Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg

I’ve realized something over the years. Those of us who have spent time in those desolate, isolated armpits of Canada, those unknown, unseen, out of the spotlight, decaying blue collar towns…as we get older we become increasingly aware we’re living in this totally bizarre, fucked up place that the rest of the world will never understand, and in fact doesn’t even know exists. Its not fucked-up in a cool or exotic way like a place like Detroit or Sao Paulo is, so there will never be a movie about it, no famous rapper will emerge from there and put his city “on the map”, so to speak. But we know our city is actually more fucked-up in a less exciting, more surreal, harder to pin down, sociologically fascinating kind of way, below the radar of popular culture. We get this frustrating awareness of our own isolation, that we are sitting in the shadows of the earth; no one see’s us, no understands us, no one even knows we’re there. If only they’d come, they’d see what a bizarre and fucked-up place this is, they’d make documentaries and mocumentaries about it, appreciate it, recognize it, sympathize.

I say this having lived a brief but memorable portion of my life in Oshawa, Ontario. I still cling to this feeling that anyone whose never been there doesn't really understand. People who live in big, cool, cosmopolitan cities don’t get it. They think “the big city” has the crime and the crazy people, they don’t realize we walk around this city without looking over our shoulder because that dark, mysterious place we came from is way more twisted with social breakdown, teenage delinquency, mental illness and random senseless criminality than any big city could ever approach with its fancy liberal city hall and matrix of bleeding-heart social programs for the “marginalized”. Christ, the entire city of Oshawa is “marginalized.” Even the wealthy and privileged live a precarious existence akin to neo-feudal lords in some post-apocalyptic future, stubbornly refusing to migrate to some higher terrain less plagued with mutants and bandits, out of some hypnotic-like state of delusion that their daily existence makes sense.

I think this is a bit of what Guy Maddin felt like when he decided to make the film, My Winnipeg.

Noah23 - Upside Down Bluejay

While other rappers stress trying to secure label support, distribution, music videos and the rest, Noah23 stays content with a D.I.Y. operatus mondi, churning out a remarkable quantity of fresh music from his basement and periodically tossing it up for his impressive legion of fans to grab. Case in point: Upside Down Bluejay, a new 23-song album released for free via his myspace page, arriving right on the heels of his other “new” 23-song album, Rock Paper Scissors, released only a month or two ago. This kind of humble, anti-capitalist, direct artist-to-fan style is likely the reason the man receives minimal indie-media flattery and zero mainstream attention, yet enjoys a heavy cult-following allowing him to rock big shows in California. Or Arizona. Or Greece. Or Germany…

Upside Down Bluejay has the feeling of an odd-ball collection of rarities, b-sides and collabs that wouldn’t have fit on any of Noah23’s formal, often thematic releases. The usual array of esoteric topics are there, talking game about Fulcanelli, chaos theory and Terrance McKenna, amidst a mind-boggling diversity of producers, including Subtitle, K-the-I, Leon Murphy, DJ Moves, Madadam and Classified, to mention a few.

Highlights: “Help”, which Noah23 has been performing live for sometime and I have been patiently waiting to be recorded and released. “House on Wheels”, another one of Noah23’s forays into quasi-indie-rock territory, it features Gregory Pepper and briefly morphs into a rendition of the Pixies’ “Where is my Mind.” “Best Bitter”, despite its claims to the contrary, is a salty dis track where Noah23 takes shots (I think) at Buck65 and Sage Francis, among others.

While not every track on this release is memorable, overall it’s another fresh gem from Noah23 that demonstrates why people like myself continue to follow his eccentric musical output despite the fact I generally can’t stand most so-called avant-garde rap (e.g. Sage Francis, Anticon).

Download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e27421f049ac7fcaab1eab3e9fa335cafcb8392ee7c61680

Graffiti anthems of the mid-1990s

By the mid-1990s graffiti was an international phenomenon. It could be found everywhere; grimy capitals of former Soviet republics were bombed to hell; sleepy Canada quiet university towns and small blue collar cities had writers, even crews, even enough crews to have rivalries between crews, and graffiti expos, and shitty websites with ridiculously long http addresses hosted on geocities. Graffiti wasn’t just another youth trend. It was art, and it was illegal. Getting involved in this subculture necessarily involved risk and sacrifice. Music trends and clothing fads come and go, but graffiti represented something more raw, more genuine, more significant. You didn’t participate by wearing certain clothes or purchasing certain CDs, you participated by sneaking into train yards on cold winter nights, by scaling roof tops, shoplifting paint and running from the cops.

