The Fat Beat Diet, February 26th 2009

I can pretty much thank my brother and a few shows on Ottawa-area campus radio stations for helping to shape my musical tastes. Elorious Cain’s The Groove was one of them, and it’s been on the air pretty much forever as far as I’m concerned (many, many years, if not decades. I started listening in the late 80s/early 90s) on Saturday afternoons on CKCU. Billing itself as a ‘disco show’, it plays all manners of dance music. It’s the first place I ever heard a Bernard Edwards bassline, and likely the first spot where I heard house and techno as well. I don’t know if he’s still doing this, but once a year for a month, he would take a break from his regular programming and play nothing but African rhythms; afrobeat, highlife, zook, sookous and the like. Needless to say, I was hooked. The guitars on the second track of tonight’s show totally takes me back to those days.

After some afrobeat and highlife and some uptempo funk, we break it down via some dubstep into a few more of my favourite old soul breaks. Then some old school hip hop, ostensibly for Black History Month. I say ostensibly since pretty much every week here at the Fat Beat Diet showcases some form of black history. I’m not necessarily sold on the idea of Black History Month, at least as far as it relates to my radio show programming, but I’ll be the first to agree that there still exists far too much racial inequity in the world today, even with Obama, and anything we can do to shed light on this nasty secret is a-ok with me. But it’s certainly not like I ever need an excuse to play some old school hip hop on my show. I used to love h.e.r. Still do, as a matter of fact… If highlife guitars bring me back to my early days listening to CKCU, listening to Special Ed brings me back to grade 11 homeroom, talking shit with Nile Séguin.

Anways, ’nuff blabbin’, here’s the show:
stream
Too late! File removed (mp3 – 80Mb)
(playlist)

Errata: I’m way too lazy to script my shows ahead of time like some of my harder-working CJSW brethren, so often times what comes out my mouth is a half-fabricated recollection, if not a flat-out lie. In this show, I should have gone with my first instinct, ‘God Put a Smile On Your Face’ was indeed originally from Coldplay not Radiohead. How I get those two bands mixed up is beyond me. Ice-T’s first album which features ‘6’n the Morning’ was called Rhyme Pays and MC Lyte was sister to Audio Two’s Milk D and dj Gizmo. Geez. I need to get some interns or something.