[Event] In Toronto TONIGHT (Feb. 9): TownHall Meeting on the Shutdown of CKLN

This post is stickied to the top of the site until Wednesday night. New posts will follow below but T.dot heads: PAY ATTENTION TO THIS!!!

I touched on this briefly on twitter earlier yesterday but let’s get into it properly now. Here’s the deal:

ALL Toronto Hip-Hop Heads:

The imminent shutdown of CKLN (whether through faults of their own doing or not) on Feb. 12 and the attendant shutdown of all the specialty shows on the station including the long-running city institution, the Saturday 1-4PM rap show currently inhabited by The Mixtape Massacre is one thing (and I explained in a little detail on Saturday why that was such a blow to the hip hop scene in Toronto). But the wholesale cleaning of shop of all the hip-hop mix-shows including the long-running Real Frequency Show and Ty & Rez Digital’s OTA Live on the main ‘urban’ commercial station in town, FLOW 93.5 as part of it’s sale to the CHUM Radio Group last week also was a double blow to the city’s still emergent urban music industry.

Kids: don’t take it for granted that the hip-hop you love will always be so freely accessible as it has been over the past few years. As you can see, the mass channels of access on the radio can easily be shut down with just a few swift actions and all of a sudden, we’re back to 1985 and hearing barely a couple of hours a week of hip-hop on the radio.

Y’all can have your little viewpoints on whether TRF and OTA Live were adequately doing what they should or not as far as promoting local music, but be clear: artists like Drake, Kardinal Offishall, K’naan and Shad did not break in a vacuum or strictly through commercial channels. In one form or another, they all paid dues and built a base from which they went on to achieve success by first stating at or benefiting from the support of underground and specialty radio shows like these.

“Yeah, but there’s always the internet, Ian” you might say pointing to the rampant file-sharing and “let one million hip-hop blogs bloom” landscape and the font of endless hip-hop music-on-tap its given us as proof. In response to that, I would say though: DON’T BE SO SURE…..

Here’s the ‘official’ plug for Tonight’s event set up by Manifesto to discuss the implication of these events:

What Just Happened?

SPREAD THE WORD!

If you can make it to this, YOU SHOULD GO!!! Even if you (think you) haven’t got anything to contribute, now is the time to show the ‘powers that be’ that there’s numbers in the community and we care about decisions that are being made about us. So be there, I will – hearing the music you love in an accessible way in the future may very well depend on it!

The Kitchen is Now Re-Open For Business!

Yes, after seven long years as a Blogspot and a week or so hiatus while we re-tooled Different Kitchen (officially known as Other Music from a Different Kitchen), we’re back on our brand new custom domain, Different-Kitchen.com publishing on WordPress. Sayonara, Blogger! Don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the Good Lord split ya on your way out!



So what’s er… different? Well I didn’t want to change things up too much but I’ve actually had a logo, designed by my dude Kevin of Debut Studio (and now Nike!), since 2004 but never had the wherewithal to install it on the blog. Now it’s up top, fully represented. Other than that I wanted to keep things somewhat familiar and maintain an aesthetic link to the original blog so you’ll see the orange links are still in effect (hope y’all like that) and many of the widgets from the original menu sidebar are also still intact but looking a lot more uniform and clean in design.



I’m actually still trying to figure things out on wordpress so you may still see some virtual ‘scaffolding’ as it were and things move around these parts as I experiment and learn the ins and outs of this new platform (hence the ‘distressed’ Yes We’re Open image above). I was going to wait til after the long weekend to re-launch but how could I pass on the ‘perfect 10’s’ of today’s date which are apparently good luck according to Chinese culture.

And before I forget: many thanks to the homie, Rafi Kam of Oh Word and the Internets Celebrities for hooking this up for me gratis! You are a mensch amongst mensches, my dude! Wanna take advantage of the Rafi’s largess through the same offer for your own blog? CLICK HERE.

As I wrap up this first official post (there’s actually some other stuff up already posted while I was in semi-secret ‘Beta’ mode testing things out so click around and check them out), let me say: I hope you dig the new site. Ain’t much gonna change beyond what I mentioned already in terms of the overall mission:  I’m still gonna try to share with and expose you to stuff the other bloggers can’t (or won’t) laced with pithy one liners and insights that destroy those geek bloggers’ boring essays and self-righteous elitism. Dig what you see or have suggestions? Email me or drop a comment below. Ditto for advertisers. Now that we’re on the more flexible wordpress platform, we should be able to do some more innovative and engaging stuff with any partners who want to work with The Kitchen. Walk with us, I promise we’ll do our best to make Different Kitchen 2.0 one helluva ride just like the first seven years were.

How Real Is the Hype Behind Jay Electronica?

