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The Current Transcript for September 3, 2020

Host: Robyn Bresnahan

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

You know, he's just so pleased to have a little bit of entertainment and a little bit of social life. It's good to see the light.

ROBYN BRESNAHAN: Well, that light is something a lot of families are seeing. Rules around visiting loved ones in long term care. Homes are being eased in some parts of Canada, but other provinces are warning of rising cases. And there are concerns about the possibility of a second wave bringing a second lockdown. We'll speak to one family member and a geriatrician and expert on elder care about COVID and the future of long term care in Canada. We'll also hear Episode four of the CBC's This is not a Drake podcast which looks back to the time before R&D and hip hop got along. I'm Robyn Bresnahan and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Long Term Care check in

Guests: Michelle van Beusekom, Dr. Nathan Stall, Carole Estabrooks

SOUNDCLIP

Families, you know, they don't have to narrow it down to that one person anymore. And so that means that their loved one will have access to even more of their family members to come in whenever they would like. And so residents are really excited about this. Family members are really excited about this as well.

RB: That's Lindsey Dickason with the Mount Continuing Care Community in Charlottetown. PEI loosened visitation rules for long term care homes this week. Some of the new rules allow for more relatives to visit. No time limit on visits and even overnight stays. But in other parts of the country, relatives of long term care residents say a patchwork of restrictions still pose a challenge and mean they cannot play the caregiving role that they would like to. And with long term care facilities hit hardest by COVID-19, concerns are mounting about the prospect of a second wave in the fall and possibly more lockdowns. Michelle van Beusekom's parents are in a long term care facility in Brampton, Ontario. She joins me from her home in Montreal. Good morning, Michelle.

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: Good morning, Robyn.

RB: I understand that you saw your parents in July for the first time since the pandemic began. What was that visit like?

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: I did, yes, I saw them on July 30th and it was wonderful. Their home had set up a lovely outdoor visiting area, and they worked so hard to make those folks visits a real celebration. But it's too short. They're 30 minute visits here, two metres apart, your mast, of course. And that 30 minutes comes and goes. And then that euphoria is replaced by real sadness, because how many visits like that, you know, will we get. It's so limited and limiting.

RB: Had you noticed any changes in your parents?

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: I were in a relatively lucky situation. My dad is cognitively very fine. He's physically extremely frail because of Parkinson's and other complications. But I can talk to him on the phone every day and he's doing okay. And my mom is on the same floor as him. She has quite advanced Alzheimer's and doesn't do the phone anymore. But it's such a gift that they're on the same floor. And that happened actually just before COVID. So they see each other every day. They spend time together every day. So my mom gets quality of interaction through my dad because the staff are run off their feet and they're not able to provide that always. So all things considered, they're doing okay, compared to a lot of other stories I heard.

RB: The place where your parents are living, Grace Manor, that was one of the facilities named in a report from the armed forces that found numerous forms of unhygienic, dangerous behaviour back in May. What were the conditions like when you visited in July?

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: I mean, I was outside, so I didn't see the conditions inside the home. But my parents looked too great. They were dressed kind of in their Sunday best and happy. And the staff had done that, you know, a nice job to do my mum's hair and make her look really nice. And Grace Manor was a great place. It's a not for profit and I'm so thankful for that. It's a community of care. Their bottom line is care. It's not profit. They were hit hard by COVID and the military support was so vital. They lost half their staff. Right? Half their staff were out because they contracted the virus. So the remaining staff, including the doctors, the director of care, started doing personal service work. They were all working 16 hours a day and they were in crisis. And that military support helped them to stabilise, to put into place really good protocols around disinfecting and hygiene. There were training gaps for sure that had to be filled. But that really helped them to lift them out of crisis and to stabilise. And they're stable now. They're in this situation.

RB: You know, on the whole, Michelle, it sounds like you're saying that you're feeling quite lucky that, you know, compared to other residents, that your parents have a pretty okay situation yet. I know that you have said that you feel like they will die without proper visitation if they don't figure this out. Can you tell us more about those?

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: Yes, I mean, that's my, you know, that's my big sorrow. My mom is 91 and my dad turned 90 in October. And I so enjoy the time I spend with them. I live in Montreal. I come to Ontario, in normal times, once a month. I'll spend two or three days with them and kind of mourning to night. We'll do different activities. And there is such a quality to that interaction. It is so emotionally rich. I am so thankful to have them at this age. And there's a beauty in the fragility and the vulnerability at this stage of their life. And we're being robbed of that. And, of course, you know, it's the whole world. And we have to take precautions. But we need to figure this out. Like we can't have them permanently locked down. We know now this this isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. We're going to live like this for another year, possibly two years. My parents, like so many others, are at the end of their life. So are they going to spend those last years locked away with us, having occasional access to them? Like, that's just devastating. They grew up as children in the Netherlands in the Second World War. They grew up in a global crisis. And now at the end of their lives, they're caught up in the epicentre of another crisis. And it doesn't have to be this way. Hospitals have figured out humane visitation. Long term care can do it, too. But they need the resources. And for that, they need the support from the government so that they have the staffing and the resources to let family in so that it can be safe. But we need access to our loved ones. They live physically but emotionally the costs are just devastating.

RB: Last week, the Ontario government announced that it's going to allow day trips and overnight visits. And yesterday they clarified even further that residents would be allowed to designate two caregivers who could visit without time limits. What do you think about that?

RB: I think the two caregiver policy is awesome. And I know that's something that's been recommended by by people like Dr. Nathan Stall and I think that is just such a fantastic policy. The day visits, it's caught me by surprise. And I think they caught a lot of people by surprise. It's not what people were asking for. I think it's potentially risky because if there's just, you know, one person who contracts COVID and brings it back just one case, it's a home back in outbreak and then visitation is lost for everybody. So I think it's a lot safer to bring people into the home. Train them in PPE proper protocols, have someone to kind of just keep an eye on things and then they help because we know these places are understaffed, they're chronically understaffed, and family and volunteers are the glue that hold it all together. And when people come, they don't just kind of focus on their person. They know all the other people and, you know, wave and engage and say hello. And that improves everyone's quality of life. So I'm not- yes, I don't understand. And I think throughout this, there's been a lack of transparency. Why this policy for the day visits? Is it safe? Is that what the geriatric experts are recommending? They are recommending the two caregivers. That's fantastic. That's going to make a world of difference for my parents. That means my brother can go back. He's typically there one full day per week. And a woman named Kobe, who is a personal companion for my mom and would typically be there six days a week for a couple of hours with my mom. They have a beautiful, beautiful relationship. So it's so exciting that that's possible again. But these out visits, I'm going to take advantage of it myself. I'll drive to Ontario week after next, take my dad out to a park, feed them cherries and peaches and fresh apples and all the things that he can't get right now. And he's been missing so desperately this summer. But it's risky.

