Beyond The Guess Who: Forgotten 1990s CanCon
This week I take a deep dive through the world of forgotten CanCon with Annick Gagnon, Aashna, Zuckerbaby and Scratching Post.
Welcome to Beyond The Guess Who. Each week I cover a lesser known Canadian Musical artist. This week: I cover a bunch of lesser-known musical artists from the latter half of the 1990’s (the early internet age) who suddenly seem to have vanished.
As usual, don’t forget to hit like, share, comment or hit the subscribe button. Thank You!
I was born in 1985 which puts me close to what some people dub the Xennial Generation. As a Xennial, my childhood was mostly analogue but as I got older things leaned more towards digital.
My first recollection of the Internet was when I was about ten years old. It was a huge deal. Everybody had a website and musical artists were no exception.
When I was putting together research for a still unpublished piece I wrote ages ago on a 1990s rap-rock band called Birth Through Knowledge, it shocked me how little information there was for a band that existed smack dab in the middle of the online boom. What little video clips I came across were largely VHS rips.
It hit me that there were others in the same boat which also made me realize that there’s a whole ton of Canadian music from this period that’s been relegated to the dustbin of history. Even the Internet has been largely scrubbed of their presence.
Some of this music admittedly was not very good, maybe in some cases it deserves to be forgotten, but I thought it would be interesting to at least give some of these artists their due.
One of the first artists that came to mind was Annick Gagnon. There’s two artists with this name. One is a popular Francophone artist who spells her name with one N, the other is a 90’s pop singer who spelt her name with two N’s. I’d forgotten about the second one until starting Beyond The Guess Who.
I remember “I’m Temperamental” getting radio play around 1999 or so. I likely heard it while recording music off the radio to make mixtapes. Honestly, I’d forgotten about Gagnon and this track for the last 25 years.
There’s a stereotype about Canada via criminally unfunny American sitcoms such as How I Met Your Mother about Canada being behind the times culturally. There was Robin Sparkles, the Tiffany-esque 80’s pop singer who performed in the mid-1990s during the grunge era.
When I saw the video for “I’m Temperamental” Robin Sparkles came to mind.
It might be a harsh assessment. The clothes and the production do scream mid-late 1990’s but the choreography and direction of the video, including a fashion montage remind me of pop videos from the late ‘80s to early ‘90s, with “Electric Youth” by Debbie Gibson springing to mind.
Gagnon had released a debut album four years previously and had been singing in public since at least 1992. There’s mention of a 14-year-old Gagnon opening for Celine Dion at a French festival in New Brunswick.
It’s also mentioned, that perhaps due to a lack of more diverse artists getting noticed, Gagnon won “Best Urban Artist” at the 2001 East Coast Music Awards. Presumably, it was for a later single (unavailable online) called “Groove Thing”.
One of the few remaining artifacts still online from Gagnon’s heyday is a garish Oocities website containing presumptuous banners such as “Move Over Britney! Annick is here!” The website was last updated at some point in 2002 and that’s about where online info on Gagnon stops. The last tidbit is that she was living in Halifax, Nova Scotia while continuing her career and pursuing higher education.
During the time Annick Gagnon was pursuing a music career, Canadian children’s television network YTV had a popular music video program called The Hit List. As mentioned in my BTS post, I “affectionately” called it The S*** List. But because I didn’t have Much Music after the mid-90s I would watch and bitch about it anyway. It wasn’t all bad, it is where I discovered Supergrass via their video for “Pumping On Your Stereo”. They also tended to occasionally skew more European with their video selections which is why I know about late 90’s UK pop acts like Lolly (shudder).
One of the Hit List hosts, Aashna Patel had previously pursued a pop music career of her own while moonlighting as a YTV host.
Her best-known single, “Not Asking For The World,” is Paula Abdul-inspired pop. People seem nostalgic for this on YouTube, but I’d say it’s been forgotten for a reason. Aashna was back on YTV not long after her stab at a music career. She’s since resumed her day job working for various media sources and relocated to California.
Taking a detour away from pop music, one of the bands that The Hit List would not have touched with a ten-foot pole was Calgary band Zuckerbaby.1
Formed in the mid-1990s, Zuckerbaby released two albums between 1997-2000.
Signed to Mercury, the band had a minor RPM hit with their 1997 single “Andromeda”.
The band had further singles. "Shampoo” was in a more commercial powerpop vein:
The band were super catchy and seem ready to go places. Unfortunately, the 2000’s pop and rap-metal boom hit. They released one more album in 2000 titled Platinum Again and were then dropped when Mercury was reorganized under Universal Music.
Zuckerbaby did reform for a hometown reunion concert in 2015 opening for Age Of Electric. Like the Age Of Electric side project Limblifter, Zuckerbaby were signed to Mercury around the same time. While Limblifter thrived as an independent act, Zuckerbaby didn’t record further material.
Zuckerbaby lead vocalist and guitarist Andy Eichron later resurfaced in the 2020s as a solo artist recording an album called Satellites & Secrets.
Another alternative band from this period called Scratching Post were formed a little earlier than Zuckerbaby. Like Annick Gagnon, an online time capsule of them survives online.
There is an old Angelfire website dating back to around the year 2000 devoted to the band. It’s not as tacky as the glittery late 1990’s YTV-style pop fandom of Gagnon’s surviving page. This one is more along the lines of a fan who attended a concert, met the band, got drunk, and grabbed a few snapshots.
According to said webpage, the band had some airplay with a memorable single called “Bloodflame” taken from their second album, 1998’s Destruction of the Universe.
After looking the song up, it hit me that I knew “Bloodflame” well. For years, I’d wrongly assumed this was Veruca Salt, a band Scratching Post commonly received comparisons to. “Bloodflame” was a huge alternative hit in Canada. The band also opened for then-popular Big Sugar across the country. They appeared on TV shows like Jonovision and released one more album in 2000 This Time It's Personal, which was produced by Peters & Peters (Black Eyed Peas).
For extra Only In Canada points, here’s a video they did with Snake from the original Degrassi High:
Do you know of any Canadian bands that seem to have been forgotten in recent years? Sound off in the comments. I’d love to do a second part of this eventually.
Next Week: TBA
Zuckerbaby were named after the 1985 Percy Adlon film Zuckerbaby (Sugarbaby)
Odds, a Canadian rock band that I loved and had a lot of their music on tapes from TV and radio.
Oh wow! That web design 🫣. I also thought Bloodflame was Veruca Salt, and I realize that I spent SO MUCH TIME looking at 90s music videos, because I think I've seen all of those.