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Geoff Berner has written some of the funniest, smartest social commentary to ever come out of the Vancouver music scene.
Try, for example, “Super Subtle Folk Song” off his 2017 album Canadiana Grotesquica. While not, in fact, subtle, the song builds up to its point in a way no other song I’ve encountered does, offering a reductio ad absurdum—a rhetorical device for demonstrating an argument’s foolishness by showing that, taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to absurdity—but in a delightfully bass-ackwards way.
While a normal reductio builds up to the absurd, Berner begins there, seeming to indulge in silliness for its own sake. The first verse has the singer discovering that the boat he is in has a hole in it and is taking on water, so he punches another hole in the hull to let the water out. What?
Then the singer’s brother is being torn apart by panthers, so he buys “a bunch of panthers as pets”, which goes on to rhyme with “My Dad was dying of lung cancer/ So I bought my kids a carton of cigarettes”.
Just when you’re settling in for more apparently meaningless playfulness of this sort, thinking Berner must have been in a particularly silly mood when writing the tune, the singer arrives at the song’s true target, nearly halfway through, and you’re startled by how purposive the nonsense proves to have been:
“You might say that I’m an asshole/I’m just trying to fit in with my scene/And while the fire is burning/Let’s make a bunch more gasoline.”
Welcome to the point of the song, which gets even less subtle as it proceeds, getting even clearer which fires, which gasoline, and which pipelines he is talking about.
Brilliant as he is, Berner has played less often than he should in recent years, and his public profile has lessened as a result. A clue to why can be found on his 2023 release, 7 Plague Songs, which sees the singer getting deadly serious about COVID. Berner is very aware that each repeated COVID infection increases the risk of long COVID and that there are vulnerable populations who are still seriously at risk, who are not being served by public policy.
“People are starting to talk about long COVID in the media a bit more,” he says in an interview with the Straight. “There’s a bit of an acknowledgement that there are millions of people who have gone missing from the workforce because they can’t leave the bed, that those are real people, who really are there.”
With most of the musicians I know whose careers took a hit because of COVID, it was because they refused to get vaxxed or go along with other safety protocols as the province came out of lockdowns. In the opposite corner, Berner has taken the principled stance that we should not be having indoor gigs without masking (and not in dinky cloth masks, but proper N95s). Certainly the last time I caught COVID, it was after packing into a stuffy basement in a punk house to see Night Court, sharing air with 50 or more people, all unmasked. Didn’t make a whole lot of sense, really, but you feel stupid putting on a mask when no one else is wearing one.
“That’s a really powerful force”, Berner acknowledges. “People look around to see what other people are doing. I’ve actually seen things like, I come into the credit union lineup with a mask and somebody else will put on their mask, because they don’t feel alone anymore.”Berner has figured out what his “red line” is for public performance.
“The show’s gotta be, like, outside and at least masks available, if not required, and for inside, it’s gotta be with good ventilation and everybody who can wear a mask, masked”. He makes allowances for people who can’t mask up due to medical reasons. “Maybe if they, like, rapid tested the entire audience I could do less masks, but that’s kind of where I’m at with playing live. But I can do outdoor festivals. I’m doing this Accordion Noir thing on Sunday, and I’m pretty excited to be playing POP Montreal.” The Montreal gig is on September 26, at Mario Park. “That’s the first time I’ve played POP Montreal for awhile,” Berner says. “It was one of those Holy Grail career goals when I was younger, to get into POP Montreal. So it’s kind of nice to go there. My kid lives there!”
Accordion Noir, meanwhile, is at MacLean Park in Strathcona, from 2-5 p.m. on Sunday, with Berner occupying a middle slot between the Vancouver Accordion Orchestra and the Queen Bees. That is, weather permitting: If it rains, the festival organizers note, the whole thing could get pulled, as it’s a pass-the-hat kind of gig with a tent for performers, but not the audience, who will likely balk at the prospect of sitting in the mud. And if there’s no audience, who can you pass the hat to? But we sure are hoping that it does go ahead, because Berner plans to endorse COPE’s Stephanie Allen in a song he’ll be debuting in Yiddish, “Shtmit Far Stephanie Allen”, which translates literally as, “Vote for Stephanie Allen”.
