feature:
Combatting CanCon
It’s Monday night–any Monday night. It’s one in the morning. The radio is on; James Brown is singing about being a man and I’m nodding off on the couch. A voice, distinctly Canadian, tells me that I’m listening to CKUT, a community radio station supported by McGill University in Montreal. “We put the looseness in your gooseness,” it continues over the track. In the background, the music changes: “It’s Wilson Pickett. Watch out.”
If I were more invested in this country’s broadcasting policy, it might upset me that I haven’t heard anything Canadian yet. “Broadcast programming provides a public service,” I might even say, quoting freely from Section 3 of the Broadcasting Act, “essential to national identity and cultural sovereignty.” As it is, my concern for the DJ’s duty to protect the cultural identity of Canada is rather inconsequential on Monday nights.
The DJs don’t like their “duty” much either. Nevertheless, requirements passed by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in 1970 stipulate that 35% of music aired on the radio must come out of this country. Its proponents believe Canadian music is in trouble, not because of the quality of our product but because of our population. The argument goes, we’re too numbered to produce significant cultural stock, and with a Black Eyed Peas-shaped tsunami constantly threatening to drown us from the south, supporters continue to regard CanCon as necessary for the viability of the Canadian artists and the country’s recording industry. But for many DJs, the CRTC’s “CanCon” rules are all but impossible to satisfy, and ask that quality and breadth of representation be sacrificed to unnecessary, and ineffective, nationalist measures.
“If you’re doing an indie rock show, great, Canada is full of it.” says Casey Johnson, host of Monday night’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio on CKUT. “But let’s say you’re doing a Delta blues show. Where are you going to find Canadian Delta blues? It doesn’t exist. You end up playing a bunch of bad music that vaguely fits the genre.” Johnson points out that CanCon detracts from independent radio’s bottom line: exposing listeners to the best music they might not otherwise hear. “There’s a big wide world of music out there, and Canadian music is a very small slice of it.”
He, like other disc jockeys across Canada, couldn’t jump the CRTC, so he went through its legs. The theme of Johnson’s show — soul and rock and roll oldies — had him struggling to find Canadian songs that suited his sensibility. “Prior to the 1970s, not much was coming out of the Canadian recording industry,” he says. “You didn’t sit around in Canada in the ‘60s making loads of records.” Fortunately, he has a guitar and a four-track recorder. His 35% is almost entirely comprised of music by Casey and the Rockers — the name he has given his one-man band. “For me, it was easier to write new material than find shit I wanted to play,” he says. He’s not the only one doing it.
Nick Kuepfer hosts CKUT’s Wombeat Fables, a show dedicated to the obscure, the strange, and the international. Judging by his selections (which beg adjectives like “challenging”) and middle-of-the-night time slot, Wombeat is answerable to no one. The CRTC still looms, however, and since Kuepfer is an experimental musician himself, and one-quarter of the band Echoes Still Singing Limbs, he has a ready supply of Canadian songs that fit his show. By turning his show into a performance space for himself and his friends, he promotes his own work and checks off his 35%. In this way, it’s Kuepfer’s creativity that saves his show from punition and CanCon from total irrelevance. It was intended to promote Canadian artists, and it is — just not as it was meant to, and not very effectively. Not enough people listen to indie radio, and commercial stations aren’t asked to do more than play as much Shania as their American counterparts.
Back on my couch, Johnson’s voice introduces a song called “Souvlaki,” a foray into instrumental low-fi psychedelia. It’s an original Casey and the Rockers composition. “I am the rock and roll doctor,” he intones over the opening notes. If only he could cure the CanCon problem as effectively as he’s cured my Monday night blues.