In 2016, Felix Viton Ho showed up at La Vitrola on St. Laurent in Montreal, not sure what to expect. An undergraduate looking to feel involved in something, Ho had Googled “Montreal concerts” and come across the show listing. He climbed three flights of stairs and entered the dimly lit venue to find a crowd of two. It turned out to be a vaporwave show: a hazy, irony-soaked genre of electronic music that originated online. When the performance started, the two other people welcomed Ho into their midst, and together, they all began to sway.

It’s no secret that live music has become increasingly—and often exorbitantly— expensive. Artists and fans have to contend with a market that is effectively monopolized by Live Nation Entertainment (LNE). The 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation means that the single company controls 70 percent of the event venues and ticketing market, gouging audiences with unexpected fees and dynamic pricing models. As Soraya Roberts pointed out earlier this year for Defector, just going to see a popular indie act these days often costs upwards of $50. From an artist’s perspective, these concert ticket prices aren’t indefensible: no one really buys records, streamers don’t really pay, and touring costs are only rising. Amidst this bleak landscape, DIY concerts can offer an adjusted model, one that exists not outside of capitalism but, at least, doesn’t require a Ticketmaster account.

After his introduction to Montreal nightlife, Ho started showing up to more local shows, frequently attending a series of small outdoor concerts put on by promoter Josh Spencer under the name KickDrum. “I asked the man at the door, Josh, if this thing was happening more often,” Ho recalls of his first KickDrum show. “He was like ‘yeah, it’s happening every Wednesday.’ So I showed up the next Wednesday, and I showed up the Wednesday after that.” Eventually, Ho asked Spencer what he could do to get involved, and Spencer asked him to hang out at the door and keep him company. “Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two,” he said. Five years later, Ho is one of KickDrum’s two promoters.

For Liz Houle, KickDrum’s other promoter, the goal is to create an artist experience that is “humane-ish…Because it’s not very humane to be an artist right now,” she says. KickDrum is not profit-seeking, which means Ho and Houle can take risks on new artists and program events that feel exciting and unusual. Meanwhile, their low overhead and NOTAFLOF policy—no one turned away for lack of funds—keeps costs down for audiences. They don’t use Ticketmaster, either, instead selling tickets on a platform they built themselves, with no extra fees.

Recent KickDrum events include two shows with PEI post-punks Absolute Losers, a show featuring rising stars Quinton Barnes and Fraud Perry, and a stripped-down folk night at underground venue MAI/SON. When they’re not worried about staying afloat, promoters can dive deeper into their communities, discovering something new—an energizing sound, a strange space—along the way.

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DIY music as an ethos is commonly traced back to UK punk and post-punk scenes in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when bands like the Buzzcocks and Scritti Politti began self-releasing their music with a view toward transparency and anti-commercialism. But artists across genres have always innovated with what was on hand, from hip hop’s turntable experiments to the homemade instruments of skiffle. “DIY describes a music culture,” writes popular- music scholar Ellis Jones, “wherein emphasis is placed on forming and maintaining spaces for production and distribution which exist outside of, and are positioned as oppositional to, the commercial music industries.”

DIY music is not separate from processes of commodification—concerts and records still affix a monetary value to creative works. But what DIY can do is interrupt the corporate subsumption of all things artistic. “DIY practitioners,” Jones writes, create “commodities that attempt (successfully or otherwise) to bypass or mitigate consumption’s connotations of passivity, exploitation, and alienation.”

Musician and booker Daniel G. Wilson grew up studying these histories of rock, punk and DIY in Mississauga. “I liked the idea that these people were going against the grain,” Wilson says. He mentions that his earliest exposures to DIY came via his Jamaican background. “Musical culture over there already has a sort of natural DIY spirit,” Wilson says. “People wire up and fix up equipment to make soundsystems.”

As a teen, Wilson was part of a thriving all-ages scene in Mississauga, centred around the Masonic Lodge (where Billy Talent used to play in the ’90s, back when they were called Pezz). When the Lodge became too expensive to book, Wilson started trying to get gigs for his band JONCRO in Toronto. But he found bookers were hesitant to book bands without a following, and that this was even more of a barrier for bands with an aggressive sound and a diverse makeup. He points out that it can be easier for white bands to have a built-in audience and that these bands aren’t always welcoming others into their scenes.

Wilson decided to face the problem head-on. In 2017 he founded a festival for BIPOC-fronted and inclusive rock bands, Lingua Franca. “I’m like, ‘ok, I’m going to prove to everyone in this city that you can have an entire bill stacked with amazing bands that are all diverse,’” he says. The festival ran for one night in 2017, its first year, and in 2018, Wilson expanded it to three. “What made me happy was all these people—people playing and coming to the show—for the first time, they were not in the minority,” Wilson says. “The diversity on stage reflected the diversity in the crowd.” Wilson thought to himself: “I’ve done something magical here.”

