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Read and produced by Lachlan Fletcher.

Stories written by Emily Brass and Nicholas Fiscina.

Minneapolis MC Brother Ali paid CJLO a visit on April 11, 2010 to record a session for Hooked on Sonics.  I got to sit down and talk with him about a range of subjects from his conversion to Islam, religion in general, culture, identity, and how far he goes to put himself out there personally in his music.

Audio for the interview is available below. Transcription courtesy of Brian H.

Omar: We have Brother Ali in the studio here, thanks for coming by.

Brother Ali: Thank you for coming to get me from my hotel and bringing me by, my brother! [laugher]

Omar: I was telling Ali, when I was driving him over here, how we basically set this thing up over the course of a couple of hours, Friday evening and Saturday morning and it worked out perfectly.

Brother Ali: And it just goes to show that the people who help organize my stuff were working on Saturday morning and Friday night and Saturday night, I mean they work around the clock.

Omar: So one of the things I wanted to talk about is, delving more into the religion aspect, because I myself am a practicing Muslim and it was always cool for me to hear in hip-hop songs, like in Jurassic 5 or in Rakim songs, when they used to drop lines about Islam, or like Mos Def for example, he’d do that pretty often. Yourself included, and I was actually wondering, and I always would ask this to brothers and sisters who I would meet in the masjid who are converts, what drew you to the religion when you were young? Like we were talking about W.D. Mohammed in the car before.

Brother Ali: Yeah well, I mean that I think that there were people I grew up with in hip hop that I looked up to, and in an amazing way. The main three were Rakim, Chuck D, and KRS-One. And they all referenced Islam in different ways, but they all, especially Chuck and KRS, they always came back to Malcolm X - and this is before the [Spike Lee] movie, and you know, you don't hear about Malcolm X in school, but I was really curious to find out what is it about this guy that's inspiring to people, to my heroes. So, you know, I wanted to look into him a little bit more. I read his autobiography. And then as I read it, that's around the time that he started becoming popular, you know, the movie was being made, and people were wearing X hats and X jackets and all that kinda stuff.

So I read his entire autobiography, and I was extremely inspired by the whole thing, and when I got to the end I couldn't believe that he was saying that Islam was the only thing that could solve the race problem that exists in America, because that's something that's always been heavy on my mind, since I was 7 or 8 years old. And so I said, "I gotta know what this thing is about". 

So then I went to go study it, Islam is expressed in a lot of different ways, as you know, but I hung around people who called themselves 5 Percenters, the Nation of Gods and Earth, I hung around brothers and sisters from the Nation of Islam for a little while, I hung around some people from the East, you know what I mean? But then it was the group of people that were associated with W.D. Mohammed, and the way that he explained the religion in a way that made it relevant to my life and made me want to read the Qur'an, and made me want to learn Arabic so I can read it for my own self, it made me really want to understand who this man Muhammad was.

Omar: He was one of the few too who broke off from the Nation, like how Malcolm did, and actually started practicing proper Sunni Islam too...

Brother Ali: That's one way to see it, I mean, I think that it was always his belief that what his father, the honourable Elijah Muhammad did, who I have a massive amount of respect for, whatever he did was necessary for the time that it existed. I mean, American slavery, the most diabolical, evil, manipulative form of slavery that's ever existed in the world, it caused people to be separated from their religion, their culture, their history, their name, their families–

Omar: –their identities...

Brother Ali: –their identities as human beings and so in order for Islam to really be something that people in that situation could even begin to approach, he needed to shake them free of the mental bondage they were in. And it actually was Elijah Muhammad's teacher, Farrad (Wallace Fard Muhammad), that created that system of thinking and Elijah Muhammad organized it, taught it, popularized it, created the actual structure that was the Nation of Islam and I think that W.D. Mohammed thought and believed that his role was a continuation of that and maybe some of those things weren't necessary anymore and that folks were in a position to actually approach and accept and communicate with the actual text of Islam now in a new way, not only in a traditional way, but in a new way because it's a new situation.

Omar: He really approached in a more modern fashion, too.

