Nice article about Toronto music scene

[Artemis]

http://www.thegridto.com/culture/music/ ... the-world/

Wed Jan 18, 2012
Music
Is Toronto the greatest music city in the world?
In 2011, Toronto artists ruled year-end best-of lists around the world again. Find out why the local music bubble just won’t burst. BY: Andre Mayer

Towards the end of last year, a buoyant theme emerged in the American media. I’m not talking about the modest drop in U.S. unemployment or the smirking coverage of the Republican leadership race. I’m talking about the consensus that we had just witnessed a banner year for Toronto music.

Year-end lists were loaded with Toronto acts. Jon Pareles, chief pop critic for The New York Times, named Feist’s Metals as his favourite album of 2011; his colleague Jon Caramanica chose Drake’s Take Care. Nitsuh Abebe, music critic for New York magazine, picked Feel It Break, the debut by Toronto synth-pop group Austra. Meanwhile, the editors of Spin went with David Comes to Life, the electrifying concept album by local punks Fucked Up, and marked the occasion by tarting up Damian Abraham, the band’s formidable frontman, for its cover.

A blog post by urban theorist (and adopted Torontonian) Richard Florida on The Atlantic website on Dec. 26 provided a more mathematical representation of our supposed greatness. In it, Florida cited a geographical study—done by an urban-planning student at UCLA—of the artists on Pitchfork’s top 100 songs of 2011 list. Not surprisingly, New York came out on top, followed by London. But in fourth place, just behind Los Angeles, was our city, which had seven songs on the list. The highest-ranking Toronto tune was “The Morning” by elusive R&B act The Weeknd, at number 15, followed by the Drake songs “Marvin’s Room” (No. 21) and “Headlines” (No. 45), The Weeknd again for “House of Balloons” (No. 57), “Changes” by experimental artist Sandro Perri (No. 78), Fucked Up’s “Queen of Hearts” (No. 80) and “Banana Ripple” (No. 85) by the electronic duo Junior Boys—who, yes, are technically from Hamilton. (Let’s face it, we spurn and embrace the Hammer as it suits us.)

We all know that best-of lists are mildly ridiculous, based as they are on the whims of full-time music snobs. But it’s hard to ignore these results. The recognition of Toronto’s impressive output in 2011 seems to suggest we’re experiencing a moment—akin to Liverpool in the mid-’60s, Manchester in the late ’80s or Seattle in the early ’90s.

But hold on: Didn’t Toronto already have its moment back in the early aughts? Zeroing in on acts like Broken Social Scene, Feist and Hidden Cameras, journalists far and wide heralded our euphoric indie scene, portraying it as one big (shaggy) family. While the coverage seemed a little cutesy, it was deeply satisfying to our civic ego.

But if critics are still so taken with our bands, perhaps there’s something more profound and permanent at play here. Maybe it’s time to cast aside our damnable modesty and ask: Is Toronto the greatest music city in the world?


It’s flattering when international media take notice of your scene and dedicate time and resources to lavish profiles. But there’s an inherent hazard in having a distinct “sound”: you risk losing the attention once tastes change. Just look at Manchester (trippy dance-rock) or Seattle (grunge).

Rather than touting a single, defining sound, Toronto’s music scene has become a riot of styles. This city has not only produced one of the hottest rappers on the planet, it has given rise to disparate talents like violin virtuoso Owen Pallett (formerly known as Final Fantasy), electropunks Crystal Castles and techno maestro Deadmau5.

Many see Toronto’s musical diversity as a hedge against future irrelevance.

“With specific genre explosions, they were just moments in time,” says local concert promoter Mark Pesci, who witnessed the first wave of interest in Toronto bands, and recently launched the listings site Justshows.com. “Whereas what we’re seeing in Toronto [now] is the development of a strong music culture that is going to have a more lasting effect.”

Toronto’s current scene can’t help but be influenced by scenes past. Despite its relative youth, Toronto has a venerable music history—from the folkies that clustered in Yorkville in the mid-’60s to the punks (like the Diodes and the Viletones) who haunted Queen Street in the late ’70s to the synth-heavy pop acts (Martha and the Muffins, Parachute Club) who thrived at the dawn of the MuchMusic age.