Lingua Franca has never had grants or sponsorships. “I wanted to prove that you could do this with very little resources, the resources of your community,” Wilson explains. In removing corporate constraints, DIY can create space for marginalized artists who can find themselves structurally shut out of opportunities.

Removing those constraints can also create scenes in places that are ignored by the music industry. Brett Sanderson and Sophia Tweel put on DIY punk and hardcore shows in Charlottetown, PEI. For them, DIY is a matter of keeping music alive.

PEI’s population is only 150,000, Sanderson points out. “So it’s kind of hard to find people to come to shows. But if you keep at it for a long time—”

“You get a little following,” Tweel jumps in. “It introduces people to a scene that they’ve never really had access to before.”

Under the name Secret Beach, Sanderson and Tweel put on all-ages shows, aiming to provide an inclusive space where young people can get excited about music. “We have posters up at every show: no misogyny, no homophobia, no transphobia, no racism,” Sanderson says. “If you aren’t cool with that then you can leave.” They also hang posters from the harm reduction organization PEERS Alliance and emphasize a “no booze, no drugs, no jerks” policy.

Secret Beach has never put on a ticketed show, dealing instead in cash and giving as much of the proceeds as possible to touring bands. Though it may be hard to maintain a scene in a small place, Sanderson and Tweel are enthusiastic about PEI’s emerging artists. “Since we started doing shows,” Sanderson says, “we’ve definitely seen more kids starting bands.”

Likewise, Houle and Ho have noticed an uptick in underground activity in Montreal. “It’s been really lovely to see the surge of young people putting on things in their apartments or at the park,” Houle says. “People are just really down to experiment and try out new types of events and do underground stuff for just their friends.”

Up until this year, KickDrum was mostly run by Ho and Houle, but in January they started getting younger volunteers who wanted to help out and learn how to put on shows. KickDrum went from being two people to seven or eight, and Houle and Ho are excited to be able to pass on what they’ve learned.

For Ottawa’s Hannah Judge and Michael Watson, knowledge sharing is one of the primary motivators behind their DIY label, Club Records. Watson and Judge realized they were effectively running a label before they started calling it one. Watson had been producing and offering distribution to artists and Judge had been showing artists how to release their music, knowledge she gained through her band Fanclubwallet. “One day I just, like, made a logo as kind of a joke and I was like, ‘what if I made a website?’ Before we knew it I was like, ‘oh, this is a record label.’”

Club Records put out their first official release this year, emmersonHALL’s self-titled record. They are proud of the album’s reception, especially considering they spent $80 on promotion. “It feels like every day I’m getting to make a really cool art project with my friends,” Judge says. Like KickDrum, Club Records exists to uplift artists’ work, rather than extract value from it.

“When you sign with a major label, you’re thinking ‘oh, how much money do I owe them?’” Judge says. “And so nothing feels super satisfying,” Watson adds. If Watson or Judge produced the music, they will take a production royalty, but otherwise, at least for now, Club Records doesn’t take a royalty percentage from artists. Instead, when they invoice for a specific job—like producing, or music videos—they add a Club Records tax, which then goes back into their funds for artists. The DIY model allows practitioners to try out different approaches like this, instead of falling into old, exploitative dynamics.

Transparency is built into the Club Records process: the website features a resources page with how-to guides for touring, pitching music, and dealing with “the scary stuff ” (aka, money). Each of the documents on the page is editable, so users can contribute their own experiences, too. The resource page harkens back to those early UK post-punk releases, which featured itemized costs and how- to explainers printed on their sleeves.

Like Houle and Ho, Judge and Watson emphasize the vibrant DIY ecosystem they belong to, pointing to groups like Debaser and Side By Side Weekend. “It’s just cool to see all your friends in the DIY scene trying to do things to uplift the rest of the DIY scene,” Judge says.

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DIY scenes have to uplift themselves, because their underground and non-profit nature makes sustainability a serious challenge. Venues face some of the biggest hurdles. “I often would joke,” Wilson says, “for the first couple of years every venue that I would book for Lingua Franca—except for the more sizable venues—would close the next year.” In 2017, Wilson booked Toronto vegan cafe D-Beatstro. By 2018, it was gone. The same thing happened the next time around with the classic punk venue Faith/Void. La Vitrola, the venue where Ho first fell in love with Montreal shows, closed in 2020, and underground venue La Plante followed soon after.

