Features

Montreal streetwear and skate brand, Dime brought their Glory Challenge back for its sixth edition last Saturday. Despite a two year gap due to the COVID-19 pandemic, their audience has continued to grow. Brand new challenges were being presented, and there was no shortage of skaters eager to conquer them. However, the goal isn't fame or fortune. “Getting together and having a community, that’s why I’m here,” said Leon Dechapdelaine, a skater hailing from Quebec, who was invited to the event.

While August in Blue seeks to celebrate the Afro-American contribution of blues music, the genre week that today comes to its close, also encourages us to reflect on the overall role the blues plays in our lives even when we’re not listening to the blues. To have the blues, is in part, to experience the blues music.

The Shazam Festival took place over the weekend of July 9, where the hills of the eastern townships were alive with the sound of music and mayhem. Free from Covid restrictions for the first time in years, the festival was able to go ahead at full capacity. 

Not everyone is lucky enough of having a workplace that’s at least a smidgen enjoyable, as evidenced in The Malicious Basement Theatre Company’s What About Albert?, written by Xander Chung. The plot follows a day in the shift of two part-time workers, a grill sergeant named Pod (Jordan Prentice) and fry cook named Pick (Fanny Dvorkin), in the hell-scape of the fast food chain they work at.

Lately there’s been an effervescence ringing through the city, and my bets are on it being from CJLO celebrating its third Hip-Hop for Life this week! The Afro-American music genre transcends itself into an impetus that sparks social change, awareness and community. In addition to curated shows, playlists, conferences, and workshops all dedicated to celebrating hip-hop’s vast and pervasive influence within art, the media, politics, culture, language, fashion and so much more; the magazine team wants to hop (pun unintended) onto the zeitgeist too and show some love.

In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead” and then in 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre posited, “existence precedes essence”. But nearly 50 years later Lloyd Cole sang, “you might call it ultraviolet radiation / it’s only sunlight”.

From a sociological perspective, music genres have completely plateaued. Analyzing any style of music, from psych rock, hip hop, folk, to metal, undoubtedly reveals a past point of origination and a list of artists who founded the genre within a scene. Easy examples of these historical points are psychedelic rock and the 1967 Summer of Love, disco sprawling out of urban nightclubs in the 1970s, goth rock and the UK scene of the same name in the 1980s… you get the idea.