Marlee Greig
ART DIRECTOR

We all suffer from cultural inferiority.

There’s this overwhelming sense of Canadian pride in sports teams, beer, Tim Horton’s and Ryan Gosling but the moment the conversation veers to the arts, especially music, suddenly Canada is perceived as second (or third) tier.  We regard our most ubiquitous auditory exports as inside jokes (Nickleback, Céline Dion, Justin Beiber).

We don’t need someone else to convince us that our own music matters, and we don’t need CANCON. What we need is the continued financial support of small artists and people who feel like music is a meaningful part of their identity as a Canadian.

CANCON (Canadian content) regulations were first passed in 1959. The logic behind CANCON is that since radio frequencies are public property, broadcast programming is a public service, which is essential to creating and maintain national identity; therefore, the Canadian broadcast system needs to present media that reflects our cultural values, opinions, etc. On commercial stations, 35 per cent of music broadcast between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Monday to Friday must be Canadian.

While the idea of promoting Canadian music is nice, it’s undermined by radio stations treatment of CANCON as a chore. Broadcast radio stations seem content to just play the same old singles from the same 10 artists, without giving any exposure to any young artists until they get on a label with a big enough PR department to flog them to major stations, or a foreign media outlet notices them.

Consider the Sheepdogs. This August, the Saskatoon-based band won Rolling Stone’s Choose The Cover contest, beating 15 other unsigned bands. All their Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent On Recording (FACTOR) loans up to this summer totaled $14,905, and in the past two months they have received $32,403. Few cared about that band before an American magazine told us they were good, and now Canadian outlets that would’ve previously overlooked or flat out ignored them are now praising them.

In the 2010-11 fiscal year, FACTOR received 3181 applications for funding, totaling $39,856,898. They approved 1,622, offering $15,860,096. FACTOR is a non-profit organization that provides grants and no-interest loans to Canadian artists, songwriters, managers, labels and distributors to promote the growth of music in Canada. The money comes from the Department Canadian Heritage’s of Canada Music Fund, New Musical Works and Collective Initiatives, plus contributions from Canada’s Private Radio Broadcasters.

Yet we don’t even notice our own artists enough to get mad about what they do.

On Monday I went to see Vancouver band Living with Lions. All Living with Lion’s fame (or perhaps more accurately, infamy) comes from the controversy around their second album Holy Shit. The person who initially wrote about the potentially offensive album artwork (the case/sleeve is designed to look like a Bible; the lyrics are formatted as bible verses and it features cartoons that depict Jesus as waste) wasn’t even Canadian. It was a blogger for an LA based entertainment site. Canadian outlets picked up the story in response to an American source getting offended by it.

Instead of changing the art, LWL returned the $13,248 FACTOR grant and pulled all copies of the original release from shelves. It was rereleased without the Heritage Canada/FACTOR logos and with the mandatory acknowledgements removed.

Still, no one in Canada saw this as an issue until Americans got riled up about it. Do we even need other cultures to tell us when to be angry at this point?

I’m willing to admit, if my headphones were a radio station I would fail CANCON requirements.

The three albums I’ve probably listened to the most lately are Man Overboard’s self-titled record (American), You Me At Six’s Sinners Never Sleep (British) and The Flatliners’ Cavalcade (Canadian). However, my morning commute soundtrack does not need to adhere to Canadian Content requirements.

I realize that it’s cool to have a foreign culture fetish but government money can’t support an industry by itself. There are great bands that come out of this country that don’t get the attention they deserve.

Go find some.