RB: Michelle, it was good to talk to you. And I hope that that visit is a happy one when you next have it. Thank you very much.

MICHELLE VAN BEUSEKOM: Thank you so much. Thanks for shining a light on this.

RB: That's Michelle Van Beusekom. Her parents are in a long term care facility in Brampton, Ontario. We reached her this morning in Montreal. Well, to talk about whether long term care homes are prepared to deal with a possible second wave this fall and the impact on residents and their loved ones. I'm joined now by two guests. Dr. Nathan Stall is a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a research fellow at Women's College Research Institute. And Carole Estabrooks is a professor and Canada research chair in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta and scientific director for the Translating Research in Elder Care programme. Good morning to you both.

NATHAN STALL: Morning.

CAROLE ESTABROOKS: Morning.

RB: Nathan, what was your reaction to what you just heard there from Michelle?

NATHAN STALL: Well, I think it it typifies what we have heard from family members and caregivers throughout the pandemic. You know one of the things, as you mentioned and as she responded to that, we're really pleased to see, is that caregivers in particular in Ontario now are going to be welcomed back in. And that follows the guidance that we helped develop through the National Institute on Ageing at Ryerson University and also mirrors what's being done, as you highlighted, and other provinces across the country, such as in Prince Edward Island. So I do think that there is some a lot more hope right now than there was for a long time during this pandemic.

RB: Carole, do you think the benefits of carefully opening up care homes to family caregivers outweighs the risk of COVID-19?

CAROLE ESTABROOKS: That's a tricky question. The short answer is yes, but I think what we're faced with is, a, we have to balance risk going forward. We know that it's unacceptable to lock institutions like long term care homes down indefinitely, which we did in the early phases. But people in their normal lives don't live with that risk. And going forward, we're not going to be able to open their homes to family caregivers without some risk. But we can manage that. We've learnt a lot in the first stages of combat. And I think we're in a really good position. We're going to have outbreaks. But I think we know how to react to them in a much more rational and planful way than we did back in the spring.

RB: How so? Can you give us some examples of what we learnt in the spring that might change in the fall?

CAROLE ESTABROOKS: Well, it's not perfect everywhere, but we have a much better system around personal protective equipment. We have a better system around educating staff. It's not perfect yet, but it's better we have better staffing levels. They're not anywhere near where they need to be, but we've stabilised it in the immediate time period with one word policies and at least in many jurisdictions, some lifting of wages. We understand now, in a way, I think that's more immediate than we did in the beginning about the extreme vulnerability in this population and about asymptomatic spread and the need to cluster or isolate people who have COVID as quickly as possible. We know that hospitals shouldn't be sending COVID positive assessments back without a home, having the facilities to manage that. So, yes, we're in a much better position, but we're not it's not going to be perfect. But I think it's much more hopeful than it was. The question is, are we going to capitalise on the immediate stabilisation and really begin to look at how we make conditions over the longer term, better for homes so they can manage both regular care and these crises that will continue to come up from time to time.

RB: Nathan, do you agree with that? I mean, Carole has said that she's concerned that this crisis and long term care only gets understood as a COVID crisis. Do you think that this period will lead to a reckoning or any substantial changes to the way long term care is handled in this country?

NATHAN STALL: That's a very good question. I fully agree with what Dr. Estabrooks says. So to highlight it, I do think that homes are in a much better place than they were in March or April. You know, as to whether this will lead to a meaningful change in the long term, it is a hard thing to hang your hat on because we've seen a number of crises, certainly not to the magnitude of this one, where there have been many opportunities to, you know, to wake up the sector and to spur change in it. And we haven't unfortunately seen that. There's been a lot of reports and commissions and expert advice that has been provided and really terrible things that have happened in a long term care sector, you know, in in Ontario, where I am. The nurse [unintelligible] incident, really shocked people across this country, frankly. And we haven't necessarily seen the changes that have been recommended to improve some of the vulnerability and improve that sector. So I'd like to hope it does, but I'm not confident it will.

RB: We heard from Michelle that she has been enjoying visits when she can with her parents outside. Nathan, how will the arrival, do you think, of colder weather complicate things, considering that many of those visits have been outdoors?

NATHAN STALL: Yes. So she touched on really the core issue that I think has been the, you know, the major collateral damage for all, the battle for the pandemic is that we haven't found a way to protect older adults without isolating them. And, you know, the colder weather is going to be hugely problematic. Some provinces like Manitoba have actually committed to building outdoors all season structures that are actually outside of the home. I think creative solutions like that are going to play a huge role in protecting people while also being able to maintain the humanity of the people who live inside their homes or long term care homes across the country. And frankly, I think that now that, you know, after several months of advocacy and expert guidance to governments across the country, I think there's a greater appreciation, I would hope, by policymakers that family caregivers in particular should and must be able to enter homes during times of crisis to support their loved ones and to assist with the crises that we've seen that necessitated drastic measures like calling in the military. So I think there's a much greater understanding that not everyone who comes to a Long-Term Care home is there to quote unquote visit. Some are there as the central partners in care. And I'm really hopeful that that appreciation moving forward is going to strengthen long term care homes as well.

RB: Carole, what does this pandemic revealed about the way that we treat some of the most vulnerable people in this country?

