I have something a little bit unusual to share this week – instead of a music pick, I am putting forth what some may call A Rant. Nicole’s post about the situation at CKLN has got me thinking about community radio. It’s still not totally clear to me exactly what’s going on at the Ryerson station, but what is obvious not just there but everywhere is that the relevance of community radio is being questioned, mostly by students at universities, who are the ones who most often provide crucial funding to these stations.

Here’s how it works: Universities give campus/community radio stations a big chunk of the money they need to operate, and some (or all) of that money is gathered by charging students a fee – usually around $4 a semester – which in exchange gives the students membership privileges at the station, meaning they can use its resources and become volunteer hosts and programmers. Some universities have been giving students the option to opt out of these fees, and it seems like many students are keen to save a few bucks by withholding money from a service which they feel isn’t relevant, useful, or interesting. In a world where you can carry around 80,000 songs in your back pocket, get newsfeeds from the most reliable (or most obscure) sources around the world, and read highly entertaining, informative blogs, why would you bother tuning into a bunch of amateurs who are just learning when to press the On Air button, or even more so, why would you want to become one of them?

Okay, I too have been a broke student. I’ve re-used teabags, felt overjoyed at finding a nice pen on the sidewalk, gotten friends to cut my hair, and worn sweaters until they were more hole than clothing. I know saving bucks is important, and no one wants to feel like they’re throwing them down the (radio) tubes. I’ve also been a volunteer at a community radio station for close to ten years now, and I think I come from a pretty good position to talk about why community radio is worth supporting. So without further ado, here are my REASONS WHY COMMUNITY RADIO IS WORTH ONE LESS LATTE A SEMESTER.

1) Community radio creates a space for community and media engagement, not a product to be sold.
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Very pleased that the mighty Sister Suvi will be launching long-awaited full-length album Now I Am Champion at the end of the month. Basically because I think anything Merrill Garbus (aka Tune-Yards, who I profiled waaaaay back when) touches turns to diamonds. But not blood diamonds. Maybe more like crystals - perfectly formed crystals you find in a cave somewhere that seem like they ought to have been manufactured by elves wearing tiny hardhats and riding magic ponies, but they really just grew that way, because that’s their nature.

The launch happens in Montreal on Sunday March 29th at Il Motore, 179 Jean Talon Ouest, at 9 PM, with Takka Takka and Postcards. The Toronto launch is March 28th at Lee’s Palace.

Here Sister Suvi plays live in Ottawa, with surprisingly good sound quality for a video recording:

In other news, I can’t wait for another show coming up this weekend, as part of Montreal’s Radical Queer Week: it’s called Folk as Queers, and it features Sarah Mangle, Rae Spoon, and The Inappropriate Hymns and Hers, a band which started last summer at a band-off where names drawn from a hat determined the members, and the rest was up to ingenuity and badassitude; eight months later they’re still going strong, and word has it that a recording is in the near future. If the Moldy Peaches in their weirdest, most perverted incarnation (I’m thinking like Who’s Got The Crack and Steak For Chicken Moldy Peaches, not that soppy song that Michael Cera eviscerated) teamed up with the Indigo Girls, they would still be less awesome than this band.

This one happens Saturday March 14th at Le Chat des Artistes, 2205 Parthenais, at 9 PM. Check out the Radical Queer Week facebook page for more events listings - they are a-plenty.

When a bunch of Argentinian and Mexican women from various queercore and feminist punk bands decide to get together to form a supergroup sensation, you know the results will be a force to be reckoned with. What you maybe didn’t see coming were the Madonna covers.

But that’s what’s so sweet about the Kumbia Queers - they combine the fearlessness and energy of punk rock with the infectious bubbliciousness of pop music. Oh, and they’re also really gay. If the name Kumbia Queers didn’t give that away already.

Cumbia is a traditional form of Latin American music that’s somewhere between folk and popular; in the context of this band it seems to refer less to a specific kind of music than to the idea of “popular music” itself, the sort of tunes that are unavoidably cheesy, kind of lowbrow, and completely irresistible. Which might also seem like a pretty apt description of the Kumbia Queers, except there’s something sophisticated and complex about the way they flip a traditionally masculine genre of music on its head, making it both female and queer.

The video for Chica de Calendario (“Calendar Girl”) is a lezzie take on the old standard of the song written to the babely object of desire:

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Montreal-based spoken word artist Taqralik Partridge has been keeping busy. This Sunday the 15th she’s going to be featured on CBC Radio 2‘s concert series Next!: Canada’s Music Future, so tune in at 8 PM to experience her husky, rhythmic poem-performance.

Partridge is a writer and performer of Inuit and Scottish descent. But instead of choosing between differing realities - Indigenous and white, Up North and Down South, big open spaces and cramped bustling skylines - she keeps them in constant conversation, merging hip-hop and throat-singing, poetry and storytelling, the personal and the political. In her own words,

It’s very strange to me how we can live and have two realities. I come from this place that’s vast and open and beautiful, but I live and work in this place that is constricted and full of so many things going on. I love Montreal and I love the city, and [yet] in many ways I feel like an outsider.

