“Across the Great Divide”: Imitation and Inflection in Canadian Rock Music

Abstract

This paper theorizes an aesthetic framework for understanding Canadian rock music by examining the economic/historical conditions in this country’s music industry and their relation to the music industry in the United States which largely determines it. A dialectical tension between imitation of American rock forms and playing with their conventions is presented, and examples from the beginning of pop rock in Canada in the 1950s to the present are discussed to show that an essential characteristic of Canadian music is generic subversion. It is chiefly in this way that Canadian rock artists have attempted to make Canadian rock and roll.

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