Apologies if you're tired of me speaking about my experience moving to Montreal, but I don't really have much else going on these days.
It might just be my Ontario education bias, but I feel like the conflicting cultures of Ontario and Québec make up a huge part of Canadian history and identity. The differences between living in Ontario and in Québec are basically the only thing you learn about in elementary school history classes, so it's something I've thought a lot about since moving here.
There are obvious big differences that go without saying, like the language and not turning right on red lights, so we can skip over those. The biggest cultural difference, as far as I can tell, is that Ontarians deeply love rules and precautions and rarely deviate from them, whereas the Québécois tend to just do whatever and hope it works and ignore rules that they don't feel like following. Both tendencies have their advantages and drawbacks and I'm a little torn between the two as a bilingual anglo who lives in Hochelaga.
The weirdest thing about living here now is that differencing coming out in small ways too. I'm being hyperbolic, but the thing that sums up Québec the best to me is that at the grocery store everyone just leaves the carts unchained and doesn't link them up so that you need a quarter to use them. The lock is still there on the cart, but nobody ever uses it. In Ontario everyone is so anal about people breaking the rules that I've seen people link carts together even it's not theirs, but here everyone just says "No, I refuse this.'
Alright, time for a classic IMU swerve in the middle of a post to another subject. We're po-mo baby.
One of the weirdest things continues to be that the ska-punk band I was obsessed with in early high school turned into one of the biggest and most influential figures in punk over the last decade. I was reminded of this when I searched for Jeff Rosenstock guitar tabs on good old UltimateGuitar.com the other day and found multiple pages of options. Not even Bomb the Music Industry!, just solo Jeff! That in turn reminded me of writing bass tabs of Arrogant Sons of Bitches songs in high school and my submissions making up the majority of the content on their page. They're still there!
Anyways, Jeff Rosenstock put out an EP (I guess?) this year and I find it to be much better than his last couple of albums. It was initially four songs, but he's since added two more and it seems like it will be a collection of songs that grows bigger throughout the year. He's also kept it off of streaming services, so the only way to listen is to use Bandcamp or, as always, download it as a .zip file for free from his website. I think that him purposefully recreating the experience of me downloading Goodbye Cool World and then reading the lyrics in my bedroom is a big contributing factor to me liking it, but I also find that the songs feel more like "classic Jeff" to me, even though I can't really place why.
This is my favourite song on the release, and looking up a bass tab to it was why I ran into the above thoughts in the first place. There wasn't one yet, obviously, and I couldn't learn it by ear because I'm tone-deaf. Such is life.
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