“I’m really excited about the COPE campaign here in Vancouver”, Berner says. “I’m a big fan of Stephanie Allen. Not all of their COVID stuff is exactly aligned with me, but getting people public housing, that’s public health. It’s just as important to get people a home that they can be safe in as getting people masks; it’s that kind of principle of, ‘Hey, let’s look out for each other’, instead of ‘Hey, you’re on you’re own, you person that I’m stepping over in the street.'”
The song is a blunt statement of Berner’s support for COPE, and contains a disdainful allusion to Ken Sim, one of the mayoral candidates he describes in the song as a “shelmak”, which he translates as “contemptible villain”. Nothing subtle going on there!
“I don’t make any bones about it—I’m like, a blatant propagandist,” Berner says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, sometimes I put politics in there, but I’m just a folksinger.’ I’ve written a song about how great Stephanie Allen is and how she should be the mayor. It’s entirely in Yiddish, but we’re going to make a video with subtitles. I’m framing it as a message for the Jewish community of Vancouver, about how we’ve all got to vote for Stephanie Allen.”
To get you started, here’s the first verse: “Stephanie Allen in di kumendike valn/In di valn, in di valn/Ale zoln shtimen far Stephanie Allen.”
That translates tom “Stephanie Allen in the upcoming elections/In the elections, in the elections/Everyone should vote for Stephanie Allen.”
“The fun thing is that, ‘the election’ in Yiddish is, ‘die valn’, so ‘valn’ and ‘Allen’ rhyme. It’s like, made in heaven, I couldn’t resist it, you know? The chorus just wrote itself.”
Berner says of Allen, “She would be the best mayor we’ve ever had, by a longshot. It’s not even close. She’s to the left of every other candidate. She was like, the co-founder of the Hogan’s Alley Society, https://www.hogansalleysociety.org/aboutus so she knows about displacement, she’s part of a group that got displaced by the government so they could build the Georgia Viaduct. And she was a big part of BC Housing, until the government decided they hated her–the BC NDP hates her, so that’s really awesome! I really think COPE has the momentum to take City Hall this year.”
I love that Berner is endorsing her in Yiddish, though I observe that it’s amusing that almost every Yiddish word i know is an insult: add “shelmak” to putz, schmuck, schlub, schlemiel, and gonif.
“It’s one of the great insult languages for sure, great at curses and complaining,” Berner says. “Yiddish is the champion language for complaining in the world. I don’t know how many languages would want to make that claim, but…”
The general public is misinformed about Yiddish, Berner observes.
“People kinda don’t know what Yiddish is; they think Hebrew is the Jewish language. It’s true that the Torah is in Hebrew, but for a thousand years, Jews in the eastern and northern parts of Europe, that’s what they spoke, this weird German that had been left out in the sun and mixed about with Slavic and Aramaic and Hebrew. It’s an amazing, fun language. And that’s what I made my project, when I went off the road because of COVID: ‘This is professional development time!'”
Berner semi-immersed himself in the language, with talking books and formal lessons.
“Now I can read it and stuff,” he reveals. “It’s amazing to look at books that were impenetrable. I can read memoirs that haven’t been translated into English yet. It’s a great way to connect with my Jewish identity when I’m not really into doing a lot of religious stuff. I’m not like, an unbeliever, and I had a bar mitzvah and everything, but I’m pretty louche. I’m not keeping kosher in this house, nor was I raised that way in Kerrisdale. So this feels like a way to be part of the Jewish story, to help keep Yiddish going”.
Geoff Berner plays Accordion Noir in MacLean Park on Sunday (August 23).