Read Online Soul Siren by Aisha Duquesne - Free Book Online Page A

introspective bleating, Sarah McLachlan. The radio by law has to play a substantial portion of Canadian music in a desperate attempt to keep the national culture from going flatline, and to be fair the music industry itself was strong and thriving. But Erica and the rest of my friends hardly ever listened to the radio, because you were either hearing American pop tunes or the tongue-in-cheek Barenaked Ladies or folkie angst. Erica and I spent our weekends hunting for clubs that would play stuff for
us
. They were small scenes that we did our best to support even when they were clearly derivative and amateurish, just to have
something
. You never got a vibe that someone would break out and hit it big. So you couldn’t pretend to be cool in recognising them first and having them to yourselves.
    I don’t know how to convey what it was like. We came from the second-largest country in the world, but the population is only about 35 million. Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities you can go to—Chinese, Hungarian, Somali, Argentine, Iraqi, Polish, Jamaican, you name it, it’s got it. And it’s actually the seventh most expensive city in the world to live in, and yet…There was no homegrown black music that could rise to the top and stay on the pop mainstream. If it was black and really popular, it came from Down There. Nothing talked about where we were, what our lives were like at home, it was all Compton ’hood glory or Destiny’s Child wannabes.
    Around High Park, just off the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Avenue, Erica and I had both gone to a high school that was predominantly white. So we laughed at the white kids who got their gangsta patter from Eminem and American crime shows, sneering in disgust at them and saying, “Do you honestly believe anybody talks like that? And talks like that around
here
?”
    It wasn’t so much the incidents of bigotry I recall back home, not that they didn’t happen. My father worked as a construction carpenter, and he didn’t suffer too often from racism at work or over his hiring—he was just too good at his job. And Erica’s father, being a dentist, said if someone had a problem with his black hands going into their mouth, fine, let the bastard’s teeth rot. No, what springs to mind is how badly Erica was needed because our kind back then—as far as the popular cultural mainstream mattered—were, for the most part, simply not
there
.
    Yes, there’s a music network that has patterned itself on MTV and has played some progressive black music, but its producers are a cliquey bunch, and if they don’t like you, you never make rotation. Yes, there’s the Caribana parade in Toronto with its waves of tourists from all over, but it’s a once-a-year gig. I am talking about our own artists getting on CBC shows, getting radio airplay, selling out the SkyDome.
    A year after she hit it big, they promptly awarded Erica a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy with nowhere near the prestige. The Junos were publicly ignored long before that time when the Brit Awards became a joke over in the UK. But the media tried to appear miffed that Erica didn’t bother to fly home to accept hers. In fact, she showed no interest in even having it sent along to her. I have the clip of her interview where our national television network, the CBC, caught up to her at a concert in Boston, the clip that was shown and quoted all over the place.
    “Don’t give me that (bleep) that I’m dissing my fans—I’m dissing
you
. I’m dissing a music industry that wants reflected glory off things
I
did that they had no part of.” She laughed in contempt and added, “You want me to show up and smile for your ceremony? Then you forget that fool hood ornament you give out and pass on some actual
money
to No Big Thang and Jamie Cross and Chantal Fox and play them on CFNY in Toronto.
Then
we’ll talk.”
    You could almost hear the scramble of music journalists as they hunted on Google and