CAROLE ESTABROOKS: Well, people who are disenfranchised or marginalised and vulnerable have borne the brunt of the damages, of course, across the board in under COVID-19 conditions, and they've been especially vulnerable in long term care homes. So I think I mean, it's revealed several things. The voice of the older adults with dementia in a nursing home hasn't been prominent and there's no reason it can't be. The voices of family haven't been heard and prominent enough. And I think we've forgotten or let slip or put to the side that nursing homes aren't chronic hospitals. Their home state, where people live. And homes for this population, is a place for both social and health care. And these people are at the less at the end stage of their lives. And in Canada, how we treat older adults who in the last stage of life, in terms of supporting quality of care, but especially quality of life and supporting a good death is really a measure of the integrity of the country. And I simply forgotten that. It's easy. I mean, you can see how that voice has slipped to the side. You sort of symbolised when COVID began all of the emphasis in the beginning was on. And one understands why ventilator's and ICUs and disproportionately in the beginning. And so in many jurisdictions, we had dire conditions in nursing homes or Long-Term Care Homes and relatively empty hospitals because it's very hard to gauge, of course, what kind of search capacity you're going to need. So I think it's shone a really stark light on longstanding systemic issues. We've got to involve residents and families in decision making, and we need to think about long term care as a place that we can and should be proud of in Canada. I'm going to go away as long as we have an old ageing population and a large proportion of people with dementia. That's the major driver in nursing homes. It's not going to go away and people shouldn't be afraid to go there. Done right and done well, it's the appropriate place for a proportion of the population. And that should be a good place. It shouldn't be a place to be feared.

RB: Thank you both very much for this conversation this morning. I really appreciate it.

CAROLE ESTABROOKS: You're welcome.

NATHAN STALL: Thanks for having us.

RB: Take care. That was Dr. Nathan Stall. He's a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a research fellow at Women's College Research Institute. And Carole Estabrooks is a professor and Canada research chair in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta and scientific director for the Translating Research in Elder Care Programme.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Bell ringing]

VOICE 1: When it comes to keeping our kids safe, I won't take any unnecessary risks.

VOICE 2: Schools can safely reopen if community transmission is low.

VOICE 3: The best place for children is in the classroom.

RB: Well, depending on what part of the country you live in, school is about to start again. Or, in places like Quebec, has just done so.

SOUNDCLIP

MATT GALLOWAY: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, and I'm here at Bancroft School in downtown Montreal. It's the first day of school, the first day of school, unlike any other, after six months of learning at home or not. Coming up next week on The Current, we'll take you inside that first day of school and the anxieties that parents, teachers and students are facing as they head back to class.

RB: Yes, Matt will return to the host's chair next week with that story as part of our series, No Easy Answers as well. On Monday, we will be taking your calls from across the country are going to be asking, how are you feeling about back to school? Parents, grandparents, are you ready to pack the kids off masks and all? Or do you still have reservations of teachers? What questions do you still have about how classrooms are going to work this fall? What about employers? What's at stake for your workplace, for the economy? And of course, we want to hear from the kiddos as well about the things that you have missed, how you're feeling about being back at school. So be sure to tune in Labour Day Monday as the current opens up the phone lines from coast to coast with the host Matt Galloway. Well, the CBC News is coming up next. And then episode four of This is not a Drake podcast. We'll be looking at the 80s hip hop kid versus the hip hop kid of 2020 and the rise of the crooning rapper. I'm Robin Bresnahan and you are listening to The Current.

This is not a Drake Podcast – Episode 4

RB: Hello, I'm Robyn Bresnahan, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

RB: This week, we are bringing you the CBC. This is not a Drake podcast. Today's episode looks at rap's rise and its relationship with R&B. Here's host Ty Harper.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

TY HARPER: In 2019, Chris Brown and Drake released their single No Guidance. Now, when this song dropped, it immediately raised the eyebrows of some critics for legitimate reasons. I mean, let's not forget, Drake had been romantically linked to Rihanna. And here he was doing a song with Chris Brown, who physically assaulted Rihanna back in 2009. But if you remember what 20, 19 was like for hip hop you might also remember that No Guidance pretty much owned that summer. You've got Drake hitting us off the top with his usual R&B Croon. Chris Brown taking over with his signature high energy Tenor for the second and third verses. And Drake returning to close things out with a smooth 24 bar Rap Sung Verse. All in all, No Guidance is what any hip hop kid coming out today might call a normal run of the mill pop song. A hit, but nothing special. And they wouldn't be wrong either. This is what normal sounds like today. A blurred meshing of rapping and singing, rooted in hip hop and R&B sensibilities. But it wasn't always like that. What I mean is that while it might be a fair assumption to think that the 2020 hip hop kid into Drake or Future or Lil Uzi Vert might also be into Chris Brown, Bryson Tiller or Summer Walker, the 80s hip hop kid that was down with Run DMC, Rakim. I'm picturing them rocking out to Boogie Down Productions, classic ode to the birthplace of hip hop, the South Bronx.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That 80s hip hop kid probably wasn't also bumping Whitney Houston or Chaka Khan or hitting rewind on Anita Baker's debut hit Single Sweet Love.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Or at least it wasn't considered cool to be a fan of both, because the reality is back then, for the most part, rap fans were over here and R&B fans were over there. In fact, the story of rap's rise to becoming the dominant pop sound it is today started with rap being the underdog, not just in the eyes of Pop's predominantly white mainstream gatekeepers, but in the eyes of many in the R&B establishment, too. So how did we go from that to a time now in hip hop artists could pop on a record with an R&B act, rap verse, sing another one and be arguably be more successful singer than the R&B singer themselves. That's what we're about to dig into. This is not a Drake podcast. A limited run series about Drake, but not really. I'm your host, Ty Harper. In this episode, we look at rap's journey to pop dominance through the lens of its long, complicated relationship with R&B and the commercial mainstream. And to do that. We begin once again in New York where hip hop started.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: You know, when you think about when hip hop first emerged, you know. Let's go to August 1973.

TY HARPER: Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of black pop culture at Duke University. He's also born and raised in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Definitely by the time it begins to hit the radio airwaves in the late 70s and early 1980s, you know, your appointed period of time where, you know, it's, what, 16, 17 years after the march on Washington.

[Music]

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: You know, King's been dead for 15 years. We have started to see these kind of legal boundaries that separated black Americans from success from the mainstream for Middle-Class Aspiration, you know, began to disappear. You had the first real generation of black kids who were educated in predominately white colleges and universities, and at least the music begins to represent this kind of aspirational view of black America. You know, R&B in the early 1980s, I mean, it is a sound a success. Right? Is the sound of crossover success. And what folks heard when they heard hip hop were the folks who were left behind. And in particular, they heard young folks who were left behind, left behind in the ghetto who might not have been able yet to make that transition. And I think many Middle-Class Black listeners were resistant to those sounds.

KWAME HOLLAND: The older establishment, the R&D people, the jazz people of the world did not respect hip hop at all.

