In an age of surgent nationalism, associations between individual and collective identity and spectacular sport are increasingly evident in Canada. The Day After the Parade builds from this context, examining how music and sound participate in the cultural dynamics, power asymmetries, and nationalist-capitalist hegemony shaping the country today. The work manipulates audio recordings from my 2018–2023 ethnographic sound study of the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club, producing what I call a “perspectival account” of the team’s soundscape.

This audio collage critiques forms of alignment in groups that emerge during extreme affective states, such as championship celebrations. While these public demonstrations perform liberal inclusivity and offer imagined prototypes for living together and establishing shared values, they also contain a deep irony: the collective chanting of “We The North,” for example, by southern, largely settler, populations affirms both the dispossession of Indigenous territories and the appropriation of symbolic capital.

The piece layers recordings of pre-game festivities, the night of the Raptors’s first-ever world championship, public appearances by global brand ambassador Drake, and the opening ceremonies of the following NBA season. Interwoven ethnographic interview excerpts reveal how moments of heightened emotion are amplified by team playmakers urging crowds to “MAKE SOME NOISE”—an exhortation that both fosters solidarity and disrupts clear communication.

In this setting, “God’s Plan”—at once a Drake chart-topping single and an expression of the ideological metaphysics of the settler-colonial project—underscores the ambivalence of collective sounding: a force capable of both reinforcing political oppression and articulating potent critique.