So here it is, three great songs about graffiti from the mid 1990s.

Artifacts. Wrong Side of the Tracks. 1994.



What can be said about this song? Artifacts. El Da Sensai. Tame One. 1994. Newark. New Jersey. A hip-hop classic, and the anthem of every kid who was painting in that era.


KRS-One. Out for Fame. 1995



In 1997 I traveled across central and western Canada and into the west coast United States on a Greyhound bus. Three days and three nights. I met some interesting people. A skid from out east who got kicked off the bus at 3am in some small desolate town in northern Ontario for drinking. A fat, abrasive tattoo artist who was looking at porno magazines the whole trip and threatened some young girl for leaning her seat back. A couple from Germany who were really into Smokin' Suckaz wit Logic. A Native girl from Thunder Bay who had spent the summer running children camp programs on Native reserves across Canada. A crustpunk girl from Alaska who passed me a note telling me I had a nice smile. She had been touring with her friend’s band, they were called Rat Fink.

What’s the point? That long bus ride I was bumping Out for Fame on my walkman. Christ this song is amazing.

Ten Foot Pole. My Wall. 1994.



At the time this seemed like a bizarre anomaly: a song about graffiti by a punk rock band from California, whose lead singer happend to be Scott Radinsky, the professional baseball player credited with being “one of the best Jewish pitchers in major league history.” I was introduced to the song by a writer named WHEN, who I believed belonged to a crew called OPS.

It seemed strange to me at the time, because I guess most of the writers I knew fit a somewhat more traditional stereotype –kids who weren’t white and listened to rap. But of course, in 1994 William Upski wrote in Bomb the Suburbs about white graffiti artists who congregated at hardcore shows.

And one final side note: who the fuck were Smokin' Suckaz wit Logic? Good question. When I met that German couple on the Greyhound bus, I knew who the group was because I always used to see their CD in the “rap” section of the record store, but it always looked suspiciously like rap-metal or something to me. I still haven’t listened to them, but having visited Wikipedia to satisfy my curiosity, I learned the following facts.

• One of the guys owned High Timez Records, and now owns a backpackers hostel in Panama.
• Another guy made beats for Big Daddy Kane and the Sporty Thievez.
• The other guy became a Christian rapper and joined a Who tribute band.

What a strange world we live in.

Fatlip died for your sins.

Do you remember the peculiar psychic resonance that floated through the rapmosphere when Fatlip reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere, five years since the last Pharcyde album, with the single and video What's Up Fatlip?



Admit it. That song, and the video, it hit you. It made you think. It made you kind of sad.

It had been almost a decade since Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde. The Puffy/Mase/Foxy Brown coup de tat was well established, "real hip-hop" fans felt kinda like sore losers.

Watching Fatlip in that video, listening to the song, was kinda like seeing a homeless Aboriginal war veteran drinking away his sorrows on the streets of Winnipeg - a mix of intense respect and pity.

It resonated with all us "veterans" of hip-hop's better days, whether artists or just fans. Unintentionally I'm sure, Fatlip took on a martyr like status. He seemed to be the collective psychic personification of all our feelings of loss, failure, confusion, disillusionment. This song got love in a special way; an intense, personal way, a way that the typical "dope" track doesn't. You saw the video and felt like you were willing to march with this man to the end of the earth in some last final suicidal revolt against the modern world. I think it was In Search of Divine Styler magazine that started calling Fatlip the best rapper of all time or something.

The same way that video made you feel was intensified and stretched out into a documentary of the same name, also directed by Spike Jonez. I think this has been out for a minute, but I only become aware of it recently.



Watching it was fascinating. And entertaining. And hilarious. And sad.

Respect to Fatlip.

A Knight at the Crossroads

A Knight at the Crossroads. V.M. Vasnetsov. 1882. Russia.