how important these things were seen as being in the 1980s versus their actual quality.

Take Gowan’s video for “A Criminal Mind.”  The video’s production values are excellent for the era.  Shit, Canadian voiceover legend Len Carlson kicks off “A Criminal Mind” like he’s pitching for Kraft.  The video’s content?  Uh, something about a blue-skinned supervillain.  Oh, and white goop.  It was the 1980s.  Videos just needed to be back then.

MuchMusic’s role in promoting Canadian music is bigged up, but not as much as one would think.  While much of Rise Up is based around music video culture, MuchMusic is grist for Rise Up‘s fast-moving mill.

MuchMusic’s greatest accomplishment is in its aesthetics – the open-concept “sets,” live-to-air on-camera fuckups, the “throw it in” approach to the channel.  It would be easy to say the Internet killed MuchMusic, but the channel really died the moment it became a lifestyle channel.  Ren and Stimpy is as good a suspect to blame as any.

The weakest part of Rise Up is its lack of variety relative to This Beat Goes On.  Canadians should be familiar with Payola$’ “Eyes of a Stranger,” 54-40′s “I Go Blind” and The Pursuit of Happiness’ “I’m an Adult Now.”  Exceptions are made for Dalbello, Slow and The Box, but Jian Ghomeshi doesn’t start referencing Skinny Puppy or Nomeansno.

In fact, an argument can be made that Skinny Puppy are worthy of mention in Rise Up – in the days before Sarah McLachlan, Skinny Puppy made Nettwerk Records.  Few bands in industrial rock have their international profile.  Maybe they appear in Part Two, I don’t know.

Rise Up contains few surprises for the hardcore Canadian music fan, but I like it.  I don’t even mind hearing how Slow predated the grunge sound by a few years.  Having a Michael Barclay book named after one of the band’s songs screams “HELLO, I’M AN OVERUSED REFERENCE.”  Hopefully, Rise Up‘s second half will be as good as its first half.

As a bonus, here’s the debut of MuchMusic on August 31, 1984.  Warning: features darkies and chroma key.

Canadian punk kicks off the second part of This Beat Goes On (review of Part One here.)  The Demics, The Viletones, D.O.A. and Teenage Head are given mention, which doesn’t surprise me.  The still-active Subhumans get one clip and aren’t mentioned by name, which does.

Cleave Anderson of the Battered Wives is interviewed, yet the Battered Wives aren’t talked about at all.  There weren’t that many notable Canadian punk bands of the 1970s, so what gives?  Anderson’s more famous as the original drummer for Blue Rodeo, but the Battered Wives did open for Elvis Costello.  That has to count for something.

Covering Teenage Head is like including roast beef in a roast beef sandwich.  If a generalist Canadian rock documentary doesn’t mention Teenage Head, something has gone wrong.  Where the hell are the Forgotten Rebels in the documentary, anyway?  The band’s only been around for 32 years, but they didn’t cause a riot at Ontario Place.  Notoriety sells, I guess.

As for Rough Trade, I don’t want to hear how incendiary “High School Confidential” was for the fiftieth time.  I’m not taking away from the song’s importance to the lesbian community, but it’s a tired point.  O/Rough Trade were around for twelve years before “High School Confidential.”  Hell, “All Touch” charted higher than “High School Confidential,” yet “High School Confidential” is Rough Trade’s signature song.

This Beat Goes On immediately goes south when Neil Young is tagged as a punk forefather.  The plaudit doesn’t do Neil Young justice.  The man has never played to trends, but can Nicholas Jennings and Gary McGroarty at least mention Harvest, On the Beach and/or Tonight’s the Night?  This Beat Goes On limits itself to Rust Never Sleeps material, which is a shame.

As for Nash the Slash, it’s great that he’s being talked about, but no FM?  Black Noise was reissued five times in Canada and twice in the United States!  Granted, three of those times were due to Passport Records’ inability to stay solvent, but FM’s 1970s output is worthy enough for This Beat Goes On.

This Beat Goes On has a bad habit of believing the 1970s ended in 1980, thus working in songs like The Kings’ “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide.”  The art of combining two songs into one isn’t new.  The Guess Who famously did that with “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature.”  This Beat Goes On has producer Bob Ezrin claim “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide” as one of the first intentional two-for-one singles, but it’s not like The Kings spearheaded a trend.

Ezrin is still a hell of a producer, though.  He should have been featured on This Beat Goes On.  The man worked with Alice Cooper, KISS, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel.  In the 1970s, he was money.

I could have done without the Burton Cummings/Dan Hill/Gino Vannelli troika of easy listening.  Sure, they’re culturally relevant to the documentary.  So is Claudja Barry, and Jian Ghomeshi doesn’t talk about “Boogie Woogie Dancin’ Shoes.”  Murray McLauchlan and Stan Rogers are given almost too much airtime, but their works are more interesting than watching Cummings pussify himself.