As the city’s musical rep grew, so did the infrastructure to support it. Independent record labels like Arts & Crafts and Teenage U.S.A. have been integral to fostering a larger community. And we’ve seen the influence of Wavelength, a weekly showcase that not only helped launch bands like Holy Fuck, The Constantines and Hidden Cameras, but demonstrated that there was so much more to indie than rock.

Of course, Toronto’s polyphonic racket also owes a debt to the larger social achievements of multiculturalism. According to the last census, 46.9 per cent of citizens are visible minorities, and nearly half the population is foreign-born.

“What Toronto does not have that both New York and London do have is scale. But Toronto has a strong overall diversity of people, because of all the immigrants that are here, which creates tremendous opportunities that pretty much no other city on the planet has,” says Kevin Stolarick, research director at the Martin Prosperity Institute, which is part of the Rotman School of Management at U of T and studies how creativity and innovation shape economic regions.

By welcoming people from all imaginable cultures, Toronto has fostered an environment where ethnicities mingle, which can create some stimulating noise. That’s how you get bands like Autorickshaw, which plays a sort of Indo-jazz, and Maza Mezé, which interlaces traditional Greek and Arab melodies. Although more subtle, a strain of exoticism also runs through the dusky R&B of Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd, whose family hails from the Horn of Africa.

“You look at someone like The Weeknd, and people are like, ‘Oh, he’s got such an original sound.’ When you listen to it, you can hear Ethiopia all over it, all over his vocalizations,” says Garvia Bailey, host of the weekly CBC Radio show Big City, Small World.

One of the great virtues of Toronto musicians, says Bailey, is their humility. She’s not talking about shyness or self-deprecation, but rather an acceptance that no musical form is superior to others and a realization that creativity thrives when you remain open to different sounds.

This philosophy is ultimately what led to the massive success of K’naan Warsame, that wiry kid from Rexdale who took his Somali heritage and abiding love of Eric B. and Rakim to create hip-hop that the whole world could—and did—embrace. While “Wavin’ Flag” may have overstayed its welcome on top-40 radio, K’naan is the embodiment of the Toronto spirit.

In the past decade, a growing confidence in the quality of homegrown hip-hop has led to an overwhelming pride. Even more than other music forms, rap places a great emphasis on personal geography, which is why it was so thrilling in the early 2000s to hear MCs like Kardinal Offishall and Choclair name-dropping “the T-dot” in song. “Kardi was like, ‘I’m from Toronto, I’m going to big-up Rexdale’ and all the myriad places that have created him, and at the same time he pulled in his Jamaican influences,” says Bailey. “He really created that pride and that swagger.”

Right now, arguably our biggest champion is Drake, who talks up his hometown at every turn; with generous shots of the Rogers Centre and the CN Tower, the video for “Headlines” is essentially a mash note to Toronto. But Drizzy pays an even higher compliment to the T-dot by continually leaning on its creative talent, whether it’s production partner Noah “40” Shebib or video-directing team Lamar Taylor and Hyghly Alleyne.

[Hype]

A friend of mine is in Put The Rifle Down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put_the_Rifle_Down

And I've mentioned before I went to high school with members of "The Most Serene Republic" (they're on the Arts & Crafts label mentioned in the article).

I'm not really a fan of either band, though PTRD are influenced by New Order, so when they sound like that, I like them.

[Artemis]

"One of the great virtues of Toronto musicians, says Bailey, is their humility. She’s not talking about shyness or self-deprecation, but rather an acceptance that no musical form is superior to others and a realization that creativity thrives when you remain open to different sounds."

[Artemis]

PAGE 2..

Arrogance does not come naturally to us Canadians, but in the early aughts, there was a feeling that what we had here in Toronto was kind of special. Around 2002, downtown hipsters coined the phrase “Torontopia,” which captured the uniqueness and idealism of the city’s arts scene.