TY HARPER: That's Kwame Holland. And if you're a student of hip hop's golden age, you probably know him as the rapper, producer and self-proclaimed boy genius Kwame.

KWAME HOLLAND: It was just looked at as something that ghetto kids did in the street, something that had no merit, no musicality, and they were voicing this opinion.

TY HARPER: In the late 80s, Quami came on the scene with hits like his billboard number one rap single, The Rhythm.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Back then, Kwame was a hip hop star on the rise and saw firsthand how the genre was being received.

KWAME HOLLAND: You know, like I remember Prince, for example, saying the only good rapper is a dead rapper.

[Music]

TY HARPER: One that's Dead No off Prince's Black album. And while Prince, as we know, eventually came to respect the merits of rap music, in the beginning, rap simply was not received with open arms by many in the black music establishment. But whether you were a singer belting out that polished black aspirational R&B or the voice of a new hip hop sound coming out of the streets of New York in the 80s, there was really only one clear path to being heard by the masses, and that was commercial radio.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Black folks, if they wanted to be treated fairly in the media, they had to own media. And that was kind of the inspiration behind Inner-City Broadcasting and WBLS.

[WBLS promo]

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Initially broadcasting, was founded in the late 60s and early 70s by a guy named Percy Sutton, who also, amongst other things, was the first black borough president in the borough of Manhattan. There was also Malcolm X's legal counsel. And you know what happened when the station began to have some real success in the 1970s, it was a period of time where it's number one station in New York City basically playing black music and all of the all their pop stations had to kind of fall in line and integrate, you know, their playlist in order to compete.

[WBLS promo]

TY HARPER: But it wasn't just WB Alessi's music mix that gave them their cultural pole position. Iit was also thanks to the vision of one disc jockey.

SOUNDCLIP

DJ: Ladies and gentlemen. There acknowledged wonders of the world. You are about to be entertained by the eighth.

Whose whole broadcasting style and programming approach made him one of the most important voices of that era.

SOUNDCLIP

Frankie Tucker's show.

Do it Frankie. Do it. Do it.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Frankie Crocker was the, I would argue, the most influential DJ, radio DJ, in New York City in the 1970s.

SOUNDCLIP

DJ: If you don't dig it, you know you've got a hole in your soul. Don't eat chicken on Sunday.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: He famously would end every show.

SOUNDCLIP

DJ: When Frankie Crocker isn't on your radio. Your radio isn't really on. Take care.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: And we're for performance of King Pleasures, Moody's Mood for Love. That's literally how I first heard the song as a six or seven year old. It was an event. But he was also someone who circulated in the clubs and, you know, the DJs recognised he was there. They would let him know what the hot sounds were going to be. So he also had the real power and capacity to break hits, you know, in ways that DJs almost never do anymore because it didn't really exist.

TY HARPER: WBLS became a major institution in New York households, including the homes of first generation Hip-Hop kids like Kwame. But while WBLS and Kiss FM was setting important precedents with their Hip-Hop programming, there was a catch and it was a pretty big one. It was great that hip hop was getting late night love on two of the most influential stations in the country. But anyone who understood commercial radio knew that the most coveted time slots on the FM grid were between six a.m. and six p.m. Why? Because that's when the masses tuned in and those masses were what turned great songs into mainstream hits and promising acts into bankable household names. Mark Anthony Neal explains why most commercial stations didn't play rap music during their primetime slots.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: The radio stations themselves, black owned radio stations at least, also had an investment to distinguish their sound from what was happening in the streets because they are also trying to challenge and be able to get advertising dollars to convince, you know, mainstream American corporations that they should spend their money on black radio. And there's a black buying audience out there. And hip hop at that point in time didn't suggest that because again, it's largely youth music. Youth music in the ghetto, the folks who had disposable income were living in the hood anymore. They were listening to Teddy Pendergrass and Teena Marie and all these things at this point in time.

KWAME HOLLAND: You know, radio networks, they had by '89, '90, they implemented this thing called the No Rap Work Day. And no rap workday was anytime between six o'clock. And this was a thing. They were like, you don't have to listen to this rap crap while you're at work. They basically said we got to play rap because that's what the kids want. But from six a.m. to six p.m. or seven p.m., we will not play rap. This was literally going on in most radio stations around the country.

TY HARPER: And while some rap artists would persevere and find other ways to become commercially viable. This left most rappers looking at different strategies to be heard on mainstream radio. One of the first big examples of this came via one of R&B's most established divas at the time and one of hip hop's most respected MCs of the early 80s.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That's the legendary Mellie Mell of the hip hop group The Furious Five, spitting his rap game, The Chaka Khan, on her Grammy winning platinum smash single I Feel For You.

[Music]

TY HARPER: A song written and originally recorded by Prince. In 1984, there were rappers who released Way More Important Hip-Hop records. Hodini put out the ground-breaking 12 inch four friends with Five Minutes of Funk on the B side. T la Rock released It's Yours and Roxanne Shanté dropped Rock Revenge and became one of the first women to blow up in rap. But the rap verse most of the world came to know best would be Melley Mel's on an Army record, which spoke to the power of commercial radio at the time.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Pop radio with nineteen eighty three eighty four is like wide open and I could argue that collaboration could have only happened in that particular moment where folks were trying so many different things aesthetically and bringing different people together. I think for a black hip hop artist, it was important because it showed a potential path that could go forward.

TY HARPER: And so for decades to come, especially in the 90s, the rap feature would be a standard strategy for R$B artists looking to add a bit of street edge to their brand. But more importantly, for hip hop artists trying to get themselves heard in the Black Pop, mainstream and beyond, whether it was Roxanne Shante on the Rick James single Lucie's Rap in 1988.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Or one of my personal favourites, Rakim, on the remix to Jody Watley, Single Friends in '89.

[Music]

TY HARPER: And while the looks wrappers were getting on, these R&B singles were great. There were limits to that strategy as well. For one, these songs would be serviced to the music industry with different versions of said song. And so deejays would get extended and remix versions for the clubs and commercial radio programmers would get shorter versions. But get this. Sometimes there would be a no rap version, which literally was a version that left out the rap feature. And it was these no rap versions that usually got the bulk of the airplay on commercial radio. And to make matters worse, these rap features didn't always make it onto the R&B Singers album. And rappers wouldn't see any of the spoils of the album sales if their features weren't on the album. But by the close of the 80s, another lane to more commercial exposure emerged thanks to a new sound that seemed like a win win for R&B singers and rappers looking to get ahead. They called it New Jack Swing.