Rush and April Wine are held off until the end of the documentary.  Max Webster are given mention, as are Streetheart (in passing), but where the fuck are Chilliwack?  The band’s previous lives as The Classics and The Collectors are featured on Shakin’ All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s.  Chilliwack had a few hits in the 1970s – “Crazy Talk,” “Lonesome Mary” and “Fly at Night.”  The big hits “My Girl” and “Whatcha Gonna Do (When I’m Gone)” were to come, but those are being saved for Rise Up: Canadian Pop Music in the 1980s.

Loverboy shouldn’t even be in this documentary.  Loverboy formed in 1980 and are synonymous with the 1980s.  That’s like talking about Saturday Night Live in the 1970s and focusing on Eddie Murphy.  Lead singer Mike Reno was in Moxy for a cup of coffee.  Why not just talk about Moxy?

I realize this review is full of “where are Random Band X” questions.  This Beat Goes On is as deep as the after-effects of a bong hit by design, but the second half of TBGO underlines my problems with it.  For a documentary about the 1970s, the early 1980s are referenced far too often.  The punk section’s history is too cleaned-up, ignoring a few notable bands.

Two hours isn’t enough time to cover ten years of music.  This Beat Goes On is the sort of documentary that works better as a miniseries or limited series.  I wonder why CBC hasn’t plumped for that idea yet.  Maybe the music rights issues are too thorny.  I’d rather watch that show than a sitcom version of Men With Brooms.

When Shakin’ All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s aired in 2006, Jian Ghomeshi was still a CBC fill-in host for shows like Sounds Like Canada.  He had his own shows in 50 Tracks and The National Playlist, but he wasn’t the fully-formed irritant he is today.  Ghomeshi didn’t add much to Shakin’ All Over, which was a rundown of Great Canadian Hits mixed with comments from Current Canadian Singers.

The basic formula for Shakin’ All Over has been repeated for This Beat Goes On: Canadian Pop Music in the 1970s (CBC: August 27 & September 3, 9:00 PM ET/PT as part of Doc Zone).  This and Rise Up: Canadian Pop Music in the 1980s are being aired as part of Doc Zone‘s programming, which is odd as Shakin’ All Over merited a two-hour Monday timeslot.  I’ll never be able to divine CBC’s programming logic, but at least the documentaries are out.

I don’t think Jian Ghomeshi should have been kept as narrator for This Beat Goes On.  Ghomeshi sounds like he can’t be arsed to talk about one of Canada’s more interesting musical decades.  This Beat Goes On retains the turgid prose he is famous for on Q, but this material needs a more engaging narrator.  Ghomeshi can’t pretend to like every Canadian one hit wonder.

The first hour covers, as it should, highlights on the level of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Ian Thomas and The Guess Who.  Later on, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell’s jazz era are covered.  Lightfoot looks somewhat emaciated in his interview segments, which is not surprising as he’s in his seventies.  Even Valdy is given his propers.  It doesn’t make “Rock And Roll Song” any less whiny, but fuck it, he’s Valdy.

Blues and blues rock are given a good chunk of airtime.  Footage is shown of McKenna Mendelson Mainline performing at Toronto’s Victory Theatre burlesque house, which is awesome.  The Mainline footage was shot for the Ontario Educational Communications Authority by Moses Znaimer, in the days before the OECA embraced modernism and called itself TVOntario.

It’s also nice to see footage of Downchild Blues Band, Dutch Mason Blues Band and David Wilcox.  Their shit still holds up thirty-some-odd years later.  Crowbar are comparatively dusted over, even though they had a huge hit single in 1971.

French-language bands get their foot in This Beat Goes On‘s door – Beau Dommage, Robert Charlebois, Les Séguin, Gilles Valiquette, Harmonium.  Northern Ontario’s CANO also earn a look-over.  This Beat Goes On: Canadian Pop Music in the 1970s is weighed down by Toronto and Vancouver-centrism, so it makes sense to include Quebec and Northern Ontario somewhere in the documentary.

This Beat Goes On‘s major failing – aside from the faux-widescreen bars placed on top of full-frame archival footage; nice going – is repetition of the Shakin’ All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s formula.  No shit you’ll see Ron Sexsmith, Sam Roberts and Great Big Sea’s Alan Doyle talk about Big Canadian Hits.  Nash the Slash gets tons of interview time for some reason.  Promoters are featured heavily, which makes sense as they had thankless jobs in the 1970s.

This Beat Goes On‘s first hour is predictable, yet enjoyable.  Disco is justifiably ignored, while the lasting Canadian artists are given attention.  The hour-long chunks work in the documentary’s favour, though This Beat Goes On‘s greatest hits format can only go so far.  The documentary doesn’t start to bite the big pink one until its second half, so take the good with the bad.