Longrunning Vancouver DIY venue and arts collective Red Gate Arts Society is currently facing its own existential threat. Active since 2012 (and even earlier, more informally), Red Gate has moved twice already: first after an eviction in 2011, and again in 2018 following a building sale. In their current Mount Pleasant venue, they operate under a licencing program for arts events in “unconventional spaces.” Co-founder Jim Carrico says that the city is now suggesting they apply for a new licence specifically for night clubs and sent a notice to their landlord. He’s not sure what prompted the notice, but in the time that he has been running Red Gate, Carrico says he’s seen more venues shut down than start up. “For there to be a music scene or an arts scene there needs to be a place where people can kind of mess up and make it up and experiment,” Carrico says, “and it has to be cheap.”

The housing and cost of living crises across the country place structural pressures on artists and practitioners to abandon DIY and professionalize. They also make DIY models increasingly necessary. Vinson Ng and Haina Wan of the dance music collective Normie Corp emphasize the importance of keeping events affordable. “The people that we want to cater to,” Ng says, “they’re just feeling it really hard, so there’s a lot of pay what you can, there’s a lot of pay it forward tickets.”

They started throwing events on Zoom during the pandemic and have expanded into in-person parties, mostly in Vancouver, with a focus on highlighting queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour and women artists. The organizers are especially proud of their Pride and Halloween events. “We can pack the room with like 800 to 900 people,” Wan says. “It’s just such a joy to share.” This year, they also hosted their first music festival, Camp Normie.

The question of whether to grow is a tricky one. Because they don’t prioritize profits, DIY models can lead to burnout, with organizers running out of capacity. Judge and Watson mention that the current structure of Club Records isn’t sustainable and they have still-secret plans to develop the organization.

Wilson would love to have the resources to book classic bands like Fishbone, he says. But he also knows that were he to expand, Lingua Franca would lose something in the process. “I think of the Afropunk festival, where a lot of Black punks are kind of sad because it doesn’t really cater to Black punks anymore,” he says.

For Ho, the question of what happens to KickDrum is almost beside the real point. “KickDrum is a useful resource,” he says. “But if the name KickDrum disappears tomorrow it won’t make a difference. What matters is the people, and the experience they’ve gained.”

Houle appreciates occupying a kind of middle ground between a business and a friend’s living room. “We’re not successful enough to go corporate,” she jokes. But the joke belies what KickDrum offers artists and audiences instead: community, creativity, and a fair deal.

Photo by Doug Peters / Alamy Stock Photo

“Sometimes people’s … personal life becomes bigger than their work,” says pop star Britney Spears at one point during Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times-produced documentary released in February 2021. Though the complaint backgrounds a montage of Spears being chased around by paparazzi in the late 2000s, it may as well have been issued on the topic of more recent discussions about her, where her ceaseless legal problems have often threatened to eclipse her actual art.

Directed by Samantha Stark, the film serves as the sixth instalment in the Hulu/FX docuseries The New York Times Presents, and is broadly concerned with the origins and contours of the legal conservatorship (or guardianship) that has governed Spears’s life for nearly 14 years. The star was placed under a temporary conservatorship of both her estate and her person in February of 2008 after an extended period of personal and legal struggles, which culminated in two involuntary psychiatric holds at the top of the year. The arrangement was made indefinite that October, and while it remains in place at the time of writing, Jamie Spears, Britney’s father and former co-conservator, officially filed a petition to end it in September 2021.

A secondary tale that emerges in Framing Britney Spears is that of #FreeBritney, the fan-led movement that has sought to liberate Spears from the conservatorship, concerned for her personal well-being and believing that she’s being taken advantage of financially. (Former co-conservator Andrew Wallet once called the arrangement a “hybrid business model” while petitioning for a raise, and Forbes recently estimated Jamie Spears to have earned at least $5 million before taxes from it.) #FreeBritney “runs from the innocuous to the extreme,” journalist Liz Day explains in the film. Some fans scrutinize and explain court documents; others look for what are supposedly hidden messages being posted by Spears on Instagram.

And though the movement can be conspiracy-like in nature, at least some fan speculation has turned out to be correct. In audio from a June 2021 hearing, which was transcribed by Variety, Spears spoke publicly for the first time in years about her legal arrangement, telling judge Brenda Penny, “I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive.” Among other things, Spears alleged that her handlers have prevented her from visiting friends who live only a short distance away, that she’s been medicated and forced to work against her will, and that she hasn’t been allowed to have an intrauterine device removed even though she’d like to have another baby. (Spears has two teenage sons with ex-husband Kevin Federline.)