I profiled Partridge for the Fall 2007 issue of Shameless, so you can read more about her here. And if you just can’t wait until Sunday, check out her Myspace page. Although she claims she wrote it more for a laugh than anything, the piece Eskimo Chick is a wry and touching crowd favourite, and Battery features a haunting string arrangement. Can’t wait to hear what’s next.

So, I don’t know if y’all noticed this or not, but Barack Obama is president of the USA. This, for many reasons, is cause for celebration. But while it is very exciting and thrilling and hopeful to have a person of colour holding the highest office in the United States (some would say the world, but that’s a little America-centric, don’t you think?), there is occasionally a slightly disturbing undertone to all the optimism; the joy has the possibility of sliding into smugness. It sometimes seems like we’re thinking “Alright, it’s been proven that people of colour can do anything, that means oppression and racism are things of the past!” This seems akin to if, had it been Hillary in place of Barack, we here at Shameless would pat each other on the back, shake hands, and retire the magazine, because – guess what! Feminism is over!

Well folks, it’s not over. We are not, as some would like to believe, post-feminist. And we are definitely not post-race. Although major ground has been gained in high office, struggles continue every day, on the street, in the home, in prisons, in hospitals, in the workplace. So this Black History Month seems like a good time to think about what those struggles mean, and where they’ve come from.

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For everyone who occasionally needs to slam their sweaty body into a bunch of other sweaty bodies in order to remind themselves they’re still alive, and then afterwards wants to eat hummous and chips and talk about their favourite Kate Bush song; for every girl who met her best friend at a hardcore show after all her guy friends told her she wouldn’t have a good time; for everyone who doesn’t know the difference between hardcore, grindcore, crust, d-beat, or screamo, and frankly doesn’t give a flying rat-tail hair-do, I give you Preying Hands.

With members of the much-loved and dearly-departed Ballast and Snakemaster, people are freaking out about this band, and with good reason. If you’re in Montreal, you can freak out too, tonight at the Decadent Squalour, 3627 Notre Dame West. Also playing are Switzerland, The Castevets, and Double Dip, another especially notable girl- and queer-positive punk band. A mere $5 gets you in, and it’s all ages.

Duchess Says, whose first full-length album I chose as one of my favourite releases from 2008, have put out an awesome video of their song Tenen Non Neue for Mange Ta Ville, a web-based television show about arts and culture in Montreal (Mange Ta Ville means “eat your city” - it sounds snappier in French. Really). They set up their instruments at the St. Michel flea market in east-end Montreal and quite likely freaked out (or delighted) any number of shoppers out for antique lamps, ashtrays with pictures of the Olympic Stadium, and steamees.

In true post-Velvet-Underground rock ‘n’ roll style, the video starts with a good minute or so of fuzzy electronic whine. But hold steady, it’s worth it when you get to A-Claude’s robot-gone-berserk singing and dance moves. I’m not sure what it is about female-fronted Quebecois punk bands who sing in made-up languages that sound like a stew of English, French, German and what-all (see, for instance, Les Georges Leningrad and the obscure and legendary La Gerantole) - is it a kind of Esperanto meant to bridge the language gap? Possession by demons? - but I like it. A lot. I hope you will too.

Santogold is the nickname of Santi White, a Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter who released her first self-titled album in 2008. For a while she was being hailed as “the new M.I.A.” which I think is now the officially recognized term for “brown girl who isn’t doing rap or R&B”. Okay, she’s a bit like the British musician with Sri Lankan roots and mad style, but she’s even more like, well, Santogold.

White herself addresses the kind of pigeonholing that women of colour face in the music industry, calling out critics for formulating descriptions of her music based on what they expect to hear from a young black woman from Brooklyn, rather than what her music is actually like:

It’s totally racist. Everyone is just so shocked that I don’t like R&B. Are you shocked that Good Charlotte isn’t into R&B? Why does R&B keep coming into my interviews? It’s pissing me off. I didn’t grow up as a big fan of R&B and, like, what is the big shocker? It’s stupid. In the beginning I thought that was funny. I’m an ‘MC’, I’m a ‘soul singer’, I’m a ‘dance hybrid artist’. And some guy said I looked like Kelly Rowland! I just thought it added to the mystery, because there was so much wrong stuff being written about me.

(from a great interview over at Lipster).

But let’s let her music speak for itself, shall we? The video for L.E.S. Artistes is definitely an “auteur” piece, and it shows off her style not just as a musician but as a total perfectionist who’s in complete artistic control of her work and her image. And, if you’re at all baffled by the video (as I was - death by paintball? Whaaaa?), there’s also a helpful “making of” video that explains the vision behind it (after the cut).

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My New Year’s resolution, I’ve just decided, is to be more like Laurie Anderson. But I’m not sure what I mean by that. Do I mean:

1) Be in complete and total control of my creative output; incorporate everything I know and everything I possess in pursuit of what I want to express?
2) Be innovative to an absurd degree; if what I need doesn’t exist yet, invent it? (Anderson invented at least two unique musical instruments/technological creations: a new kind of violin involving magnetic tape and an electronic “talking stick”)
3) Be always, always, always critical of systems around me, and challenge them through my work?
4) Wear a white suit all the time and dance like it don’t matter?

Yes, yes, yes. And yes.

Two videos that changed my life (one after the cut):

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