Brother Ali: Yeah, absolutely. As I was saying in the car, I absolutely loved him, and he did so very much for me, both in the things that he taught, and he sent me to Malaysia with a group of students when I was 19 to go and learn about that society, because that's an Islamic society that's not separatist, it's not as sexist as what some people would think.

Omar: Like we were talking about the Saudis early...

Brother Ali: Well, I mean, to an extent, and not to point fingers at anybody in particular but...

Omar: –that's what I do

[both laugh]

Brother Ali: But I mean, I think that he sent us there because of the approach and application of Islam there. But he sent me there and there was just so much learning over the years. Every time that we're in a space together he made a point to come and speak to me, and I mean, right in front of me. And it just meant so very much to me, and when he passed away I wept like a baby and me and my wife and kids drove to Chicago for his funeral. So that was really my introduction and my growth in Islam.

Omar: I think that he was one of the most important people in the faith in North America and his death was a serious blow to the propagation of the faith, especially in the time now too, after September 11th and everything that was going on and the sort of xenophobia that's been going on towards Muslims south of the border. He was needed at that time and it's too bad that he passed away.

Brother Ali: Yeah, it's my feeling that the people, there's a community that's not a structured membership like it used to be with the Nation Of Islam, but there are people who, his wisdom fed us, in terms of our spiritual growth and development and also our business growth and development and the building of our families and things like that. So those people, we feel like he gave us a lot and he did what he needed to do for the time that he was here and, you know, we're going to continue the spirit that he put in us. It's in us, it's in our children. A part of him will always be in us, just like all the great Islamic teachers, but all of the greatest teachers in general. Martin Luther King still lives in us, and Gandhi still lives on and Buddha still lives in on in us and Jesus still lives on in us and as long as we are still turned on to the wisdom that he left us then he'll always be here.

Omar: The other thing I wanted to ask you about is, I guess, is the topic of identity–we were discussing that with the slavery matters. The fact that you grew up albino and I remember reading to how you mentioned that even though you grew up in a white family you felt more comfortable amongst African-Americans basically, based on the fact of how they were discriminated against in a similar fashion to how you might have been discriminated against. And then on top of that you decided to convert to Islam and you're basically taking as many minority fashions as possible as you can upon yourself....

[both laugh]

Omar: Did you find that you were painting yourself in a corner?

Brother Ali: No, no. What happened was that when I was little... When you're an albino, as a kid, it's very difficult. You might as well be a leper, you know what I mean? You're untouchable. People treat you as though you're not a person and that was the experience I had with the world until I was about 7 or 8 years old and I had certain people come and talk to me and reach out to me. Elders and kids too, African-American elders that I learned a lot of things that I needed and that I still practice to this day, to be taught that if you wait for these people to tell you that you're worth something then you're going to wait for the rest of your life and you might as well just quit now, because these people's concept of you can never define yourself. 

You need to internally figure out what it means to you to be a valuable person and then you need to impress yourself. Don't worry about impressing others. Impress yourself. Don't ever show them how they're hurting you. If you need to cry, then you go to the bathroom and cry. But when you're in front of them, don't let them make you crazy, the insults and treatment they give you, keep your head up high, be proud, go into the bathroom or go home and cry. Go home and cry, don't ever lose your temper or cool, you know. All these things that made me who I am that I just couldn't get from my family because they never had to develop that. They were white Americans, part of the “privileged group”. So you know that's something that touched me. And also my friends, the children, would treat me like a person, and they would make jokes, and it wasn't to belittle me or it wasn't to be evil, they were funny. It was for the purpose of making everyone, including me, laugh. And if I could tell jokes back that were equal to those jokes or better, then I was a person. That's the group of people that made me feel like a human being. That's the first time I ever felt valued and embraced. And so from that time of 6, 7, 8 years old, I always felt that way.