BRIANA YOUNGER: New Jack Swing was this melding of hip hop production and aesthetic value with our M.B singing and vocal techniques that really made it abundantly clear how compatible these two genres were.

TY HARPER: That's music journalist Briana Younger.

BRIANA YOUNGER: It becomes the blueprint for essentially almost every popular song we hear now that is kind of begging you to question whether it's hip hop or R&B, I think that starts with New Jack Swing.

TY HARPER: And while New Jack Swing, its creator Teddy Rally and Uptown Records, the label founded by the late Andre Harrell, who was primarily responsible for pushing the new Jack Sound, are all deserving of their own podcasts, even big screen movies. What's important for the focus of this series is that New Jack Swing became a go to formula that breathed new life into commercial R&B. Former new additions member Bobby Brown became the self-proclaimed king of the genre, thanks to smashes like every little step, My Prerogative and his first major solo pop smash Don't be cruel.

[Music]

TY HARPER: But on the other hand, New Jack Swing also gave rappers a clearer crossover path to black commercial radio and beyond. Think heavy ds run of hits that not only included somebody for me and is a good to you, but also saw him secure features with established R&B acts. Most significantly, his appearance with Janet Jackson on the remix to her song All Right.

[Music]

TY HARPER: And later with Janet's brother Michael on his single Jam.

[Music]

KWAME HOLLAND: Band, Heavy D started doing New Jack Swing Records with Teddy Rally. Big Daddy came and did a new Jack swing record with Teddy Riley. We started looking at it. It's okay now. That's the most popular form of this hip hop R&B thing that's going on. From that point, Teddy was the go to guy to cross over.

TY HARPER: And Kwame himself would have one of his biggest hits as a rap artist during that whole New Jack Swing era with a song called Only You.

[Music]

TY HARPER: A song he produced himself but initially was actually meant for another artist.

KWAME HOLLAND: The record was originally created for Vanessa Williams at the time with me as a feature. It didn't work out, so I just kept it for myself because I wanted to go against that quote unquote, no rap workday. So if I put 50 percent singing, 50 percent rap and I have a higher chance, I have a 50 percent chance of being on the radio at six o'clock in the morning and not after six.

TY HARPER: And Kwame is Gamble would pay off giving him his second billboard, top 40 R&B hit single and helping to solidify his fan base, a fan base that actually included the King of Pop himself.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: Kwame poses a way forward for RMV styled hip hop.

TY HARPER: Here's Mark Anthony Neal.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL: It doesn't get fully realised the way Kwame first imagined it. On the one hand, because of, you know, the beginning and fluid's of West Coast, NWA, Dr. Dre and that whole movement. But I think, you know, for me, there was something comfortable that was taking risk aesthetically but was still hip hop and still very much R&B.

TY HARPER: Indeed, the growing popularity of NWA and the harder edged West Coast gangsta rap sound, along with pushback to the new Jack Wing style from within the hip hop establishment, would signal a grand opening and grand closing for New Jack Swing. And in good old hip hop fashion that seemingly Antine New Jack Swing sentiment would make it onto several classic releases from that era, including We Got the Jazz from a Tribe Called Quest.

[Music]

TY HARPER: And Ice Cubes, legendary line on his song The Wrong, and We're to[beep] With. Kwame himself, would get his own share of criticism from within the rap establishment, most famously embodied in a line from the late notorious BIG on his song Unbelievable.

[Music]

TY HARPER: At the time. Quami would just shake it all off and keep it moving. But talking to him for this podcast, he had this to say about the whole new Jack swing backlash.

KWAME HOLLAND: It wasn't necessarily against New Jack swing. It was the copycats and the rappers who were known for their [unintelligible] records jumping on New Jack Swing Records to get ahead. That's where the backlash came from. And then it was more of your records are not getting played on the radio but the Teddy Ralley records are, so now you hate New Jack Swing. When everybody was getting played on the radio, we love New Jack Swing. It's like rappers hating Trap now because everything is so trapped out.

TY HARPER: Kwame would eventually hang up the mike in the mid 90s to become a full time producer, eventually working with the likes of Mary J. Blige, Lloyd Banks and tweet for her hit single with Missy Elliott, Turn The Lights off in 2004.

[Music]

TY HARPER: But not before having a hand in one of the biggest songs of the new Jack Swing era, a song Kwame had no idea would have the impact it did.

KWAME HOLLAND: I was messing with some girl in L.A. and her brother, her brother knew every member of New Edition and he was like, hey, you want to meet New Edition? I'm like, uh, OK. So we went to everybody's house. We first went to Ralph's house and me and Ralph got a call. And then we went to Ronnie, Ricky and Mike. They were all in a house together. Everybody's playing Say Good Janis's and just chilling out, you know, being, you know, young adults, teenagers. And Mike was like, I'm putting together a group with just me, Ronnie and Ricky. We're gonna rap. We're gonna sing. I'm like, it'll never work. So we were all going out to a club that night. So he picked us up and he plays Poison minus the raps. He's like, yo, I know somebody could come up with some raps for this. By the time we got to the club, I handed them a napkin, I was like, he goes, you're right. Two verses. I wrote the verse that they actually kept and used was Bryony's rhyme.

[Music]

KWAME HOLLAND: Poison. Deadly. Moving in slow. Looking for a mellow fellow like the Vogue. Getting pay. Laid. You know, I wrote that. They use that whole thing. And that was it. That literally was it.

[Music]

TY HARPER: The Poison went on to become one of the biggest songs of 1990. And to this day, it's one of the most recognisable songs of the new Jack Swing era. The Poison album also went four times platinum, besting every release by Bell Biv DeVoe Original Group New Edition. The album also included production work from the Bomb Squad of Public Enemy Fame and would be an early blueprint for the fusion of rap and R&B, which she expanded upon later by artists like Mary J. Blige and Jody C. I mean Bell Biv DeVoe even came equipped with a catchy mission statement that quite literally articulated their genre of fluidity. In BBD's mind, they were.