To be fair, Montreal has also produced some earth-shaking sounds in the past decade—Arcade Fire most prominently, as well as Handsome Furs, Malajube and Chromeo. But talk to musicians in this town and they’ll tell you that, like New York or London, Toronto has become a place that lures artists from all over—including, as Mark Pesci points out, a significant number of Montreal acts, like the ferocious Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, which mixes metal, native chants, jazz fusion and Noh, a type of Japanese musical theatre.

“Many different types of people gravitate to our city,” writes Austra singer Katie Stelmanis in an email from London, where her band recently played a string of shows. “I know many artists and musicians who have moved to Toronto to be part of a larger music or art scene. I don’t know if they thought they could ‘make it’ [in Toronto], but it is definitely a place to be creative.”

This influx is obviously a sign of Toronto’s desirability, but it has had some unanticipated consequences. Through his work at the Martin Prosperity Institute, Kevin Stolarick has encountered many Toronto musicians who claim the scene is incredibly competitive.

“In Halifax, there are tons of bars full of people who are happy to hear bands play Maritime music,” says Stolarick. But the sheer variety of sounds available in Toronto, he says, makes it difficult for new bands to build an audience, “so it’s a tough competition.”

According to Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham, the truth is more nuanced than that. The scene is perfectly collegial, he says, but concedes that bands have a way of spurring each other on. A few years ago, he recorded a smart-alecky hardcore tune called “How to Rob an Indie Rock Superstar” (under the name Pink Eye). Here’s the chorus: “Small-time jacking is how it begins / Stick up the Hidden Cameras and pawn their violins / I stuck up BSS and Metric, DFA 79 / Outside of Wavelength.”

“I don’t think that was born out of any true malice or competition, like I wanted people’s spots, but it was jealousy that these bands had achieved such prominence,” Abraham says. “When you’re inspired by seeing a lot of great local bands starting out, you can’t help but want to start a band yourself. And the more bands that get started, the better the chances of something great coming out of that, period.”

You don’t have to love all of the bands that have emanated from Toronto in the past decade to recognize that this has been a period of exceptional musical quality, not to mention bracing originality.

So has this gust of creativity made Toronto the greatest musical city in the world, more dynamic and vital than even London or New York? The question is deliberately grandiose, and, of course, impossible to answer. As a music hub, Toronto has some discernable flaws—the paucity of all-ages venues, for example, means we’re not serving younger bands as well as we could.

So can we safely say that Toronto is in the top five? Sure. Then again, do such arbitrary designations mean anything? Perhaps not; unlike tennis rankings, for example, they serve no constructive purpose other than to stoke one’s vanity.

The global interest is exciting, to be sure, but what’s even more gratifying is seeing this music scene evolve. The original surge of attention was primarily on white indie-rock, and lauded the collective approach of bands like Broken Social Scene and Hidden Cameras. But in the past decade, something happened to Toronto, collectively. Instead of falling prey to its own success, like Seattle or “Madchester,” the scene matured, expanded and became more reflective of the wider experience of Toronto, where the fusion of cultures creates almost boundless sonic potential. Maybe it’s less about striving to be the number one music city in the world, and more about saluting the fact that in Toronto, you can hear all the possibilities of the world in one city.

[farrellgirl99]

The Weeknd's House of Balloons was definitely one of the best albums of 2011.

I still think Drake is an awful rapper though.

[Artemis]

I still think Drake is an awful rapper though.

I agree with you on that. I don't get why he is so huge.

[JOEinPHX]

I still think Drake is an awful rapper though.

I caught that dude when he did SNL

No stage presence, no flow, no energy.

Dude is fucking boring as shit. Why people buy his albums makes no sense to me. Kids today love mediocrity apparently.

[Hokahey]

Im listening to Austra right now because of that article. Not bad. I really love synth-pop.

[Hokahey]

Now I'm listening to Fucked Up. I'm kind of blown away by "Queen of Hearts." Really interested in hearing more.

The fact that the chorus starts out "Hello my name is David!" doesnt hurt.