So all of these beautiful experiences I'd have with African-American people, I'd go back among white people and hear the way that they mocked black folks and that they didn't respect them and didn't value them... Of course, not everybody, but if you're sensitive then you don't have to look very hard o wait very long to find examples of black folks being devalued, and this caused a lot of confusion inside of me, and anger in me, and distrust, because they wouldn't say that. I was in the midwest, I wasn't in the south, and they wouldn't say that to them, they wouldn't say that to my friends.  They would say it to each and because I was there and because they were like "he's white too" they thought it was all right to say it around me, and then when I would say something about that, they would ostracize me even more and so there was a time where I had a lot of anger and a lot of confusion, and so you know, Islam, although I think a lot of people that don't understand or don't know much about it, think that it's a very separatist religion, when it's really not. It really taught me, and that's why when I got the end of Malcolm's book and he said, Islam is the only thing that can cure America of racism, white supremacy, this “evil thinking", because it's not about the people being bad, nobody's saying that the people are bad, or that to say, "you're racist", but it's a type of thinking that perpetuates the inequality and injustice and unequal access to resources and it's a very evil thinking and that thinking is the devil. That thinking is the evidence of the devil.

Omar: It's what pits people against each other.

Brother Ali: It really does. And it prohibits and restricts certain people from living out their lives as a complete human being, to this day. So when I got involved in Islam and I started to learn and Islam is not the only thing that teaches it, but it's the one that got through to me, that all human beings are created the same and the human soul is from God, and what we're born with is from God and that lives on inside of us inside that way as long as we can... You can neglect your heart or your soul to the point where your soul gives up on you and you can practice evil so much that your soul can just quit. In the Qur'an, they talk about people becoming stones, their heart has a disease and their disease increases to the point where your soul stops trying to bring you back to what's good. Islam taught me that. So that people's mind can be confused and trapped to the point where they become instruments of this evil scheme in the world, but that the soul is still from God, and so you speak past the brain and speak to the soul, and that's what I try to do with my music, at least the good parts of my music, because there are parts of my music too where I'm just an asshole…

[laughter]

Brother Ali: …because I have to do that in order to be honest,  you know what I mean? I don't think that if I don't ever show the side of me that's a jerk then I don't think that anyone will ever believe when I'm trying to tell them all these good high things, that I ultimately believe in.

Omar: So show them both sides then, the whole picture.

Brother Ali: Show all sides, yeah. Show myself when I'm vulnerable and scared, show myself when I'm celebrating, show myself when I'm angry, show myself when I'm on an ego trip. Because I believe that most of what I am, I think, is good and so I believe that that's the only way that message will ever resonate, is if you're willing to be completely open, and I think that's the reason why 2Pac is  the figure in rap that he is. It's not because of his songs, and it's not because of his... Although his songs are great, he's got some of the most amazing songs ever, but you believe him. You can't help it, it's like you got a hole in your soul.

Omar: It's like pages from his diary, almost...

Brother Ali: Yeah, and he wasn't afraid to show you when he was evil. He wasn't afraid to show you the evil side of him, and the beautiful thing is because of that, the beautiful side of him as a man is what we latch onto. But if all he ever showed you was, "look how good I am", then we might be like "whatever".

Omar: Well, it's not honest.

Brother Ali: It's not complete. It's incomplete.

Omar: Yeah.  Talking about this stuff, your latest album (Us), it seems to be your most personal one, I guess.

Brother Ali: Thank you for saying that, man.

Omar: The songs are more representative of personal stories of yourself or what you're going through or of your family, or your environment, what surrounds you. You basically explain why you would go about to do that, to put yourself, the whole picture to see or to read or to hear about. Is it hard to do that? It must be difficult to put yourself out like that.

Brother Ali: Well I had to build the confidence to be able to do it, so for my first couple of projects, you hear little glimpses of me being open... Those weren't hard, but those took some courage, I guess.

Omar: I mean, I can't even tell people my birthday, [laughter] that's how closed off I am to people.

Brother Ali: It's amazing how open you can become in a room full of people. A room full of strangers.

Omar: Is that what makes it easier, the fact that they're strangers? Is it easier to open up to people w ho, whether or not they judge you or not, it has no real bearing?