[Music]

TY HARPER: And with that, Bell Biv Devoe became a pivotal example of what blurring the lines between rap and R&B could look and sound like while selling millions and millions of records in the process. Which to me, kind of begs the question, if a trio of formerly known as R&B singers could go platinum on the strength of their raps, what was stopping rappers from doing the same thing as singers?

RB: We have been listening to This is not a Drake podcast. We'll continue this episode in 90 seconds after your regional update. I'm Robyn Bresnahan and this is The Current.

This is not a Drake Podcast – Episode 4, part 2

RB: Hi, I'm Robyn Bresnahan, you're listening to The Current. Let's pick up where we left off with Episode four of CBC's This is not a Drake Podcast with host Ty Harper.

SOUNDCLIP

TY HARPER: By the 90s, hip hop was no longer the underdog, it was in the 80s. Don't get me wrong, it was still an uphill battle, but it was clear that rap was here to stay and moving into the mainstream in a big way. Still, rappers hungry for the kind of commercial success that came with appealing to both hip hop and R&B audiences the way BBD had were facing a new challenge. And that was getting the emotional vulnerability that came with singing to make sense within the context of hip hop. Now, to be clear, rappers have been singing on their songs from the very beginning. I mean, one of the earliest examples was Kavvy Kav on his 1983 rap classic All Night Long.

[Music]

TY HARPER: But like waterbed Kav on that song, rappers who sang back in the day usually did it with a playful tongue and cheek delivery. Think Slick Rick on basically every hit record he had. There always seemed to be a kind of ambivalence around a rapper singing like they meant it, something you didn't see with Bell Biv Devoe. Not that BBD wherever viewed as real MCs. But there was nothing coy about their rap delivery either. Here's Mark Anthony Neal with some thoughts on this.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Know there've been so many examples of rappers, who sang, right. And there's always been a kind of earnestness to it. Right. You know, Chris One sang.

[Music]

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: So even if it was a kind of, you know, Jamaican style sing sing, we have the examples of most [unintelligible] singing in black on both sides. You know, Biz Markie sang. I mean, that's essentially what he does all throughout. You know, Just a Friend. You know, it's done so in a way that's shocking.

[Music]

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: I actually think that ambivalence is not so much something that's internal to hip hop as it was the external influence of hip hop. I think about that great line that KRS One asked. You know, when he asks, are there any straight singers and R&B.

[Music]

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: And for a moment, think about the image of and B in the mid 80s and late 80s where they're all wearing Jerry curls and some of them are singing with false set of voices. One of the dichotomies that comes out of this kind of hip hop and R&B tension, particularly around masculinity, is that hip hop represented a kind of hard hypermasculinity and R&B represented a soft masculinity. Right. That's why Bobby Brown and that generation were so significant, because they brought that hip hop hardness, you know, to R&B, which was perceived as being soft.

TY HARPER: This ambivalence, Mark Anthony Neal is articulating, also speaks to the deeper issues around masculinity and homophobia that hip hop and other male dominated genres continue to struggle with. But he takes it a step further and also highlights the way female hip hop artists are perceived within this realm of conversation.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Lauryn Hill was a singer, is a singer. Queen Latifah is a singer. Right. Missy Elliott is a singer. Even the ways that we talk about those artists. We tend not to think about them as Hip-Hop stars with this kind of hybrid form. It is not just about gender because no one thinks about M.C. latest hybrid, right? She's a hip hop artist, but she did say. But for these women, hip hop artists who could also say is like we don't quite know how to categorise them because somehow the singing, you know, doesn't fit comfortably the idea of what folks thought hip hop was time.

TY HARPER: Now, over the course of the 90s, we'd see plenty of other artists push the boundaries of what a rap act could do with singing. Whether we're talking Bone Thugs in Harmony's Whole Style, as epitomised on their '96 mainstream hit the Crossroads or the earnest attempts that experimentation that came in the late 90s and early 2000s from rappers like Q Tip and Andre 3000 Veha Outcasts, multi platinum selling speaker box Love Below Double album, which included songs like Prototype. She lives in my Lap and of course the billboard topping single, Hey, Yeah.

[Music]

TY HARPER: But while those artists were clearly pushing the boundaries of what a rapper who sang could sound like, they all had a pretty singular visions, visions, few rap acts were able to incorporate into their own styles. And so the rapper with the R&B singer on the hook combo continue to be the default formula for most hip hop artists trying to go pop. That was until a rapper from Jamaica, Queens, broke that mould just a little bit stiff. That's Many Men from 50 Cent's debut album, Get Rich or Die Trying, released in 2003. By this time, hip hop, thanks in large part to Diddy and Bad Boys Shiny Suit Jiggy Era was dominating the pop charts with the standard rapper on the verse, singer on the hook formula. But 50 helped usher in an era of East Coast style gangsta rap that centred around smooth as butter RB Hooks sung by 50 Cent himself and approach 50 initially clowned, another successful rapper for doing at the time. Jar Rule.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: The funniest thing about 50 was that 50 was seeing just as much as John Rowland records. The difference was 50 just had a lot more personality.

TY HARPER: Phonte Coleman is a member of the hip hop group Little Brother. And aside from being regarded as one of the most respected emcees to come out of the early 2000s era, inspiring Drake himself, Phonte would also become known for his singing, most notably as one half of the Grammy Award winning group Foreign Exchange with producer Nicolai.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Many Men, that is a song about people trying to kill him. And he's singing. You know what I mean?You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, it was it had a way of taking just these really dark and just tragic subjects and making them beautiful. He was someone that represented just kind of a traditional view of masculinity. Just the manly man. Just the muscular guy, the built dude. You know the tough guy, as I think lot of he was. I will if 50 can sing and get away with it, then, hell, the land is all the way open.

TY HARPER: It really felt that way. And with the success of Get Rich or Die Trying. Fifty had made a pretty strong case for rappers cutting out the R and B middlemen or middle woman and doing the singing themselves.

DWELE: Ironically, who put Fifty on my radar light was his remake Attain It when his mixtape when he was singing my part but making it gangsta.

TY HARPER: That's Grammy nominated singer Dwele. And the remake he's referring to is 50 Cent's Take on Slum Villages 2002 Single Tainted, which featured dwelling on the hook. Here's a bit of 50s version.

[Music]

DWELE: After that. You know, that's what I heard Many men. That's what I heard. [Unintelligible], Candy Shop, you know. And I'm like, oh, OK. He does this and he's a rapper. He's killing it on the lyrics. But these hooks are magical.