Where Stark’s documentary most succeeds is in efficiently recapping the events that led up to June 2021, giving viewers the necessary legal and cultural context to fully understand the conservatorship. And yet, because of that same efficiency, the film has to make necessary omissions for the sake of its runtime. One of these is Spears’s actual body of work—the thing that made her a beloved cultural figure in the first place. A few words are said about her 1998 video for “…Baby One More Time.” Former MTV VJ Dave Holmes notes of her meteoric rise that “she produced excellent videos.” But then we drop the subject completely; it’s established that Spears is working constantly through the 2000s and 2010s, including performing a wildly successful Las Vegas residency from 2013 through 2017, but the art itself takes a back seat to her snowballing legal problems.

And, perhaps because the film has driven so much of this year’s conversation about Spears, that elision of her work has carried over to what feels like the majority of social media posts and think pieces about her. This is particularly unfortunate in her case because her art has been the main channel through which she’s attempted to take back control over her life and narrative in the more than two decades that she’s been famous. On numerous occasions, she’s used her music and music videos to plead for respect and privacy, to laugh at herself when it was clear that she wasn’t going to get any, and even to carry out revenge fantasies against people who’ve hurt her. To downplay this, as the film does, is to inadvertently and mistakenly paint her as a passive figure in all that she’s been through.   

Spears has been known for singing about fame and its complications since as early as her second album, 2000’s Oops!… I Did It Again. The film features multiple montages of her fielding invasive questions from journalists and the public during her imperial years, with Spears addressing her body and self-publicized desire to remain a virgin until marriage. But, while we see that her music is breaking records worldwide, there’s no indication that said music quickly became about being a young woman navigating young adulthood in the public eye.

In 2000’s “Lucky,” she tells the story of a starlet who can’t figure out why she’s so sad even though there’s technically nothing missing in her life. “I’m so fed up with people telling me to be someone else but me,” she sings on 2001’s “Overprotected.” She opens “I’m a Slave 4 U,” from the same year, with an accusation: “All you people look at me like I’m a little girl.” Media scrutiny of Spears around this time could indeed be quite horrid, but an equally important part of the story is how she capitalized on it, when she could just as easily have recoiled.

Tabloid coverage of the star entered a new phase in 2002, following her breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake. His music video for “Cry Me a River,” released in November of that year, depicts him breaking into the home of a Spears lookalike and watching her shower from the shadows. The ex-lover in his lyrics is implied to have cheated on him, a narrative that the press ran with. “He essentially weaponizes the video for one of his singles to incriminate her in the demise of the relationship,” critic Wesley Morris summarizes in the film. But Stark chooses to end that particular chapter there, skipping over what Spears did next, which was respond.

In her 2004 video for “Everytime,” Spears is depicted as one half of a famous couple feeling the strain of omniscient paparazzi. In a scuffle with photographers and frenzied fans, she’s hit in the head with a camera. She doesn’t realize that she’s been wounded until she’s in a hotel bathtub, where she loses consciousness and eventually dies. The camera-as-weapon metaphor was arguably heavy-handed, but the video served as a reminder to the public that there was a real person at the centre of this insatiability. Its most haunting moment has a man clamouring for an autograph while Spears is carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. There’s no retaliation at Timberlake, just a shifting of perspective.

Some challenges would be trickier to recast artistically. Spears’s so-called breakdown proper is generally considered to have lasted from late 2006, when she filed for divorce from Federline, until February of 2008, when the conservatorship took effect. The film covers this period in excruciating detail, from the week that she famously shaved all of her hair off at a Los Angeles salon, to losing custody of her sons, to various rehab and psychiatric ward stints. Not covered, of course, is the work that she released while this was happening.

On 2007’s Blackout, there was no attempt at deflection. “Piece of Me,” the album’s second single, has Spears instructing any critics to “get in line with the paparazzi who’s flipping me off / Hoping I’ll resort to some havoc, end up settling in court.” The song pokes fun at the “hot mess” persona that had by that point made her a favourite punching bag for late-night television, and one of the tabloid industry’s biggest cash cows. As with some of her early work, it was as if Spears recognized the constant surveillance and unflattering coverage to be inevitable, and turned her attention to how she could exercise agency within that dynamic.

The film abbreviates the next decade or so, giving us a montage of Spears making television appearances, touring, promoting fragrances, and winning awards for her work. “She’s living the life of a busy pop singer, and yet we’re also being told that she’s at risk constantly,” says journalist Joe Coscarelli, referring to the conservatorship remaining in place. Her work during this time continued to reference her bumpier years, and often emphatically. In the video for “Hold It Against Me,” from 2011’s Femme Fatale, her fall from grace is represented as a literal plummet, the star surrounded by monitors playing music videos from her cultural peak. In its climax, she battles a double of herself, seemingly alluding to her
own demons.