Brother Ali: I don't know, I mean, I'm open to the point where I make people uncomfortable. I keep telling people I love them, and I tell people things that make them uncomfortable, and I don't mean to, it's just that I'm so comfortable with being open like that and I could tell sometimes when I get a little too comfortable with somebody. I meet rappers that I think are great, and I don't have any kind of weirdness about sexuality, or anything, so I tell them, "man, you're beautiful to me. I love you.  I love everything you do, man. Your soul is just so radiant." I don't have a problem with that, that's not a funny thing for me to say, but some people don't like to be spoken too like that. [laughs]

Omar: Well  you got two options when you do that: you either bring people closer or you push them away.

Brother Ali: Yeah, that's very true. And if people get pushed away like that then I can't , that's less work for me anyway. I can't follow behind somebody like that. I can't babysit like that.

Omar: Do you find people become more closer because of the fact that you're  more open? It must be easier for people to relate to you, I guess, then.

Brother Ali: Yeah I think that's the thing that people like the most. They can get this sense, it's really tangible, that how much I embrace who I am and celebrate it and people look at me and say "well if this fat albino guy can be a rapper and think he's a rapper, tour the world and be like 'hey I'm a rapper' while other people are like “no, you’re not”, I think people think it makes them more comfortable in embracing who they are. I think that's the number one thing. There are people who rap better than me, there are people who can definitely sing better than me, but I think that's the thing that really makes people want to gravitate towards what I do.

Omar: I guess it's kind of like what we started off talking with, all of these different things that made you as much more of a minority than anybody else, is the same concept that make you different from everybody else is what makes you an individual and that, in effect, forms an identity as a person.

Brother Ali: Yeah, I mean, I'm not a minority though, it's not the same. Race trumps everything [laughter], so I still have my complete white privilege. [laughter] I do. And there's nothing you can do about it. But the more comfortable you are just being a human being, the more comfortable you become with the truth, and that's just the truth.

Omar: That comedian Louis C.K. has a whole bit about how he's white and how he's like, you know, "there's nothing bad about this" 'cause of the fact that everyone else gets the bad card and because he's white he gets the top ladder and it sucks, but that's how it is.

Brother Ali: Well I mean what you can do is to try and free yourself from that thinking... “White” is a mindstate, nobody's born white, it's just not true. You live white because our whole society believes in white. So you live a white life but it's not from God, you're not born with it.

Omar: Yeah, it comes from your environment.

Brother Ali: You can be born German or Jewish or Scandanavian or Polish or whatever, but that's not the same thing as being white. White is a made-up thing. Even the symbolic, scriptural meaning of white and black, because European people aren't white. I'm Albino, and European, and I'm not white, so nobody's white. And the darkest African people aren't black. You gotta think, "we're pink and brown, so why isn't it called pink and brown"? Because firstly black and white are polar opposites. And then black and white also have symbolic meaning that white is considered good, pure, superior, righteous, holy. Black is considered evil, scary, sinister. And that does something to people, and so when Malcolm and Farrad, it was really Farrad who made up this "white man is the devil".

Omar: It's like when Malcolm was in prison and they were showing him the dictionary definition of “white” and “black”.

Brother Ali: And when they say "the white man is the devil", they're not talking about caucasian people, they're talking about that thinking, the concept of what it means to be white, and it's evil. It just is. And so when people say, "I'm white, stop talking bad about me", I'm not. It's a thinking that you either accept or reject and we're taught that before we ever get a chance to start thinking and make decisions for ourselves. And it's not for our own benefit,  believe or not. We benefit from it in certain ways but that's not why.

The people that control things didn't make these races up or didn't invent these concepts for us to have power, it's to keep us seperated and to keep it so after a while, the people who control things never had to hit a slave with a whip because they've got a white person that's convinced that they're higher up on the totem poll and they're a part of the ruling class and so they hit the slave with the whip and the real person that's running the show gets to sit in the house and eat cookies and do whatever they wanna do. And so the more comfortable we are with just being human beings, the more comfortable we feel around the truth. The truth isn't our enemy anymore, but until that point we allow ourselves to be instruments and party to this very evil thing in the world. You know, they talk about the "mainstream" and in a stream you got a momentum from all this water going in a direction, like a river, and everything that is a part of that thing is adding to the momentum of it and so when society is going in a direction, if you don't physically or decisively push in the other direction, you're perpetuating it-

Omar: You get swept away with everything else.

