Happy Canada Day: The Two Best Pieces Of CanCon Given To Me By MuchMusic

It’s Canada Day! As people celebrate our neighbors to the north with ice-cold Molsons and even chillier responses to having bankrupted NHL teams relocate there, I thought I’d look back on the brief period 10 year ago when my cable system received the Canadian music-video channel MuchMusic, which later turned into MuchMusic USA, which then became Fuse. But I remember those early, heady days of non-Viacom-sponsored music television quite fondly, because the Toronto-based MuchMusic had something going for it that boring old American channels didn’t: CanCon regulations, which stipulated that a certain amount of programming had to be given over to acts from the homeland. Sure, this resulted in a lot of Our Lady Peace, but it was an OK enough tradeoff for the occasional video by Sloan–as well as the clips after the jump.
Plumtree - “Scott Pilgrim”
Sludgy, awkward-crush pop? Sign me up! And sign up cult comics figure Bryan Lee O’Malley, too.
Prozzak - “www.nevergetoveryou”
Ah, 1999. You were such a heady time! The word “blog” had just been coined, the first dot-com bubble was just inflating, I was being invited to launch parties for Web sites that never wound up existing. It was only in this time that a song incorporating both a malformed URL and a sample of the “new message” sound from the proto-IM client ICQ could have been birthed, really.
And finally, a video that I didn’t learn about from MuchMusic, but hell, it might be one of the best pop songs of the past 20 years:
Len, “Steal My Sunshine”

I really need to try a butter tart someday. Anyway, feel free to reach across the longitudinal parallel appropriate to your geographic location and share your favorite Canadian musicians here!

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