 2002/11/14A HOUSE TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE MR SCRUFF PICKS HIS TRACKS WITH CARE 2002/11/14 CONTINENTAL SHIFT SPOKEN WORD ARTIST CELEBRATES THE NEW NORTH
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CONTINENTAL SHIFT SPOKEN WORD ARTIST CELEBRATES THE NEW NORTH Fateema Sayani
The Ottawa word-slinger says things are heating up on this end of the map and it's about time Canadians stepped up to the mic and started singing about their experiences, rinks, snowmobiles and all. And so he's tagged the scene. "I'm not afraid to mention Ottawa in my poems," he declared. "I talk about the Rideau Canal and clubs and playing hockey in 'tha capitale.' If it's the experience, why shouldn't we speak of that? "The North Coast is defining; I'm representing exactly where I came from. I tell you where I'm from and how I live up here." Ultimately that means at least one hockey rhyme, and Bansfield covers it off on the second track of his second spoken-word CD Tales of the North Coast, being released this weekend. Black Hockey Player came about after Bansfield watched a doc on the Ceeb about the men with skates. "It would never occur to me as a subject of interest until I thought about it. But it represented a lot of my experiences growing up as a black kid in Ottawa. There's a sense of being on your own and being different, yet you're standing out like a sore thumb. There's this feeling of being caught between cultures and it comes out in that poem." He intertwines racial profiling with sports history, citing black sports heroes from Jackie Robinson to Donald Brashear and explaining the difficulty of wearing a helmet over an Afro. Along with the slap-shot force, you'll hear some "touches of country and the forest," Bansfield insisted. He drops in a lot of nature imagery to pay homage to his birth city, the highly suburbanized Parry Sound. Hey, who said hip-hop was all about ghettos? A sampling of the scene today shows the genre diversifying and fragmenting, creating oodles of sub-genres (think trip-hop, lit-hop, agit-hop, prop-hop) from the boonies to the Bronx, sort of akin to nu-country's various slap-on tags. "Calling the scene the North Coast is taking what can be seen as a weakness and making it your strength and wearing it as a badge," Bansfield said. Dust off the snow, and it shines brightly.
TALES OF THE NORTH COAST CD RELEASE W/ THE NTH DIGRI AND
GUESTS
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