Brother Ali: Yeah and you become a part of it just by default. I used to be like that with gay people, because the whole society is so anti-gay and thinks that because gay people are different that it's a license to terrorize them, torture them, kill them, brutalize them, terrify them... And so on my first album, I said the word "faggot" twice, I didn't have any particular hate for gay people, I wasn't talking about them when I said that word, but it's a terrifying, evil word for a gay person to have to hear, as a human being. So me saying that word, I have to own up to the fact that people play my first album, walk around with their headphones, and say this terrible word all the time because of me. And so one of the songs I did was called 'Tight Rope', I tried to, now that I have gay friends and understand a little bit more, I've tried to correct some of the wrongs that I've done. But you know if society's all moving in one direction, you can't sit there when the direction is wrong. If you're just complacent then you are a part of that evil thing, unless you physically stand up. Martin Luther King said it best: "If you don't stand for something then you fall for anything."

Omar: "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem." Stokey Carmichael.

Brother Ali: Exactly. You wanna trade quotes? I got a quote book in my house too.

Omar: Let's go!

[both laugh]

Brother Ali: "Be the chance that you want to see in the world." Gandhi.

[more laughter]

Brother Ali: "My humps. My lovely lady lumps."

Both: Fergie!

[laughter]

Omar: Do you find it necessary to use, the sort of pulpit that you have to spread a message?

Brother Ali: Nope. It just worked out like that. Initially I just... Hip-hop and rhyming, I've just done t hat all my life, since I was a little kid, that's all I've ever done. Everyone who's known me since I was a kid has known me for that. Even at the mosque, everybody knows, "that's what he does."

Omar: Was it the influences maybe? I know myself, I grew up admiring bands like Public Enemy or Fugazi or Bad Religion based on the fact that they used their position to spread messages about certain things.

Brother Ali: Me too. I respected a lot of that too, but I mean, I like a lot of music that I don't like the message of always.

Omar: Like Fergie.

Brother Ali: In a way, yeah. That's not my jam.

Omar: [laughs] I’m just teasing you.

Brother Ali: But really though, I honestly respect will.i.am for his ability to make a pop song and do it consistently and make it really universal, so that people who do not come from his environment, he's able to give them their favourite song of the year. People that actually might look down on him..

Omar: Like myself.

[laughter]

Brother Ali: Like think of the people that go out and sing "I gotta feeling, tonight's gonna be a good night", like frat boys with their white baseball hats, if they saw will.iam in a parking lot they'd be like "look out, bro. This black guy's gonna rob you." But he figured out a way to give them their favourite song and that's a talent. But I think I'm like the last 50 Cent fan left on earth.

Omar: Have you seen his new record  (Before I Self-Destruct)?  With the DVD?

Brother Ali: Nah, I just... That one doesn't exist to me.

Omar: I wanna watch that movie so bad. It looks horrible.

[laughter]

Brother Ali: See, man, I don't like laughing at him... Yeah, sometimes I do.

Omar: Come on!  [laughter]

Brother Ali: But I'm saying, R. Kelly. I might be the last R. Kelly fan. And N.W.A. A lot of the stuff I grew up on wasn't good, like Nana had that N-word-For-Life album. It was purposefully negative, like they were trying to push it as far as they could go. And when I grew up, my favourite music was Public Enemy and N.W.A. and PE is all positive, power-to-the-people stuff and N.W.A. has skits where they're like kidnapping prostitutes and murdering them. It's strange like that. So, no, I don't think with music that you have a responsibility to do that. I don’t. I think that it's not even a responsibility, but if you express yourself in some kind of genuine way there's some kind of truth in what you're saying and that truth will connect with people. Because even through all that stuff, now that I'm 30, you know, that part of that N.W.A. record I'm like "this is silly, slash, terrible", but there's something in their music and they're also people who said "fuck the police" in public for the first time and like, they brought a lot of truth to the world that people didn't know about before.

