I didn’t roll any dice to land on this band. And I know that if Jakob rolled his weird-looking D&D thingies, he wouldn’t land on The Tragically Hip, either. I doubt he has any Hip in his storied music collection. I’d actually be more inclined to believe he’s in the market for an SUV.

The Tragically Hip are a rare stay-at-home Canadian music success story. Since the mid-1980s, the five-piece band from Kingston, Ontario has cranked out album after album, tour after tour, hit single after hit single, without losing a member or succumbing to any serious scandal.

The Hip (as Canadians call them) are Gordon Downie, Bobby Baker, Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois and Johnny Fay. They’ve been together since they were teens, when they fell into a laid-back roots-rock sound anchored by working-at-the-steel-mill instrumentation and writing-in-a-notebook-at-the-football-game outsider poetry. Their songs are grindy little rock numbers that appeal to guys who wear their clean baseball cap to the bar on Friday night, with cryptic, poetic lyrics. Most people ignore the lyrics. The people who like the lyrics tend to sniff at the three-chord crunch of the music.

Some of the lyrics are here. If you can figure out what the hell Downie is talking about, let me know.

Here’s your challenge: If you happen to be in Canada, go find the nearest watering hole (it has to be one with a neon beer sign in the window). Walk in and look around. I guarantee you will find:

• (a) A person wearing a Tragically Hip T-shirt or hat
• (b) The Tragically Hip playing on the stereo
• (c) A person who cheers when you ask the bartender “Got any Hip?”

If you don’t find any of these things, you are accidentally in Seattle.

The Hip are about as Canadian as a rock band can get. The five members never left their hometown. They run the band as a business, with members earning salaries, showing up for work on time, following schedules, that sort of thing. I have met and/or interviewed three of them, and they are very, very nice. And, in proper stay-at-home-in-Canada style, they’ve made little headway in the U.S.

I like a lot of their songs. So why do they fill me with such a feeling of ick?

Maybe it’s the saturation. There was a time — early 1990s to about 2002 — that you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing at least one Hip song an hour. And a lot of those shouldn’t have been played in public. I liked their first EP, which had a song called I’m A Werewolf, Baby. And I liked their first album, Up To Here, with great songs like Boots or Hearts, New Orleans is Sinking and Blow at High Dough. But as the years went on — and I saw something like eight arena concerts — I just found a slow descent into sameness: the same guitar tones, the same rhythms, the same vocals.

If you were to look through our music collection here, you would find every Tragically Hip album. I don’t apologize for that. I also have a lot of Dave Matthews discs, too. That I apologize for. But the Hip? Whether I enjoy their music or not, I always felt it was my obligation to listen to them at least once per disc.

And, to be perfectly fair, they sound pretty good on a cheap boom box, especially if you’re sitting on a Muskoka dock with a few bottles of Keith’s in a cooler.

So do I like the Hip or not? Hells if I know. I’m Canadian.