Bande à Part

"Gang of Losers" is the title and centerpiece track of The Dears' new album, but it isn't really a reference to the band. It's the anticipation of a movement. This is not an album; it's a recruitment campaign.

Let's get this out of the way: this album's going to be a failure measured by its own extraordinary ambition. But that's only appropriate. There's no such thing as a gang of losers. Losers don't hang together, and winners don't join them. There's that. And then there's the fact that, musically, the album is pretty uneven. At its best it's spine-tinglingly stunning, but the highlights are hidden in a lot of songs that don't immediately seem distinctive, that only reward after many listens. This is an effective formula for a great album, but not one destined for greatness.

But this is a must-hear album. Its content profoundly outstrips its form, and thoroughly redeems its weaknesses. The message is so pure, so sincere, and so relevant, that any hesitations about the music seem trite. If you know the Dears, you won't think this is their best album, but you also won't care: it's their most important. Complaining would be like joining the other party because you don't like your party's campaign colors.

So, what's the party platform? It's pretty simple, and so blindingly true that it's bound to inspire ridicule, resentment, and condescending reviews. First, there's lead singer Murray Lightburn's assessment of the situation:

"Every single one of us is getting massacred."

He's dead serious, and the critics will, no doubt, punish him for it. These are Canadians, folks. They're a funny breed. They watch the news. Not Fox news. Not just the Daily Show. But the news. They feel guilty about stuff like dropping bombs. They're cute that way.

This will inevitably be taken for melodrama. Murray telling us he's getting massacred is, on the face of it, as silly as his impossibly cool and photogenic bandmates posing in front of the words "gang of losers." But you have to stop thinking like an American to figure this out. If an American says everybody's getting massacred, she means: my cellphone rates are a rip-off. When a Canadian says it, she means: see those people over there being torn to shreds by bullets and bombs? - that's us, that's me.


So the gang of losers is everybody, as the album stresses by directly addressing the audience. It addresses you loud and clear, and in true recruitment fashion, it's "you" excludes no one: you = we. In their first video they even put the word "you" in flashing 30-foot letters.

"You and I are on the outside of almost everything."
"You and I, we have the same heart."
"We'll find our place in the world, if takes all day and all night."
"Nobody wants you, but we want you."

There's a faint sillouette of a soldier in combat gear on the cover; a similar image boldly heads the band's website. The only thing missing is a Maple Leaf version of Uncle Sam, finger pointing straight at your chest. But if everyone's already part of the club, who's left to join this band of outsiders? Same answer: everyone. If every single one of us is getting massacred, every single one of us is doing the massacring. The gang of losers persecutes itself. There's no in-crowd to blame. So the same refrain of "you" that picks out comrades and ask them to join up is also the repeated "you" that is assigned blame:

"You can try to break my heart, but it just won't be enough."
"Just don't hate everyone cause you hate yourself; you'll hate everyone till there's no one else."

Gang of Losers is an invitation to every single of one us to join a war against ourselves: against the part of ourselves that casts out and destroys the outsider in every group and the outsider in ourselves. Following a long musical tradition, it identifies this part of ourselves as "hate," and the movement of resistance as "love." These are tired and abused words, but the Dears make a valiant attempt to reclaim them for the cause of sincerity and sanity.

"We'll be okay. We're all okay."
"The world is really gonna love you."
"I believe in love, I swear it to you."

These are hard lyrics to pull off. And even if they do pull it off, it's bound to inspire bitter resentment in critics and entertainment seekers who resent any signs of a depth of commitment and conviction that they themselves are incapable of experiencing.

It may fly better with the less-jaded Canadian audience. Canada has not only refused to dismiss North America's admirable history of social and political optimism as a passing fad that was rightly forgotten along with the Pet Rock. It has also politically and culturally appropriated many of that tradition's values in their truest, and consequently most militant, form--namely, the belief that love = good, and hate = bad. That's an outmoded line of thinking, especially to the ears of those living in a nation that has successfully extended the Five Minute Hate to five years. But the gang of losers to our north, the ones who have sheltered and protected American's best convictions after we've exiled them from our own hearts, is not about to let it go without a fight. Canada is America's conscience, consequently its truest friend.

I'm not kidding. This is a Canadian Revolution, and if we're careful, it could become ours. It's a running theme in the Canadian indie-rock invasion. Stars' breakthrough album, titled "Heart," began with an introduction from each band member: "I'm Evan, and this is my heart," because they knew that these days you have to put your heart on your sleeve as solid evidence that you're among the remaining few that have actually got one. Another Canadian indie luminary, Emily Haines of Metric, recently lifted the lyrics to John Lennon's song "love" in their entirety, singing them absolutely, utterly, and cringingly straight: "Love is real. Real is love."

To hear these lyrics out of their standard context in this way is positive shocking, particularly in the context of a culture and era where to refuse hatred is the highest act of insubordination. It's as if Dan Rather had, with utter conviction, ended the evening news with:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too.

To express this kind of sentiment these days--unless it's a cute tribute to a beloved entertainer--is tantamount to treason. And it's not Cheney and Rumsfeld that are going to send Emily and the Dears into exile as punishment, it's Pitchfork and MTV. Maybe they'll lock down those borders this time.

Fortunately, the Dear's new album hasn't been released yet, so there's time to enjoy it before tepid reviews from the Ministry of Entertainment banish it forever from our cultural memories. The Dears want your body, they want your brains, they want your soul, brother. They want you. Join the losers. Sign up, tune in, get cast out. Five years after the purported end of irony and the beginning of the Five Years Hate, we have reached our Nuremburg. From here on out, you're either for hate or against it. It's time to choose sides.

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