Eager to impress his new employers, he went on weekly pilgrimages to the record store strip on Toronto’s Yonge Street, scanning the consignment walls at HMV and Sam the Record Man for the kind of unplucked gems he’d have seen at the Toucan in Kingston. It was there that he discovered the self-released Thriller by Son, led by Jason Beck, a recent McGill grad who was, in Jordan’s words, “basically trying to Frankenstein Prince and Elvis Costello together, and totally succeeding.” Jordan bought the record out of curiosity, and by the end of the day his colleagues were convinced that both talent and scout were ingenious.
“Of course, nobody bought it,” he recalls, “so my stock just plummeted.” He’s now forty-four, hair depleted but youthful wardrobe intact, and his nervous tics are mostly tamed by a scrappy confidence (he bears a resemblance to Law and Order’s Christopher Meloni, but without stage makeup). His manner, a glissando between industry suit and gushing fan boy, belies a career marked by disappointments. After Son followed Thriller with another bomb, 1997’s Wolfstein, they were dropped from the label. Jordan’s next signing was Big Wreck, an act whose primed-for-radio bravado presented an ugly contrast to his first discovery. “I kind of liked the idea of my job more than I liked my job,” he says, “more than I liked beating my head against the wall trying to get interesting things signed and having to settle on Ricky J,” referring to the poor man’s Vanilla Ice from Montreal.
The big Canadian labels had always produced a lot of pap. As Stuart Berman writes in This Book Is Broken, his oral history of Broken Social Scene, they were all branches of international companies, mandated to produce blockbusters for export to their (mostly) Yankee masters. This left little room for the bands Jordan had grown up on, whose music wasn’t made to appeal to middle-of-the-road audiences. By the mid- to late ’90s, most of them — King Cobb Steelie, Change of Heart, the Inbreds, names familiar to anyone who listened to college radio then — had retreated back into obscurity, their hopes of ever making it big crushed, their stories retold as cautionary tales to the next generation of independent artists. Otherwise, they fled the country: Beck, for his part, decamped to Europe with his friends Merrill Nisker (later Peaches) and, eventually, Leslie Feist (later Feist), reinventing himself as Gonzales. As it turned out, obscurity was a better fit than the limelight. As Jordan toiled in the mainstream, Canadian alternative musicians went it alone, in total freedom. “You weren’t going to sell a million records in the States, so you didn’t even worry about it,” says James Keast, editor-in-chief of the independent music monthly Exclaim! “It was like worrying about being gored by a unicorn on the way home. And since suddenly your reasons for doing it were your own, it meant the music was good.”
Good music was disseminated independently, or through small labels that ran on shoestring budgets, generating just enough profit to finance a few more releases. Labels like Noise Factory, which issued albums by soon-to-be members of Broken Social Scene, operated out of their owners’ apartments. To be a musician who tended bar or peddled records to make ends meet was no longer a sign of failure; since sales were a pipe dream anyway, being part of a creative clique was infinitely more gratifying than being signed to a major. So it seemed like poetic justice when peer-to-peer file sharing, starting with Napster in 1999, began to flood the mainstream music market with free goods. The indie labels, with their lean budgets, online cunning, manageable rosters, and devoted fan bases made up of friends and friends of friends, flourished, while the majors staggered under the weight of their overheads.
They were more risk averse than ever by the time Three Gut Records, a label run by two friends out of Guelph, released the debut album by the Constantines, a band hailed as punk rock’s answer to Bruce Springsteen. The Canadian press loved it. The music website Pitchfork Media, oracle of all things independent, loved it. The Constantines’ success, purely critical at the time, tipped off the public that something important was happening in Canadian music. “I felt like I was in a position to potentially become involved and help exploit — well, ‘exploit’ is kind of a nasty word, but to help spread the love,” says Jordan. He tried but failed to secure a Warner deal for his new favourites, but that was a clash of worlds, and it was increasingly unclear which one Jordan belonged to. Later that year, he was fired.
Warner, he realized, was not in the business of spreading the love, so he dreamt up another way to do it. He’d create a “community of music listeners” and give them a forum from which to make taste; they would be entrusted with selecting the best Canadian albums of the year, based on merit alone. Unlike the Junos, whose winners are largely determined by industry professionals with a stake in their sales figures, the recipients of this new award would be nominated by broadcasters, programmers, bloggers, and critics. And the winning album, whose makers would receive $20,000 in prize money, would be hand picked by an elite grand jury of music experts. It would be the one Canadian award to strike indie musicians, once skeptical of conventional accolades, as legit.
