Tragically

Maybe Downie was just drawing a parallel between the inexperienced Henry Hudson, who piloted the ill-fated flight that went down with Barilko, and the neophyte pilots of the Allied Air Forces. But it’s difficult to ignore the imperfections in this image of elite military pilots, these dashing and supposedly unquestionable heroes. Some of them were just kids. Some of them weren’t heroes at all—at least not yet. They were working it in. And if that image of Canadian history could be complicated so quickly, as a chaser to a story about a vanished hockey player, everything was questionable.

Elsewhere the lyrics were more directly adversarial. “Wheat Kings” was torn straight from the headlines, an acoustic track about David Milgaard, a 17-year-old wrongly convicted of a brutal rape and murder in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Milgaard served 23 years in prison before being released earlier that summer of 1992, and eventually fully exonerated. The song begins in a watercolor image of rural Canada, Downie singing of “sundown in the Paris of the Prairies,” but the veil is quickly pulled back to reveal the nightmare in Milgaard’s mind, “where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister/Hung with pictures of our parents’ prime ministers.” Five of them had served in the time it took Milgaard to be convicted, suffer behind bars, and find freedom.

Most urgent of all was “Looking for a Place to Happen,” which told the bloody and bitter story of European annexation of Native land from two perspectives. First, Downie gave voice to French explorer Jacques Cartier, who callously wanted “To find a place, an ancient race/The kind you’d like to gamble with,” before shifting the focus to an indigenous person fleeing for their life: “I’ll paint a scene, from memory/So I’d know who murdered me.” The Hip were not telling the story of a harmonious country. Everywhere on Fully Completely, there seemed to be injustice and death, a beautiful-seeming facade melting away to reveal something grotesque and disturbing.

Fully Completely exploded upon release in Canada, selling 200,000 copies in its five weeks. In the States, it performed so poorly that MCA pulled their marketing budget for it just a fortnight after its release. “Two weeks before the record comes out, all the record company is saying is, ‘It’s gonna be big boys, look out!’ Then the week after, no one returns our calls,” Sinclair said. “That’s the way it is.”

By July 1993, the band’s own optimism had curdled. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, drummer Gord Sinclair put it down to an attitude south of the border. “I think Americans have this weird thing about Canada,” he said. “They look north and figure it’s just the 52nd state. Being from Canada really does not have much of an impact for them. They just sort of assume that you’re a second-class American or American with a funny accent or French.”