TY HARPER: But Dwele takes his analysis of 50 secret singing songs a step further and actually nails it down to one very unique but arguably overlooked ingredient.

DWELE: It was [unintelligible] man. I mean, you know, he was, he was singing with some bug shots in his face. You can not even see it, hearing it. You what I'm saying? [Singing] I'll take you to the candy shop. Nobody can purposely do that. That's what made him special. That's what made him stand out.

TY HARPER: Fifty's ability to help break the machismo stigma around rappers singing their own hooks would be another pivotal moment that helped push mainstream rap in the direction it's been going in to this day. But it wouldn't be a singer or a rapper responsible for the genre's next transformative moment. It would actually be a piece of technology.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Auto tune is a tool that is used to manipulate pitch. So if you're a singer and you're singing a little flat or a little sharp, auto tune is a software that you could use to literally tune your vocal and get it in perfect pitch. The earliest case I can remember hearing it was on Believe Bashir in 1999.

TY HARPER: Auto tune was already a thing before Cher used it on Believe. It was usually used much more suddenly and specifically to correct any imperfection in a singer's pitch. It eliminated the need for lots and lots of retakes, which in turn cut down the production time and costs for the singer and the record label. So that wobbly robotic effect we hear on Believe.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Well, most singers and producers would have heard that and turn the auto tune effect way the hell down. But Cher and her producers didn't. Instead, they embraced it. And here we are.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: I never would have guessed that Cher would be the most influential hip hop artist of all time. But I think we've got to put her in the running.

TY HARPER: There's no question Cher's vocal production on Believe had a major impact on pop culture moving forward. But when it comes to T-pain, the rapper turned singer who actually popularised the use of auto tune in the hip hop world. He actually credits a different artist for the initial inspiration.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That's the dark child remakes of Jennifer Lopez's debut single If You Have My Love. But whether it was Cher, J. Lo or both. The bottom line is T-pain, thanks to his auto tuned vocals became one of the winningest new acts of the late 2000s. And it started with his debut single, I'm Sprung. But things really took off for T-pain with his first billboard number one hit, Buy You a Drink.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Pretty soon, T-Pain's auto tuned vocals were the go to hook for other artists hit rap records, including D.J. Khalid, Rick Ross and Kanye West on his hit single Goodlife, which won T-Pain his first Grammy. And it was at this point that Kanye West himself decided to give auto tune a go on his own voice with pretty massive implications.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That's Love Lock Down from Kanye's 2008 album 808s Heartbreak, an album that featured Kanye a rapping and singing exclusively with the auto tune effect for the very first time, and all with studio assistants from T-Pain and a newcomer by the name of Kid Cudi, who'd been making waves that same year with his debut single Day and Night.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: I always felt that Kanye was dealing with a particular level of pain and trauma that he was trying to recover from. And I thought that he did feel as though there was a space in mainstream hip hop to really talk about his emotions without filtering it through auto tune and this kind of distorted singing. He can't really sing. That's important. He could sing straight ward because he physically couldn't, but also because in the context of hip hop, you know, it wouldn't have worked for him at that time for what he needed. And so in order to announce the kind of filter his emotions and ways that we accepted because we had accepted auto tune singing the context of what hip hop was at the time.

VOICE: The combination of T-Pain and Kid Cudi, who also brings the emotional lyricism and kind of just on its face. I am sad. I am heartbroken. I am depressed. And Kanye takes the combination of all of that and of course, makes 808s and Heartbreak and 808s and Heartbreak becomes this watershed moment where people still to this day point to this is the moment everything changed because, one, the man is extremely sad on his right. He's just crying an auto tune the whole time. And I think this is the moment when it kind of becomes a question of if Kanye is a rapper, but he's singing an auto tune. Is this a rap record or is this- people would say an R&B record. I don't think any R&B head would think that was an R&B record. But I think in the public discourse, that then becomes this like underlying almost tension as to what now is this new frontier.

TY HARPER: Now, pretty much every rap act we've covered in this episode in some way helped to disrupt hip hop's established notions of what rappers who's saying could sound like. And Kanye West was no different, except in his case, Kanye forced Hip-Hop to question why there was in space for auto tuned rap acts to sing with unabashed angst and pain and to do it in a way that had little to do with perfect musicality and everything to do with our ideas of truth through emotionality, a truth that was meant to be more biting than pitch perfect. And so by 2009, auto tune wasn't just a T-Pain. It had the stamp of approval from Kanye West, one of hip hop's most influential artists at the time. And Kanye wasn't the only established rap act co-signing it either. Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg were just a few of the other high profile rap acts who embraced auto tune. And pretty soon it was on every other rap record on the radio. Which is why it started to feel like, auto tune, it officially moved into the house of commercial rap and was ready to be respected like the rest of its hip hop rooted furniture. But not everyone was ready for that.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That's DOA, Death of Auto Tune, Jay-Z's first single off his 2009 album, The Blueprint 3, and for the A.I. auto tune hip hop crowd. It was exactly what they needed to hear.

[Music]

TY HARPER: On its release Jay-Z made it pretty clear that DOA was not directed at T-Pain or Kanye, but at the feeling that auto tune had become a crutch, a gimmick that was actually hurting hip hop. And it was a sentiment many, including Phonte, agreed with.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: It just erases all individuality because they all sound the same, like the exact same. You know, you Urey racing any semblance of what your real voice sounds like best, the only thing you have.

TY HARPER: But if Jay-Z's plan was to kill Wrap's auto tune fetish with DOJ, it didn't work. Auto tune continued to dominate the mainstream rap landscape well into the 2010s, with a slew of commercial hits by a whole new generation of artists that make up the commercial hip hop world we're in right now. And while it might be convenient for some to dismiss this generation's use of auto tune as the equivalent of pouring Ketchup all willy nilly over your French fries, the reality is many of these artists are applying auto tune in ways that make it harder to argue that what they're doing is a gimmick.

[Music]

TY HARPER: That's Tony Montana from Future, the Grammy Award winning artist who helped pioneer what would be called mumble rap, which got its name because of the incoherent way in which the rappers associated with the term spit their rhymes. Case in point, future second verse on this very song, which many consider to be an early example of the mumble rap style.