A more complicated entry was the video for “I Wanna Go,” from the same album. Spears plays herself in a revenge fantasy targeted at the media, cussing journalists out in a press conference before wreaking havoc outside the courthouse. At one point, she hams it up for a photographer before smashing his camera on the ground. When she finds herself cornered by several more, a long-corded microphone appears, which she swings around to violently take each of them out. While the metaphor is once again unsubtle, it corroborates the idea that Spears thinks of her music as her main form of resistance.

But the same video happens to end on a less cathartic note. After she’s rescued from the onslaught of press by a friend, who begins escorting her away from the scene, he turns back to face the lens with an evil expression, diabolical laughter heard in his head. The shot is an homage to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video from 1983, which ends with an identical moment. But it can also be read as a suggestion that Spears was skeptical of the people she was being told to trust.

Since her debut in the late 1990s, the star has been plagued by the narrative that she’s malleable, an empty vessel through which other people’s ideas and wants can be communicated. That line of thinking, combined with evidence supplied by tabloids that she needed help, allowed the conservatorship to go unquestioned by many people prior to this year. But as Spears’s former team member, Kevin Tancharoen, says in the film, “That idea that Britney is a puppet who just gets moved around and gets told what to do is incredibly inaccurate.”

Taken together, Spears’s artistic output paints a picture of a woman who doesn’t take anything lying down, a fact that can co-exist with the many instances—personal, cultural, and legal—in which she’s been unambiguously targeted. Downplaying that work in discussions about her runs the risk of buying into the idea of her as vulnerable and absentminded, just as her legal opponents have spent almost a decade and a half insisting she is. “Believe me,” she sings toward the end of “What U See (Is What U Get),” a deeper cut from her sophomore album. “You’ll be looking for trouble / If you hurt me.”

Photo by batud@rocketmail.com, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Pop singer Halsey begins her 2020 album, Manic, with a quote from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: “I’m just a fucked up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind.” It’s hard to imagine Katy Perry or even Lady Gaga starting a record the same way 10 years ago, but in today’s music landscape, this approach is par for the course. This is an opener for the age of post-resilience pop.

In 2015, philosophy professor Robin James argued in her book, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, that we were living in an era of resilient pop music, where songs musically and lyrically reflected neoliberalism’s obsession with resilience. Resilience, according to James, acknowledges systems of oppression, but suggests they can be overcome through personal strength. James focused on pop-inflected electronic dance music (EDM), which dominated charts at the time, blending club-ready electronic dance music with poppy vocals from stars like Sia and Nicki Minaj, who sang about freedom and fun over dissonant synths and frantic beats building to a cathartic drop. This was the logic of resilience, wrote James: “noise into signal,” pain into persistence.

Since 2015, though, these songs have become fewer and farther between. A new era of pop has come into being, what Jon Caramanica of the New York Times calls Pop 2.0. Defined by its hybridity, Pop 2.0 brings together trap, Latin-pop, alt-country, and more. Those EDM strategies of build-up and release are still around, but now in the form of down-tempo trap beats, not hyped-up anthems. As Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene has written, this new pop is also kind of a bummer—influenced by the rise of emo rap and streaming’s encouragement of low-key atmospheres, the songs are usually more concerned with sadness than strength.

A new generation of stars has come of age with this ethos—Billie Eilish, who writes about nightmares and demons, and Julia Michaels, whose biggest hit to date is titled simply, “Issues.” On her 2020 album Rare, Selena Gomez sings about the importance of staying vulnerable. These new pop stars are more likely to dwell in darkness than chase light, to whisper-sing their problems rather than belt them away. Their music doesn’t require an immediate bounce back; it has space for prolonged pain and failed recovery.

Ariana Grande, possibly currently the biggest pop star in the world, is also the best example of this style. The former Nickelodeon actress has lived through multiple traumas in the public eye and processes them through her music. On 2018’s “breathin” she sings an ode to anxiety; on 2019’s “fake smile,” she refuses to pretend she’s fine. The title track from that same record, “thank u next,” is a song about gratitude for love gone wrong. In 2012, it probably would have had a soaring chorus, propelled by pulsing synths. In the age of post-resilience, though, the song sounded like a breeze: light and laid-back,
not interested in overcoming but passing through.

