PARIS—Sports and music make strange bedfellows. When they agree to jump in the sack at all, that is.

How strange can it get? Last week, hot-stuff rapper Lil Wayne started blogging about sports for ESPN.com. I should have noticed this, seeing as I spend upwards of 8 hours (equivalent to a 21-overtime hockey playoff game) surfing the Worldwide Leader’s archives.

But embarrassingly, it was actually pointed out to me by a friend of mine, Dave, the music editor at Eye Weekly in Toronto, who emailed me to get my take on the depth of Wayne’s sporting chops for his weekly web-music column, Totally Wired.

(The joke that got away, i.e. the one that came to me after Dave’s deadline: “Seriously, Lil Wayne? Dumping Ben Roethlisberger for Kurt Warner, just because Ben looks like he’s not going to turn it around, is like ditching Rihanna for Queen Latifah because Rihanna threw up on your shoes at the Grammys afterparty.”)

But there’s an even bigger case of music-sports crossover in the news this week, as we approach the NHL’s kick-off weekend: CBC’s search for a new Hockey Night in Canada anthem is into the home stretch.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation launched their “anthem challenge” back in June, on the heels of a ham-handed bungling of negotiations with the composer of HNIC’s iconic jingle to renew the broadcaster’s licensing agreement.

Depending on whom you ask, representatives of composer Dolores Claman either set too rich a price for Canada’s second national anthem (reportedly between $2.5 and $3 million for rights in perpetuity), or were low-balled by a budget-crunched CBC (Claman claimed the offer was $850,000). At one point, a “mediator” was even involved. Wow. Either way, Claman’s “duh, duh DUH, DUH duh” soon became the property of CTV, who plan to use the anthem for their TSN, RDS and 2010 Olympic hockey broadcasts.

(Incindetally: the theme was recently re-recorded by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and will debut next week on TSN and RDS.)

A veritable Canadian media shit-storm ensued, with pontificators and Joe Sixpacks alike bashing CBC from coast to coast for failing to lock up what many consider a national treasure. And the Joes had a point: after all, it was their money that the CBC, a state-supported broadcaster, was offering to Ms. Claman.

But here’s the ingenious part: now that they’ve allowed the golden goose of the network’s one true cash cow to fly the coop — stop me before I barnyard metaphor again — the CBC is getting its own new anthem, on the cheap! A measly $100,000 will be paid to one of a reported 15,000 Canadians who submitted their new-and-improved draft to the network’s anthem challenge, plus royalties. That’s, what, 1/25th the cost of retaining Claman’s classic? How could the new anthem be more than 25 times worse than the seminal tune that millions of Canadians associate with Saturday nights, with hockey, with the country’s very sense of self?

This week, on his program The Hour, journalist/nose-jewellery-aficionado George Stroumboulopoulos revealed the five semi-finalists — one per day — that will compete for the right to inspire the next generation of Canadian hockey fans. The fifth will be announced tonight, so we haven’t heard them all. But, ignoring the fact that the same mathematicians who constructed the final offer to Claman were placed in charge of deciding how many competitors comprised a “semi-final” — Seriously, five semi-finalists? For a competition designed to attract the interest of sports fans? — the next HNIC anthem will be a sad step down from the original it endeavours to replace. Heck, the winning song probably won’t even be the best track submitted.

How do I know? Because I was a judge.

Yes, the masterminds running our national broadcasting corporation entrusted the duty of choosing Canada’s next hockey anthem to yours truly. Me. Maybe I’m not making myself clear: they consider a guy whose nom-de-plume contains the word “trotter” to be an expert on something. Shocking.

(Of course, it may be that they picked me off of their list of “Canadian journalists who will contribute to sports-related media projects for no pay.” So great, now I’m on that list, too?)

Anyways, I was one of the 50-or-so judges chosen to populate the “panel of experts.” We each reviewed 136 entries that had been short-listed from the 15,000 submissions. We were instructed to rate the potential of each recording to become a memorable HNIC anthem on a scale of one to ten.

It wasn’t too difficult to figure out which tracks worked and which didn’t. You can normally tell within the first 10 to 15 seconds of each song (which ranged in total length from thirty seconds to two minutes) whether you have a winner on your hands — something memorable and exciting, but that will stand the test of time. It has to hook you, and when a track is right, you know.

For me, there were three such tracks in the batch of 136. Three ditties that made me think to myself, “That could be the new anthem for Hockey Night in Canada.” I gave each of these a score of 10.

There were a couple sixes and sevens thrown into the mix — tunes that had something going for them, but that didn’t smack me in the face with their originality and timelessness. Most of the rest of the submissions were non-starters: these started at a baseline of four, and were summarily dropped as low as one for such crimes as evoking “Who Let The Dogs Out?” or openly apeing Claman’s original melody. (Seriously, CBC, did you really want to get your ass sued by this woman? Again?)