Omar: The last question I wanted to ask you is about Minneapolis. We were talking a bit about that in the car, and when we had P.O.S. in here I was talking to Stefan about how in the early '80s Minneapolis was the scene for hardcore punk with the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and how their influence was pretty much what wrote the book for a lot of modern punk and indie rock bands. And now, you guys have your own  hip-hop scene with Rhymesayers, with Ant and Slug and...

Brother Ali: –These are just two of them but I would say that there's four that I'm really excited about... Actually five, but one of them is still growing. We had the punk scene in the early '80s but we also had Prince during that time with the funk, so we had like funk and punk. Prince broke through, and he was famous in Minnesota before the rest of the world knew who he was, because we support our own like that.

Omar: And he stayed in Minnesota, too.

Brother Ali: Oh yeah, he's still there. If you live in Minnesota and you're connected to the music scene somehow, you might randomly get invited to a party at his studio at 3 a.m., and come watch him perform for four hours in a private setting. Basically everybody in the hood where I lived when I moved to Minnesota, if you worked in the music industry, you had a job with Prince at some point in your career. He gave you a job, he gave something to put on your resume and gave you a career. So then we had Morris Day and the Time came behind him, and I would even say that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis kinda came on the tail end of that as well, but they're from Minnesota, produced a lot of records for Janet Jackson, huge hit songs. And then right after that we had a band that furthered that tradition, we had a band called Mint Condition. I don't know if you're familiar with them.

Omar: Yeah.

Brother Ali: But they're a huge band from St. Paul and R&B was enormous and right after them came a band called Next, another R&B band.

Omar: Sorta one-hit-wonders for us here, though.

Brother Ali: Next really had three hits, two as Next and R.L. had one more with Deborah Cox.

Omar: And Deborah Cox is Canadian too, I think.

Brother Ali: Really?

Omar: I think so.

Brother Ali: Wow. I had no idea. She's somebody that I'd like to see come back. Yeah so after that we had indie rock. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this band called, uh, it’s Craig Finn's band–

Omar: The Hold Steady.

Brother Ali: The Hold Steady, yeah. But they're incredible, and they're almost starting a new wave of bringing “bar rock” back. And so when this hip-hop thing started in Minnesota, I mean, we used to throw a big show at First Avenue and sell it out and live for two months off of that money.

Omar: That's the club too over there...

Brother Ali: Yeah. And I mean, P.O.S., every time that he plays First Avenue it's sold out.  And now I do two nights in a row and they're both sold out. Atmosphere does four nights in a row there and it's sold out. And now the new thing in Minnesota is bluegrass. Johnny Lang is from Minnesota.

Omar: He's still around, eh?

Brother Ali: Still doing his thing. He's on tour, in fact he's touring Canada with Buddy Guy.

Omar: No way.

Brother Ali: Yeah! He's out here doing it. Mason Jennings... Neither one of those two is necessarily bluegrass, I don't think…

Omar: Johnny Lang isn’t, but Mason Jennings sorta is…

Brother Ali: …But they both a Midwestern, Iron Range kinda blue/bluegrassey kinda song. They're doing it big. Minnesota is a great, great place.

Omar: Alright, well it's great to see that because I grew up loving bands that were influenced by that '80s punk sound from Minneapolis and it's kinda cool to see how those guys kinda started that whole DIY aspect and setting their own tour circuit, and I see the same kind of similar parallels to what you guys are doing.

Brother Ali: Yeah and I mean, I gotta give the credit to that to Atmosphere and indie hip-hop artists in general who do that in that manner: Get in a van, do six shows a week, sometimes seven shows, play everywhere, don't turn down a show, ever. I think almost all of the credit should go to Atmosphere. They taught us all of that. But I mean, Slug grew up either listening to or being friends with the guys that you're talking about

Omar: Alright cool, thank you very much for coming to the station, it was really fun to talk to you.

Brother Ali: Thank you.  Thanks for letting me talk, and talk and talk…

Read by Emily Brass.

Produced by Nicholas Fiscina.