Five cycles into the Polaris Music Prize (named after the North Star), “indie” has become shorthand for “interesting” in musical parlance, and many bands who have made the Polaris short list have received the acclaim they deserved. The Constantines’ tenth anniversary was commemorated in the Toronto Star. Broken Social Scene’s fourth record debuted at number one on the Canadian charts. Feist’s albums now challenge Carole King’s for most gifted on Mother’s Day. The winners, meanwhile, are beloved acts that haven’t quite broken big yet: Owen Pallett, then known as Final Fantasy; Patrick Watson; Caribou; and Fucked Up, a band who, as the name suggests, came up in the Toronto hardcore punk scene but had warmed to melody by the time their second full-length album, The Chemistry of Common Life, won the prize in 2009.
As a tent for Canadian music scenes nationwide, Polaris served notice that Canada, on the strength of its independent rock bands, is finally, inconceivably cool — disproving the cliché that, as Peaches once told an interviewer for Canoe.ca, “You can’t become anything in Canada unless you leave Canada.” Its cachet is the triumph of taste over consumption, independence over conglomeration. This, at least, is what you’ll read in the press kits.
Creative communities can make art, but they don’t often know what to do with it. “We were so phenomenally unprepared,” says Owen Pallett, spruce in his Paul Smith scarf despite the mild weather. He’s talking about Blocks, the label that released his first two records, Has a Good Home and the Polaris-winning He Poos Clouds. Blocks was co-founded in 2003 by musicians Mark McLean and Steve Kado, Pallett’s former bandmate in Toronto’s “gay church music” legend, the Hidden Cameras. Their slogan is “Don’t try, do!” and, true to this ethos, most of their releases are manufactured on someone’s carpet out of cardboard and glue. When Has a Good Home started to sell forty copies a night during Pallett’s inaugural tour, Kado nearly worked himself into an early grave trying to keep up with demand. At the time, Blocks barely had the wherewithal to supply local record shops, never mind get the album to fans outside their environs. Has a Good Home and He Poos Clouds earned the label enough money to buy bushels of craft supplies, but Pallett enlisted European labels Tomlab and the much larger Domino to release his records beyond Canada.
And he wasn’t alone. When the Constantines’ success began to exhaust Three Gut’s resources, the band signed an international deal with Seattle’s Sub Pop. Three Gut remained their home base until the label folded a year later when sole surviving staff member Lisa Moran collapsed under the workload. In 2007, Caribou, by then residing in London, England, signed with the American indie label Merge, home of the multimillion-selling Arcade Fire, themselves graduates of Montreal’s indie rock scene. Fucked Up worked their way up to Matador, one of North America’s most storied indie rock labels, based in New York. In short, they did what Canadian musicians have been doing since Hank Snow fled for the bright lights of Nashville. Many maintained close ties to their scenes of origin (Pallett donated much of his Polaris winnings to Blocks affiliates, and the rest went toward his boyfriend’s student loans). The smart ones ensured their copyrights were Canadian owned, entitling themselves to domestic arts grants. But they didn’t count on their friends to get their wares to market, something Jordan — who conceived of Polaris in part as a way of repatriating some of these lost acts — knows as well as anyone.
It took international labels to bring domestic independent acts to foreign audiences, and foreign approval to get average Canadians jazzed about their projects — not exactly a new trajectory for Canadian art. But former major label execs like Jordan recognized a demand for infrastructure early on, and by 2003 they began looking to the independent music scene for opportunities. “You see independent radio promotion companies more than ever before in this country, marketing companies, lots of independent labels, and they’re all staffed with ex–major label people,” says Jeffrey Remedios, a former publicist for Virgin/EMI and the co-founder of Arts & Crafts Productions, home to Broken Social Scene and company (Feist, Stars) and, nowadays, the Constantines. Arts & Crafts operates out of a downtown Toronto loft furnished with sleek vintage upholstery and mounted gig posters. In the open concept workspace, employees in street clothes do business to an impractically loud soundtrack; Remedios and his well-manicured assistant work out of sight, presumably in peace and quiet.
