MF GALAXY

Legendary PE front discusses “hip hop is dead,” racism in Canada, and why PE let Arrested Development make the Malcolm X  movie theme song   Chuck D. is the leader of Public Enemy , one of the contemporary music’s most influential acts, and creator of two of hip hop’s most powerful albums: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back from 1988, and Fear of a Black Planet from 1990. Born in 1960 in Long Island, New York, Chuck D. attended Adelphi University where he contributed poster artwork to the growing hip hop scene, and where he hosted a hip hop radio show on WBAU. Forming Public Enemy with collaborators Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, DJ Terminator X, and the martial artists the Security of the First World , Chuck D. led a bold new aesthetic into hip hop, combining the look and messages of the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. The group enjoyed enormous success and weathered enormous controversy, creating classic anthems such as 198...

On the previous episode, we heard all about the controversial Bradford Reading Challenge . It shouldn’t be controversial at all, of course. Author, tech-reviewer, and fandom activist K. Tempest Bradford suggested in an xoJane.com opinion piece that readers should branch out beyond the extremely typical, self-imposed restriction of straight, White, able-bodied, and presumably English-speaking male authors. That’s right: thanks to the educational and media systems and cultures of Canada and the United States, that author category is default for way, way, way too many readers. So how about, said Bradford, for one year, open up your minds and eyes to encounter the whole universe of writers beyond? To hear all about the outrageous and even vicious backlash Bradford got for suggesting people read books to make themselves happy, download episode 18 of MFGALAXY from iTunes. But tonight, let’s pick up the Bradford Reading Challenge ourselves, and hear suggestions from: Canada Reads host...

Tell us the story of how and why you are connected with one of your oldest and dearest friends. One of my oldest and dearest friends is Henry Carlo Service, but to me he’ll always be Carlo. We met when we were both summer student workers at the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. He wore a suit every day, but it was usually club suit (this being 1988, he wore 1988 styles... think Bobby Brown). I wore t-shirts and shorts a lot, I think. Hard to believe that was 21 years ago. But when I see photos of me with a flat-top and him with a jheri curl, I accept it really has been more than two decades. (The photo is much later, from my wedding day in 2005.) We really didn’t hang out at the time; we didn’t connect much at the time and two years later we admitted to each other that we’d feared the other was a sell-out. Even typing those words now makes me laugh at both the absurdity, given what I know of Carlo, and the stupidity of (in my case) an 18-year-old’s socio-political prejudice. Bu...

I've been busy enough late that I get an album by my all-time favourite hip hop group two weeks and I get to listen to it maybe three times so far. So nothing especially clever to say except that this album is terrific.