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this is a throw-down ...


So we're at the roller derby the other night, watching our friend Toni so neatly deliver high elbows to the head, when Let Your Backbone Slide comes on over the sound system. Oh, it's your favourite song, I said to C (this is a game we play). But she didn't know what song it was, even after I named it.

You've never heard of Maestro Fresh-Wes ?

Sorry, I'm not into rap, she said.

Okay look, I said. There's like three successful Canadian rap songs -- ever -- and you're listening to one of them.

At which she shrugged.

At which point we returned to this ongoing debate we have, this peeling-brain-onion thing about who has the bigger gaps in their experience, and C talks about how few music stores there were in her childhood Kingston, and how limited the radio was, and then some head-down years she spent in Montreal, exhausted from waitressing, and listening to nothing. And then I counter with this: Saskatchewan, middle of nowhere, three hundred people. Bush parties. Majority ethnic group? Ukrainian farmers. I remember winning a Streetheart record at a dance, and thinking I was the shit. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, drugstore dancer.
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Comments

  1. Toni10:25 am

    No elbows to the head -- though I may or may not have given a blow from behind, which was illegal and landed me in the Sin Bin.

    What would you say the other two successful Canadian rap songs were? One has to be the Dream Warriors. I'm curious what the other might be.

    Poor C. Tell her she can come over and play with my records if she wants.

    Thanks for coming to watch us play! Hope you had as much fun watching as we had bouting (though I doubt that's possible).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Krista10:56 am

    You can't forget about Organized Rhyme! Though I'm not sure what songs were famous, just that Tom Green was in it and he became a little famous?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Toni11:06 am

    O double t a w a. Loved Organized Rhyme.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kristen12:07 pm

    Oh one has to be "Informer" by Snow..

    ReplyDelete
  5. red-handed12:48 pm

    Yep: I'd say Dream Warriors and then either Snow or K'naan; it's a push.

    ReplyDelete

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