Going down like a song: national identity, global commerce and the Great Canadian Party

Abstract

On 1 July 1992 over 100,000 people assembled in various locations across Canada to see their favourite bands play live at the Great Canadian Party. Broadcast on television and radio, this Canada Day spectacle celebrated the country's 125th birthday, but rather than being organised by the state or a non-profit making citizen's movement, it was facilitated by more than $100,000 of corporate sponsorship. Drawing on fieldwork in Vancouver, I will argue that external funding initially helped Canadian musicians but soon allowed outside sponsors to control the live music industry. These sponsors could then co-opt anxieties about national unity in a selective celebration designed purely for their own ends. By addressing the Great Canadian Party's emergence and historic moment the following discussion will explore what it meant for Canada to be represented through a giant commercial, a commercial drawing on shared national identity in order to sell the products of a global industry. The Party revealed how judiciously agents of commerce could use popular culture to negotiate between geographic scales. Despite that success, however, the resistance of participating bands suggests that the Party could not secure full hegemony for its sponsor's project.