Stories written by Candace Roscoe, Jonathan Moore and Gareth Sloan.

Day 2 of Osheaga and security is more uptight than ever. Yesterday’s bag check was but a brief glimpse inside my purse and as a result I decide it’s a brilliant idea to sneak a half mickey of vodka into the festival today. Turns out Sunday is the new Saturday and ignorance is passé. Today’s security guard behaviour trend really encourages intense bag checks and straight up pat downs. This is either because Snoop Dogg is playing later and they are prejudice ‘haytahs’ or because the three-quarters of the festival ground was littered with 24s of Southern Comfort by the end of last night. I notice this as I approach the festival gates and swiftly turn around. Will they kick me out of the festival if someone catches me trying to ditch my stash? There are security guards everywhere and I am strangely intimidated, even though I could probably take 75% of them in a fight. My two saving graces were the vending machines and singular Porta Potty just outside the bag check. New plan: buy orange juice, head to bathroom, mix a big ol’ ‘drank’ and await the arrival of Nina, who I planned to meet just outside the fest, then we’d share it as previously promised. I get out of the shack of a bathroom, only to see Nina has just crossed the bag check into the festival. She sees me and motions to hurry, and when Nina in a rush you don’t fucking piss her off. I quickly down the bottle of spiked OJ and stumble into the festival. It’s 1:30 pm and I’m already drunk. I am still morally against purchasing overpriced Osheaga food, don’t have a water bottle and it’s significantly hotter than yesterday. I basically figure I’m fucked.  

First up today is Montreal’s Ian Kelly, who I should like 'cause my name and his last name are the same. As we are basically the same person, I would expect Mr. Kelly to have at least a decent taste in music-making, but it turns out his output is not my bag. The vocals are rather whiney, which is something I either totally dig or despise in music. As this voice was paired with fairly tepid, folk tinged mellow rock, it just didn’t do it for me. Acts like Ian Kelly are why no one comes to Osheaga before 4 pm. No one wants to see ‘fine’ music that’s not bad enough to be laughable or good enough to be enjoyable. Worthwhile live music should evoke emotion During Kelly’s set I emoted about half as much as I would watching an episode of Will and Grace because there’s nothing else on TV. Even though I completely hated yesterday’s Unsettler’s set, at least it got me thinking about how much it pissed me off and why. You can have a bunch of fun being angry and putting people down. You can have no fun if you feel nothing whatsoever. And this point in the day, that’s exactly what I feel. The next act I’ve scheduled for myself to see is Hannah Georgas. I’m so out of the loop when it comes to this sort of music, so I ask Nina who this person is and she responds by saying “Some indie folk singer, she’s big on the CBC”. I roll my eyes as if to say “NO THANKS, not after this soundtrack to my elevator trip TO HELL!” 

It turns out Hannah Georgas isn’t so bad after all. We catch a bit of her set (which apparently sounded much different than whatever they play on the CBC) and I do really like her voice because it’s nice and yelpy, much better than the fembot SS (singer songwriter) crew we experienced yesterday. From the few songs I hear, the lyrics seem to evoke the essence of constant pain in my ass Ke$ha (dancing until the cops come, that sort of thing), which is just plain strange but whatever. I decide this chick makes music that sounds like a less electronic and intense Metric, which surprisingly works. Again, not really my sort of music but I can admit I was impressed.  

All I really need to say about Blitzen Trapper can be summed up in the description of the couple standing beside me. He is wearing no shirt and has a white wife beater shirt tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, flip flop sandals, Ed Hardy sunglasses, small hoop earrings and a baseball cap that’s holding back his long, greasy hair. He also has a nipple ring and is jamming out to the alternative tinged country rock tunes with his Bacardi Breezer. She is grown woman sporting pigtails and a pink baseball cap, a frilly pink gingham shirt with denim overall shorts and running shoes. You get the idea. The only aspect of the band you probably didn’t already conjure up in your imagination is that they have a synthesiser and pretty killer vocal harmonies.  

