Sum 41, Simple Plan, Avril Lavigne.
Any good Canadian can tell you these are internationally popular artists that hail from here at home, but far fewer understand their significant contribution to the broader 2000s pop-punk boom. But if Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel have anything to say about it, that's about to change.
Their new book, In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World (out this week through House of Anansi Press), explores the massive contribution Canadian bands made to the pop-punk explosion at the beginning of the century. Looking at nine such bands, including Gob, Alexisonfire and Billy Talent, Bobkin and Feibel make the case that, even though the genre is most commonly associated with California, that doesn't tell the full story. "blink-182 and Sum 41 were talked about in equal measure," says Bobkin, noting that they stormed the pop charts together.
"Several major artists within this punk, hardcore, pop-punk scene, all emerging and becoming dominant around the same time and helping to define a cultural moment, and all from Canada," says Feibel, "It seemed unprecedented for all these artists becoming like our own backyard."
Whether its pop-punk moshing its way into the mainstream, influencing pop artists to play with punk sounds, or allowing hardcore to flirt with melody and hooks, "You can't talk about 2000s pop punk without talking about Canada," says Bobkin.
Bobkin and Feibel met writing for Exclaim! They bonded over the formative influence these bands had on them and a shared frustration with how maligned they all tended to be in the music press, both in Canada and abroad. "I got a ton of shit as a kid for liking these bands," says Bobkin. "Becoming critics, we felt we had an opportunity to use our platform." Now, they're changing the narrative.
The Toronto-based music journalists lay the blame for the general public's ignorance on the Gen X–millenial generation gap. "All the bands that are featured in the book were the earliest millennial artists to become successful," says Bobkin, 31. There was a sense that the wrong bands experienced too much success too soon in their careers. "There's all sorts of people willing to write something off that explodes very quickly," says Feibel, 33. "There's a lot of skepticism around that, particularly by people who are paid to be skeptical about it."
Although the bands profiled in the book didn't hail from a single scene, they are united by geography. Six are from Southern Ontario, and each of them cut their teeth in suburban DIY and all ages venues as opposed to downtown clubs.
"There's not enough critical mass of sub cultures in Canadian suburbs, because we have so few people" says Bobkin who credits this as a feature, not a bug. "That's where you get these weird amalgams, like Silverstein or Alexisonfire, because you have all these kids who have all these diverse tastes, who have to hang out together because they have no other choice."
The diversity of styles meant that some artists would get left out of the duo's larger narrative. To get around this inevitability, Bobkin and Feibel included numerous sidebars in each chapter, detailing foundational bands like Grade and Chixdiggit, influential contemporaries like Moneen and Not by Choice, and modern inheritors like Fucked Up. "There's another version of the book where maybe we go a bit broader and there's chapters on Propagandhi, for example," says Feibel. "But for the main chapters, we looked at whether they were big to a major audience."
To that end, the authors purposely used a very broad definition of pop-punk when narrowing down which artists to focus on. "There are very different influences and ways of embodying the punk rock spirit," says Feibel. But from Silverstein to Fefe Dobson, what each of the artists they profile had was "some combination of the sound, the look and the attitude, of punk rock."
Marianas Trench's inclusion is particularly likely to ruffle some feathers. Even the band's own Josh Ramsay pushed back against the idea that they should be included in the book. "They didn't owe their sound as strongly to punk rock as Gob did," says Feibel, noting that, after their 2006 album Fix Me, Marianas Trench would lean harder into the pop influences that had always been there. Still that record and its success fit the mold. "They're past that moment, but, well, we're writing about that moment," Feibel adds.
The continued urge to dictate what does and doesn't count as punk in this period speaks to truly no-styles-barred attitude that so many of these bands brought to the table. "Nobody could tell these artists what to do," says Bobkin.
That includes Sum 41 playing with hip-hop and hair metal, and Avril Lavigne throwing off her early country influences. "All of them had that same anti-establishment ethos that put them at odds with the industry, and they all fought to be heard. Even if they didn't always know who to namecheck and who to hate, all the artists in the book were influenced by punk and influenced punk artists," says Bobkin.
"That's punk as hell to me."