Rise Up: Canadian Pop Music in the 1980s

Released in tandem with This Beat Goes On: Canadian Pop Music in the 1970s and broadcasted as part of CBC's Doc Zone series, director Gary McGroarty's Rise Up: Canadian Pop Music in the 1980s tackles the biggest, flashiest and most ambitious era in Canadian music. As This Beat Goes On attempted to draw a line from the 1971 CanCon ruling to the success of Canadian music on both sides of the border, Rise Up documents the advent of music television and the stars they proceeded to generate. Music video pioneers like Chilliwack and Triumph, picked up by early MTV, inspired a brave new wave of image-conscious bands to look sharp, act sexy and create a whole new kind of art. Rise Up focuses heavily on the fusion of '70s genres, like new wave/reggae (the Parachute Club, Truths and Rights), art pop (Jane Siberry, the Pursuit of Happiness), alt-country (Cowboy Junkies, k.d. lang) and blues rock (Powder Blues Band, Jeff Healey). Along with the scope of '00s artists (Brendan Canning, k-os, Sam Roberts) obsessing over their favourites from the era, Rise Up does a tremendous job demonstrating the notion of Canadian music of the '80s as stage setter for the mosaic atmosphere of our current music scene. Giving the same amount of face time to those whose sound fuelled Canadian pop (Bryan Adams, the Tragically Hip) as to those who helped change its look (Dalbello, Men Without Hats), Rise Up captures the zeitgeist by representing the stars behind Canadian pop music in the '80s for what exactly they were: stars.