I enjoyed the compositions that featured heavy doses of Rush-style guitar riffs (that sound just SCREAMS “hockey night in Canada,” doesn’t it?); subtle echoes of our official national anthem; an east-coast fiddle motif; creative percussion (sticks smacking on the ice was an inspired choice); and the French horn (although it too closely evoked John Williams’s classic Olympic fanfare).

Mostly, it came down to this for me: which one of these tunes could have been the intro music to the most important hockey-related cultural touchstone of my generation? I speak, of course, of EA Sports’ NHL 94 for the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. If you were a male born between the years 1970 and 1987, there’s an approximate 83 per cent chance that this video game influenced your life in a significant way. Heck, transcontinental gatherings have been convened between friends for the express purpose of determining the greatest NHL 94 player of all time — trust me on this one.

So of the 136 samples that I judged, a grand total of three of them struck me as clear-cut, deserving replacements for that game’s opening music (the second greatest hockey intro music of all time, followed closely by the musical intro of Blades of Steel).

And wouldn’t you know it? Two of my top three were announced on The Hour as official honourable mentions, part of a five-song group of “close but no cigar” choices. I won’t tell you which two they were, so you’ll have to listen to all five bridesmaids and decide yourself. (I liked that they announced the official honourable mentions, in case the winner and each of the four runners up can’t complete their duties as champion due to injury, death, or conduct unbecoming of the HNIC theme — I’m thinking a shady internet-porn-related incident in the winner’s past?) And having heard the four finalists, I’m not holding my breath that my third dauphin takes the final semi-finalist spot this evening.

It’s not that the final five choices are terrible. They’re just not that special is all. The best of the four is probably the first one announced, on Monday: “Canadian Gold,” by Colin Oberst, an elementary school teacher from Alberta. The rest are just “huh.” For example, “Sticks to the Ice,” by a thirteen-year-old from Toronto, is cute for what it is, but the tune sort of rolls all together, and there’s no real memorable hummable riff. I consulted my notes from the reviewing process and, I kid you not, my actual comments read: “kid from Toronto taped solo piano on tape recorder. Cute. But no.”

It’s a sweet story, the composition by the 13-year-old making the final five. But if I’m being honest, and with no malicious intent towards young Robert Burke, who is a whiz on the keyboard, it does sort of smack of a decision driven by television ratings, to have the underdog kid’s ditty in the top five. Grandmothers everywhere must be rooting for him. If he makes the final two, where Canadians get a chance to vote, Burke’s a shoo-in. I suspect the judges will cut him off before that happens, but I’ve been wrong before. Maybe it is sort of catchy …

And then there’s “Ice Warriors,” a ditty by professional composer Gerry Mosby. It has a decent, memorable hook. But it has also come under angry criticism on the Anthem Challenge’s website and Facebook page by fellow competitors after the discovery, by some diligent sleuths (and angry losers), that Mosby had recording-industry connections to two of the senior judges (including the head judge, Canadian music producer/cocky bozo Bob Rock). Indeed, the whole process of selecting the shortlist has been heavily scrutinized and bashed by many fellow entrants, and the CBC has done little to quell the controversy, offering the limpest of explanations of the judging process and showing very little transparency, even after reports surfaced of the possible conflict-of-interest in Mosby’s case.

“Now with regard to the potential conflicts of interest,” reads a post by sboyd, presumably a CBC spokesperson, on the official competition website, “in the event judges had personal or professional contacts with contestants, they were disclosed and appropriately noted through the selection process.” That seems to me to be an admission that conflicts of interest were present in the judging, no? So glad that the CBC owned up to their mistake! Although it does say very clearly in the rules that “CBC reserves the right to change the structure, process, timing, duration or any other aspect of the Competition at its discretion.” So presumably, they are free to give their $100,000 of Crown money to whoever they choose, right?

So as I mentioned, the two finalists will be named during a special broadcast tomorrow (Saturday) night on CBC, at 9pm EST. Then Canada will have three days to vote for our third national anthem. Of course, the average Canadian may not even have time to vote for the finalist of their choice. Who would spend time voting on something of national importance… when HOCKEY’S BACK?

Sportstrotter’s NHL SEASON PREDICTIONS

Division Winners:

Pittsburgh
Montreal
Carolina
Detroit
Minnesota
Phoenix

Sleepers: Chicago, Phoenix, Carolina, Vancouver (I’m such a homer!)

Overrated: Ottawa, Anaheim, Calgary, Tampa Bay

Hart Trophy: Sidney Crosby
Rocket Richard: Alex Ovechkin
Art Ross: Sidney Crosby
Norris: Brian Campbell
Vezina: Manny Fernandez
Calder: Kyle Turris

Eastern Conference Finals: Pittsburgh over Washington

Western Conference Finals: Minnesota over Chicago

Stanley Cup Finals: Pittsburgh over Minnesota (1991 all over again!)

Tags: CBC, HNIC, NHL

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Posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.