[Music]

TY HARPER: The Future would be one of the key acts to rescue auto tune from its gimmicky rap ways in the late 2000s. And like T-Pain before him, Future built a sound and brand that was distinctly his own, a sound that has made him one of the most commercially successful rap acts of the last decade. And there would be many other acts who helped make auto tune and the rap singing style, a central characteristic of hip hop's new wave of commercially bankable artists from the Migos and Lil Uzi Vert to Rich Homie Quan and more recently, the late Juice Wrld, whose 2018 hit Lucid Dreams became one of the most stream songs on Spotify.

[Music]

TY HARPER: So where does Drake fit into all of this? Well, according to Mark Anthony Neal, Drake kind of doesn't.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Auto tune as an outer body experience. And it's, you know, distorted. But it's a way to bring melody in the voice to hip hop in ways that rapping doesn't allow you access to that melody. Drake found a way in his natural voice to tap into that interiority without having to use the outer body experience. What I would argue that they did is made Drake Drake is that Drake claimed this kind of interiority experience that had been articulated as an outer body experience via auto to another ways. He actually brought that back to the actual body.

TY HARPER: There's no question that Drake uses auto tune. But Drake's biggest pop moments as a rapper slash singer were thanks to songs that featured him leaning into a more traditional use of auto tune and singing.

[Music]

TY HARPER: Whether we're talking about Hold on, We're Going Home, a song that, while suddenly using auto tune, was a straight ahead R&B as it got at the time. Point being, if you'd never heard a Drake record before that song, you'd probably never guess he was a rapper. Even Hotline Bling while very rap sing songy didn't rely on auto tune to sell itself to the masses. Meanwhile, songs like One Dance, Passion Fruit and Signs made it clear that Drake's seemingly old school conservative auto tune approach wasn't a fluke. But it's also important to remember that Drake arrives on the scene after decades of rap artists challenging the notion of what a singing rapper could sound like. So Drake is able to sing and rap on a commercial smash like no guidance with Chris Brown because of what 50 did, because of what T-Pain and Kanye did any, if you know anything about Toronto's place in this particular conversation, because of the influence, Chaos and Socrates had on Drake's early career. And a lot of this is something Drake himself acknowledged in a Rap Radar interview he did towards the end of 2019.

SOUNDCLIP

DRAKE: You know, I'll always give credit where credit is due. So, I credit all those people with that movement. I think I was probably the one that took it the furthest to go and make like full blown R&B songs. Like to me. Like making music for girls is just the way this thing you can do. You know, out of all the things that people will say about me, I was never affected by the whole like, you know, this is soft. This is emotional or whatever. Because I was just kind of like I mean, or I guess I just make music like dusty guys, like, that's just not really like what inspires me, you know.

MARK ANTHONY NEAK: Drake couldn't existed 20 years ago. He is clearly a product of this moment when there's so much more of an inward look at black male interiority. And, you know, Drake is really the embody view that. I mean to understand. Drake, right, you listen to a drug song, you're wondering because it's the same theme. We're loved. I loved you. I broke up. You don't want to be my friend anymore. Almost every Drake song. So you know that that is the simple Drake pattern. But again, it's about what are my feeling inside. Right. How do I express, you know, the kind of contradictions and trauma that I'm feeling internally? Right. And how do I find a way to express it?

TY HARPER: But the way music journalist Briana Younger sees it. Drake and is auto tuned peers did something else worth considering at the beginning of the conversation, like in the 80s. There is probably no version of this story where you could really set out and be like, I'm going to be a singer and rapper. Labels powers that be wouldn't they wouldn't have known how to market it. They wouldn't know what to do with it. And so I think now we are seeing people like Tory Lanes, like Black, who feel like they don't have to choose and often they'll be singing and rapping on the same albums and sometimes even on the same record. I think that's a direct result of Future and Drake kind of making it this very normal thing.

TY HARPER: Which brings us back to where we started this episode with me envisioning what a Hip-Hop kid in 2020 might perceive to be the norm for mainstream rap today. This episode wasn't just for that imagined kid. It's also for my real two year old daughter who will inherit a rap and R&B legacy very different from mine and the one that exists today. And so whether her era embraces the traditional sensibilities of rap and R&B or come to embody a different amalgamation of Black music, one that is maybe less obsessed with maintaining these rigid and toxic gender and masculinity rules, my hope is that she will always, always have some sense of its histories and how her generation got to wherever they ended up. We close with some final thoughts from rapper and singer Phonte, who, while critical of today's hip hop artists throughout this podcast, ended our conversation with a story that reminded me why hip hop is the most important music and culture of our time.

PHONTE: You know, man, one of the most beautiful calls I've ever heard it was from Mose Def and he said, you know, his mom told him a quote and she was like, you know, the big thing about hip hop is that hip hop was invented so that the sons could take care of the mothers that the fathers abandoned. And I was just like, dude. I mean, that's it. I mean, we could go and talk for hours just about the artistic merits of this and the auto tune and this and that. But you're changing your family's bloodline with this. For you to be a kid, you know, sitting in Raleigh, North Carolina, or Greensboro, North Carolina or Brooklyn, New York or wherever in the world, and can literally just make something with software just out of your imagination. And that could possibly be the thing to just totally change your life and the people around you. I mean, you can't. You can't knock that. You can't. You can't not then you have to see the beauty in that.

TY HARPER: This podcast was produced by Anupa Misrtry, Del Cowie. Josh Bloch and Me. Mixing in Sound Design by Andrew Norton. Judy Ziyi Gu is our digital producer. Our consulting producers are Dalton Higgins and Pascinthe Matar Story Editing by Chris Oche. And special thanks this episode to Misha Stanton. Original Music composed by Boombox Sound. Transcription by Kelsey Cueva. Tanya Springer is our senior producer and Arif Noorani is our executive producer. I'm Ty Harper.

RB: That was the conclusion of this is not a Drake podcast. Tomorrow there will be a bonus epilogue. Also on tomorrow's show, I will be chatting with Matt Galloway, the regular host of this programme. He is just back from Montreal, where school is back in session. He'll be telling us about his visit and also about some of the highlights of what's to come on The Current in the coming days. So stay tuned for that tomorrow. That is our programme for today. Q is up next. And one of Canada's finest lyricists is going fully instrumental. Bruce Coburn drops by the Q studio to perform songs from his latest album, Crowing Ignites. I'm Robyn Bresnahan. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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