I think I would have loved The Antlers when I was in super down with indie music in high school. Their set was kind of perfect indie pop with a refreshing loudness that seemed to be lacking in most ‘indie darling’ cases. It wasn’t cutesy, which I liked, and was almost loud enough to cover the ridiculously obnoxious ‘blip blop’ sounds of the Piknic Electronik stage just to our left. The vocals are great, helping to push the music out of the realm of the expected and their synthesizer is perfect in tone, for some reason reminding me of the Cold War Kids, who I always had a soft spot for, if they were included on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. 

We Are Wolves were also great. A lot less synth- and electro-oriented than I remembered, which was cool. Their set is loud, dark, danceable and freaky which is exactly what this festival is missing. In this context, they seem pretty fucking hardcore goth and they bring out all kinds of odd and entertaining people. For example, the woman dancing in front of me is some sort of 45 year old Hot Topic goth with pink hair, skanky leather outfit and a tattoo on her back of what seems to be a cartoon version of herself with devil horns. She was really into it. Lots of their songs sound surprisingly single-worthy, only too noisy to be played on mainstream radio which basically makes it excellent music with the exception of a few of the more electronic tunes that bordered on cheesy. The band also should have played later on in the evening when the atmosphere would have seemed more appropriate. No one really wants to dance their ass off in broad daylight though it’s certainly hard to resist. 

I decide to wait in the crowd for Sonic Youth while Snoop Dogg is playing the stage next door. There is at least half an hour where there is literally nothing else to see, so the entire festival is packed into a quarter of the festival grounds. I watch his performance on the screen near our stage and it’s pretty good. His drummer is incredible and the Doggy Dogg is sticking to the classics. He totally knows how to work an audience, which today consists almost exclusively of dorky white kids who love Judd Apatow movies. Surprisingly, a good chunk of the crowd is able to sing along to most of the set and they do so enthusiastically, waving and going nuts if they see themselves on one of the stage’s gigantic screens. The set was pretty sensational and overall enjoyable, even though part of me just wants it to be over because it’s SONIC YOUTH TIME! 

I can’t review Sonic Youth’s set. It wouldn’t be in the least bit objective and it would probably consists of something like: “HOLY SHIT OH MY GOD I AM SO CLOSE TO THURSTON MOORE HOLY SHIT I LOVE SONIC YOUTH SO MUCH THEY ARE BEING SO AWESOME RIGHT NOW AND KIM GORDON IS STILL SO BEAUTIFUL AND I JUST DON’T WANT THIS TO END EVER!” So basically I’ll leave you with this: I love Sonic Youth and they are the best band at Osheaga. So much beautiful noise! 

After I regain consciousness from passing out due to basically seeing God, we rush over to Devo who also put on a great performance despite being, well, a little old for dance music. I’m astonished they have a bunch of energy and sound just as great as in their prime. The crowd’s smaller than I expected but we’re all having a great time. The video stuff playing in the background mixed with their light show is a little overwhelming though. So many blown up images and bright colours kind of distract me from the music and also kind of hurt my eyes. I figure I can handle it for another hour, but this ends up not being the case. After hearing a chunk of great new and old material, my friends and I all suffer from sensory overload and we decide to go see Weezer cover Lady Gaga and MGMT. They do this at every show on this tour and two of us have already seen it in Ottawa but we decide it would be fun anyway. We get drunker and experience our first overwhelming urge to dance, which is funny as none of us really dig the band anymore. We ‘ironically’ dance like the dudes of the Jersey Shore, which totally backfires when I punch myself in the head pretty hard and break my sunglasses. Whoops. After Rivers Cuomo takes off his long, blonde wig, we decide to head to the metro and back to reality. It smells like beer and body odour as we shove ourselves into a car already packed to the brim with tired festival goers.  

All in all Osheaga was good. Not great, but good. Unfortunately, I discovered most local and Canadian groups chosen to play the festival who have any chance of achieving commercial success and notoriety mostly blow. So, if you are reading this, go start a band and make it interesting. We need to work together to fight this growing trend of cringe-worthy, dull and cheesy Canadian music. We are making ourselves look awful. Seriously, what the fuck is our problem?