The reasons for this shift are multifaceted: it capitalizes on a trend towards performed vulnerability on social media, where every micro-influencer is expected to be “real” with their followers, instead of simply aspirational. These new stars also grew up listening to hip-hop and pop punk, where the lyrical content has always been engaged in internal struggle. And, of course, it gestures towards a generation in crisis: teenagers becoming adults faced with mountains of student debt, a precarious labour market, and environmental ruin, to say nothing of politicians or pandemics. If resilience is the edict of neoliberalism, post-resilience pop is music for neoliberalism’s failures. It acknowledges that whatever is wrong has no quick fix. Though the vulnerability can feel overly performed, the damage carefully curated, it’s more interesting than motivational platitudes.

In 2020, there were already signs that pop is pushing past its depressive period: Dua Lipa racked up streams with her disco-ish bangers and Grande released an album about new love (and new sex). Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B provided an empowerment anthem with “WAP” that was invested not in clichés of strength, but the pleasures of Black women’s sexuality.

Wherever this new pop goes, it won’t save us—change happens in the streets, not on the charts—but it can give us different modes for understanding pain and power, and a helpful reminder that when you’re not okay, you’re also not alone.

PHOTO BY SARAH BODRI

We were teaching ourselves something that we didn’t know,” says Kat Estacio, co-founder of Toronto’s Pantayo, a quintet blending traditional Filipino kulintang music with Western pop and rock styles. That’s partly why it took eight years between the ensemble’s first practice in 2012 and the release of their self-titled debut earlier this year. As with many of the best records, though, Pantayo was worth the wait.

The group is made up of Kat Estacio, her twin Katrina Estacio, Michelle Cruz, Eirene Cloma, and Joanna Delos Reyes, all of whom met over the course of several years at Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture’s former location in Kensington Market. They discovered a shared desire to play Filipino kulintang music, and decided to learn together, via YouTube videos and sheet music. Typical kulintang pieces are played on gongs and metallophones, but before too long the group found themselves innovating on tradition.

“As we were exploring, we were putting in our own influences, ’cause we’ve been exposed to pop music, all five of us,” says Kat. “We played the sheet music in a way that made sense to us, added our flavour to it.”

This flavour comes in many forms on their record, which draws inspiration from R&B, hip-hop, and synth-pop. The album covers a lot of ground both stylistically and thematically. On the soulful “Divine,” Cloma beckons a lover over a cool beat. Other tracks like “Taranta” and “Kaingin” feature driving percussion, chant-like vocals, and lyrics about trauma and resistance, inspired by topics like colonialism and missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The record is tied together by its kulintang base, the gongs sometimes serving as a captivating centrepiece, or otherwise an atonal counterpoint to synths and drums.

For Pantayo, learning to play kulintang music was a process of understanding a part of Filipino culture that had previously felt inaccessible. Even band members who grew up in the Philippines were raised on North American pop culture—the band counts The Tragically Hip and Santigold amongst their influences—and kulintang music felt far away.

“I saw those instruments as something ornamental in a room, not really incorporated in daily life,” Kat explains. “But they’re a community-based instrument; people would play them outside after a long day at work.” Kat grew up in Manila, while kulintang music is played predominantly in the southern Philippines.

Approaching the tradition as outsiders, the group took care to reach out to kulintang teachers both in the Philippines and North America. After spending years learning traditional pieces, they began writing material for Pantayo in 2016, working closely with producer alaska B of experimental rock group Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. During the album-writing process, the band grappled with questions of identity: “Who are we? What are we about?” Cruz says they asked themselves. “How can we stay away from making music just because it’s what everyone’s going to like?”

The answer to the questions came through the music itself, and partly through the process of building Pantayo as a group. The band members’ experiences as queer Filipina-Canadians shape their work implicitly. “I’m not the same person that I was when I was in the Philippines,” Kat says. “I am the result of the migration that happened. That story is what we want to tell, apart from the narrative of the songs themselves.”

With the release of the album, their story has reached a wider audience, landing them on the Polaris Prize shortlist and opening up new opportunities. Though the group was disappointed not to attend a Polaris gala in person, they’re already working on ideas for new material, as well as spreading kulintang music to others through educational workshops in Toronto schools. “The fact that we’re able to talk about the tradition and our experience as a band making these songs,” Katrina says. “It’s nothing like I ever imagined.”

“Chevrolet Van” by dave_7 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Tamara Lindeman, also known as Toronto singer-songwriter The Weather Station, doesn’t mince words when it comes to climate change. Asked whether she thinks the music industry is finally waking up to the global crisis, her answer is a swift no. “People talk about feeling guilty more,” she says. “This doesn’t mean anything is changing.” Lindeman is one of many Canadian musicians speaking out on the climate crisis, but talk is one thing; impact is another—and it’s hard to have in an industry where artists depend on emissions-heavy touring to make money.