Actually NOT the video for “Exhibit C” but for another Electronica track called, “Dear Moleskin”

This is an amended and expanded version of a couple things I wrote in my Google Shared Items in response to the start of producer, Just Blaze‘s “Buy ‘Exhibit C'” campaign at the end of last year. I was gonna leave well enough alone but then I saw that a blog post by Hot 97’s DJ Enuff entitled, “Why am I not playing J [sic] Electronica on Hot97?” had reignited the battery in Blaze and Questlove‘s backs to relaunch their “Save hip hip by supporting ‘Exhibit C'”, I figured I’d speak up and offer another take on matters.

Before I get into it though, I’ll start by saying I actually am a Jay Elec fan. But while I know a bunch of bloggers have gotten in lockstep to declare “Exhibit C” the best hip hop song of 2009, I’m gonna have to beg to differ. But whatever, taste is really all subjective anyway, right? What I am amazed at though is how what I have termed the ‘Jay Electronica Exception’, came to pass.

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“These cops got to stop this. They’re shooting people like crazy….”

Candlelight vigil for Khiel Coppin – I pray no-one ever has to do one of these for me!

I was gonna do a post about how f-cked up the NYPD was after the Khiel Coppin murder but never found the time to get to it. Then again after the one year anniversary of the Sean Bell shooting and the murder of David Kostovski with my angle being that, as a Black male in NYC, I am and have good reason to be scared of the NYPD, but again didn’t get to it. But an incident that happened to me personally last Friday night sealed the deal and prompted me to finally write this post and stop wasting my time with the usual BS about mp3’s, mixtapes, new videos, sneakers, George Bush and Iraq until I got this off my chest.

So I’m about to walk the one block to my apartment from the subway after hanging out for a bit with some co-workers after our annual office holiday party. It’s about 1:30am and as I come out of the station I see an NYPD van parked in the middle of the road with a bunch of cops around it and one white civilian woman. I briefly make eye contact with the woman and glance at some of the cops but keep walking without paying any of them any particular mind. As I approach the gate to my apartment complex though I notice the van has passed me by and is now right outside my building with the cops all coming out of it. “What’s going on?” I wonder but just as I’m about to go to put the key in the gate to my apartment, they call out to me:

“Excuse me sir, where are you coming from?”

“From the city,” I reply confused.

“Where exactly?

“From Lafayette and Canal.”

Now I’m getting nervous and stuttering ‘cos literally five or six HUGE cops are now surrounding me and towering over my skinny ass. I could barely remember the info I just gave them and am kicking myself cos, if they start asking me more detailed questions, I don’t even know the name of the bar I’ve just been hanging out in for the past hour even though I even had the flyer in my back pocket (as I discovered later). I hadn’t done anything wrong but I felt nervous, jumpy and guilty just having these dudes looking at me like I’m some kind of a suspect.

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Revisionist History: the Canonization of Saint Ronald

“Today history is what we say it is.” television executive speaking to the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland

Watching last week’s coverage of the Reagan state funeral was probably one of the most disheartening things I’ve ever experienced in the media. Actually after the first couple of days I had to give up as I just couldn’t take any more of the media overdosing on coverage of every trivial aspect of the state funeral preparations or pundits trying to top each other’s efforts to canonize Reagan and rebrand him as one of the best presidents America has ever had. Even ESPN got in on the act as they interviewed NBA (I think) officials about whether they had considered postponing playoff games when Reagan was shot.

WTF? Did I miss the memo or something? I was old enough to remember the Reagan era and, as I recall, it covered one of the lower points in modern American history. This is a man who basically ended his term in near-disgrace over the Iran-Contra scandal after his administration, in violation of the law, secretly sold weapons to Iran, even though they were on the State Department’s list of terrorist states at the time, and then illegally diverted the funds to the Nicuaraguan Conatras to fund their insurgency against the Marxist (but democratically elected) Sandinista government. (Newsweek)

Here’s some other highlights from his two terms as president for those who either missed it or don’t remember:

– Reagan infamously thought trees created the greenhouse gases that caused global warming thereby wasting valuable time and diverting funds and resources away from research efforts that could have helped head off this problem years earlier.

– he spent billions on his Strategic Defense Initiative (aka the “Star Wars” missile defense system), which was never completed (or even proven to work), based on the premise of not only defending the US from Soviet missile attacks but also on his sincere belief that it would protect the US from alien attack (I am not making this up).

– he took about six years to acknowledge that AIDS was a serious public health problem that needed to be addressed and researched and not just an issue to pander to the “moral majority” conservatives with by baiting gays and denouncing the homosexual “lifestyle choice.”

And, as reported in Newsweek:

– he failed to shrink big government, contrary to one of his supposed claims to fame. The number of federal employees actually grew by 7 percent during his two terms.

– federal spending also increased as a proportion of national output.

and

– while, committed to balancing the budget, he ran the largest peacetime deficits in American history and tripled the national debt. (more…)