news
Sound Advice: Shakespeare My Butt by Lowest of the Low
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
A healthy sign of a true classic album is one that has many lives.
When Toronto’s the Lowest of the Low released Shakespeare My Butt in 1991, it kickstarted a Canadian indie revolution, spending a short amount of time as the best-selling independent Canadian release (usurped by the Barenaked Ladies’ fame-making Yellow Tape, which of course contained “If I Had $1,000,000” and “Be My Yoko Ono”—who could have competed with that?) and launching the band into instant cult status. Their intelligent and romanticized tales of love and politics and, of course, Toronto, resonated with multiple generations of Canadian music fans who were looking for something more.
Though the band would release another album, Hallucigenia, in 1994, and would reunite for two more in the first half of the aughts, no record would match the love or legend of the still-celebrated Shakespeare. Now, almost twenty years later, it’s getting a much-anticipated reissue, available today, and, expectedly, this collection of literate, storied folk-punk still has its legs.
The typical reissue treatment is given here—a remastering (it’s louder overall and cleaned up a bit, though still as trebly as ever, a good or bad thing depending who you ask—and thank you for asking, yes, it is terrific and ragged and raw and shouldn’t be touched, just listen to “Salesmen, Cheats, and Liars” above for proof); new liner notes (with stories from Edge 102‘s Dave Bookman and the Weakerthans’ John K. Samson, among others); and a DVD mini-documentary culled from old performance footage and more recent, reflective interviews with frontman Ron Hawkins, whose big, everyman voice, with its hint of weathered rasp, still resonates as immediately as ever.
Comparable to the Weakerthans (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, Lowest of the Low inspired and whom frontman Ron Hawkins would later form a camaraderie with), Lowest of the Low so deftly, so straightforwardly, and so melodically paint poetic pictures of humanity at its most hopeful and hopeless: pictures of home and all the mixed, inextricable feelings within (“Rosy & Grey,” the classic, aching “Subversives”). Shakespeare My Butt ultimately deserves this celebration because even in the dated bits, it’s the timeless, rare kind of music that is both restless and satisfying—music that forms identity.