The carbon impact of the music industry, and touring in particular, is enormous. A study conducted by the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute estimated that for every ticket purchased to a standard show (for venues with a capacity lower than 2,000 people), five kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent are generated, thanks to the combination of venue emissions and the travel required by artists and attendees to get there. Every 300-person show, then, generates roughly the same emissions as a one-way flight from New York to Berlin. Many major acts like Radiohead and Coldplay have started scaling back their tours until “carbon neutral tours” are achievable through implementing comprehensive carbon-reduction strategies. Mid-sized artists don’t necessarily have the resources or the cultural capital to do the same.

There are always measures musicians can take, though. “Talk it through with your booking agents to try and cut back on flights and make your trips count more,” Lindeman says. “Think twice about tours and ask yourself whether they’ll be truly impactful, or if you’re just touring for the sake of touring.” The easiest concrete steps she points to are buying carbon offsets and taking plastic off of tour riders (the document that tells a venue what to provide for the artist, like bottled water or cases of beer). “That should be a no brainer,” she says.

Other Canadian artists are making an effort, too: East Coast singer-songwriter Tara MacLean works with Bullfrog Power to power her tours using green energy sources, and electronic musician Caribou has partnered with PLUS1, a non-profit founded by Arcade Fire that donates extra concert proceeds to causes including climate justice.

Ultimately, Lindeman stresses, the reason touring is unsustainable is because our transportation systems are unsustainable. To really have an impact, the music industry should be advocating for a renewable travel grid, which would enable touring without carbon emissions. “There is nothing inherently wrong with travelling or playing music,” Lindeman explains. And it should be possible to do both without emitting greenhouse gases.

Though she hasn’t seen a major shift within the industry, there are bright spots. Lindeman mentions Music Declares Emergency, a U.K. organization demanding governmental response to the climate crisis. In Canada, artists like Tanya Tagaq have made climate change a central theme in their work, as on her 2016 album Retribution, while also emphasizing the inextricable connection between environmental destruction and the theft of Indigenous land. In January 2019, over 160 members of the Canadian music industry signed a statement of solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders and benefit concerts have since been held across the country.

“The music industry faces the same issue every other industry does; scratch the surface of anything you do, and you find oil and gas,” Lindeman says. Carbon offsets and other greener touring measures reduce the harm these industries cause, but they don’t get at the root of the problem. “We have to fundamentally alter our infrastructure so that it does not run on oil and gas,” she says. “Then we can do what we do, and not have blood on our hands.”

“Music criticism is dead,” proclaimed Dan Kopf emphatically on culture website Quartzy this past spring. In the present streaming era, when you can easily discover music on your own, the “music explainer,” in the form of podcasts, is where it’s at, he argued. Why consider secondhand opinions when you can hear directly from creators about their own writing processes? Hosted by Los Angeles-based Hrishikesh Hirway out of his garage, Song Exploder, a podcast that is perhaps the best known of Kopf’s explainer examples, has already featured an impressive array of guests since it debuted in 2014.

While an explainer like Hirway might not replace the music critic, they could well be reinventing the role. That could be a good thing, even if there are some questions.

It’s possible that explainers could become merely industry insiders, more social entrepreneurs than musician-broadcasters. We’ve seen it happen with music criticism: Since recorded music became freely accessible, the critic-as-journalist has been joined by a new kind of entrepreneurial critic—the opinionated fan. Film critic A.O. Scott has suggested that critics have always been viewed as either specialists or amateurs. In the age of social media, an entrepreneurial music critic is a discerning fan for whom contextualized opinions on music are more important than knowledge of how (or, sometimes, where) it is made. For a select few, fandom can pay, and on YouTube a small crop of verified vlogger-reviewers are now considered modest cultural authorities, with view counts numbering in the millions. However, there are few non-white and even fewer female or non-binary reviewers among them.

The state of criticism at more established online publications is more complicated. Some international music sites like Pitchfork have attempted to diversify their staff and coverage. But the Guardian recently reported that music magazine NME has gone in the other direction. During the early 2000s, two Canadian music sites—Exclaim! and the late Chart Attack—boasted diverse mastheads, but media visibility for non-white, non-male critics seems to be an ongoing problem. Erin Lowers, Exclaim!’s current hip-hop editor, has told Now magazine that “the credit isn’t there” for female-identifying hip-hop writers and publicists.

A key problem plaguing pop music criticism is that, unlike literary and film criticism, it isn’t particularly well-defined. In academia, it exists primarily in musicology or cultural studies departments. In journalism, it has historically involved being present where music subcultures “happen,” an approach seen in Lizzy Goodman’s tome of celeb interviews documenting the 2000s post-punk revival in New York City. During the past two decades, it has also increasingly overlapped with media criticism, such as in recent works by Ryan Alexander Diduck and Grafton Tanner, where music technologies are the focus. Then there are memoirs. Rashod Ollison, a Virginia-based pop critic, documents the challenges he faced growing up as a gay Black teenager in rural Arkansas, marking focal points of his story with song lyrics. He recalls how he admired soul music because he “preferred a more ingratiating place… nurtured by sounds born out of the visceral emotionality of sanctified church singing” to the male anger he felt drove much of west coast hip-hop and alternative rock in the early 1990s, which he couldn’t hear as progressive or sustaining life.

Explainers have the potential to improve criticism and bring these disparate strands closer together. They might also integrate public conversations about pop music with more traditional genres of music like culture-specific folk and classical music, as well as certain forms of jazz. Public broadcasters like NPR, CBC, and BBC already achieve this to an extent, but music criticism sites largely do not. So if there is a Song Exploder equivalent out there capable of getting Mbongwana Star, Shirley Collins and the Latvian Radio Choir in the same room, maybe with Steve Martin dropping in briefly via Skype, I’m on board.

CORRECTION: A version of this story that ran in print in September/October 2018 incorrectly named writer Lizzy Goodman as Elizabeth Goodman. This regrets the error.

…Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto’s hip hop culture from analogue to digital

Mark V. Campbell’s …Everything Remains Raw is an in-depth look at Toronto’s burgeoning hip-hop scene from the 1980s until present day. It also explores how the city helped mold hip-hop culture. The book is a collection of photos, zines, interviews, and art created during a time in Toronto when hip-hop culture was new. The book is an effort to keep the representation of hip-hop genuinely “raw,” Campbell says. Archival photographs, images of graffiti, and nostalgia about venues are all part of the conversation.

Campbell offers sharp observations about the deep influence that photojournalists and hip-hop artists have made, while also exploring the politics and changing dynamics of the hip-hop experience. The book encourages readers to contemplate the deep connection members of the hip-hop community felt to the music and one another during important moments in the Toronto hip-hop scene.

Readers will be forced to consider institutionalized Western art and the implications that come with leaving out marginalized communities. For example, artwork that is normally seen as nationalistic often deeply contrasts with the reality of what was happening in the country’s physical geography at the time. …Everything Remains Raw encourages readers to ponder and broaden our vision of what we consider to be Canadian art and culture. In the way that The Group of Seven celebrated Canada’s land, hip-hop creators used their words and art to do the same to Toronto.

Photo courtesy of Queer Songbook Orchestra, via Facebook.

On stage, a group of classical musicians dressed in formal evening wear hold their string, brass, and woodwind instruments. Making their final preparations before playing, they check their tuning, adjust their seats, and arrange sheet music on the stands in front of them. A pianist sits to one side, and a drummer near the back. After a slow lead-in from the rhythm section and trills from the strings, a vocalist steps to the microphone and begins to sing. But rather than opera or a contemporary classical composition, the lyrics to the iconic queer anthem “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat emerge, instantly recognizable to anyone who has danced in a gay club in the past 30 years. This stripped-down orchestral cover version is just the first in an eclectic set that will transform well-loved pop songs into surprising, beautifully performed new works.

This is the Queer Songbook Orchestra, an 11-piece chamber ensemble dedicated to unearthing and reimagining a queer canon from the last century of popular music. Directed by Toronto musician Shaun Brodie, the group creates new arrangements of songs by out and closeted queer artists from Elton John to Leslie Gore, while also queering music from Disney movie soundtracks, Top 40 radio, and popular musicals.

Reclaiming a hidden history of LGBTQ participation in pop culture, the Queer Songbook Orchestra is actively invested in the politics of queer representation. During performances, narrators read stories that situate these songs within individual queer lives, often sharing deeply personal memories of adolescent hope and desire. For one narrator, k.d. lang’s hit “Constant Craving” was the only representation of queerness he encountered while growing up in his small Newfoundland town, and he relentlessly called the local radio station requesting it. These are songs that have saved lives, celebrated by the Queer Songbook Orchestra in lush performances that inspire moments of communal joy, sorrow, and reflection.

The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a diverse group of musicians, many of whom are sought-after players with bands like The New Pornographers, Hidden Cameras, and Bonjay, as well as the Canadian Opera Company. Some recent collaborators have included acclaimed poet Gwen Benaway, Rough Trade singer Carole Pope, and pioneering electronic music composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

The group has a busy 2018 planned. They are completing a stop-motion film, soliciting new stories to appear in their live show, and releasing their debut album in June. In the fall they embark on a 12-date tour that will take them from Whitehorse to St. John’s, N.L.