MAPLaylist: Tune in for Some of the Greatest CanCon Hits

To accompany our recent episode about Canadian content policy, producer Max Collins made a playlist of every artist that came up during the reporting process. You can find the full playlist on Spotify or on Amazon Music. Below, Max has included some footnotes and fun facts about some of the notable bands that made the cut:

• The DeFranco Family – Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat

At the dawn of Canadian content mandates, there was high demand by Canadian radio stations for music that could pass the MAPL test… with not much to fill the need. This was good fortune for the Port Colborne pop group The DeFranco Family, who started releasing music in 1973. Family bands were popular at the time, thanks to the success of the Osmond Family and the Jackson 5. The DeFrancos—three brothers and two sisters, led by the youngest sibling, Tony—shot from playing weddings in their small city to international stardom, bolstered by Canadian radio’s need for anything to meet their CanCon quotas. By the mid-1970s, the DeFranco Family’s star began to dim, and by the end of the 1970s, they had stopped performing. But in their short tenure as CanCon darlings, the DeFrancos’ made enough of an impression for their first hit single, Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat, to get a mention in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs.

• The Weeknd – Secrets

Much like the team at 99% Invisible, Ontario-born Abel Tesafaye, known professionally as The Weeknd, shows an apparent interest in architecture. The title of his debut mixtape, House of Balloons, is a reference to the nickname of the South Parkdale-neighbourhood house rented by Tesafaye and his roommates in the early days of his career. Thanks to The Weeknd’s international success—and due to the number of non-Canadian collaborators he works with these days—much of The Weeknd’s biggest hits don’t qualify as CanCon. But The Weeknd still finds ways to pay homage to the unique architecture in his hometown. The visually-striking video for his 2018 song Secrets is partially at the Toronto Reference Library, and partially at the Andrews Building at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus.

• Cadence Weapon – SENNA

Additionally to federal government funding, Canadians have access to a robust awards system, with cash prizes that are nothing to sneeze at. The Polaris Music Prize is a competition similar to the United Kingdom’s Mercury Prize, with no American equivalent. The prize is open to any Canadian musician to enter, and is awarded solely on merit. After two previous attempts of his had been shortlisted, Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a. Cadence Weapon, won the prize in 2021 for his sixth album, Parallel World, and took home $50,000. “It was a life changing moment for me. It was huge,” says Pemberton. Other winners of the Polaris Music Prize include Feist, Arcade Fire, Kaytranada, and Jeremy Dutcher. Cadence Weapon’s SENNA appears on that album.

• Alaclair Ensemble – Les infameux

On top of the CanCon rules set out for radio across the country, certain regions of Canada have their own local content quotas, too. The province of Québec, the country’s only Francophone-majority province, requires at least 65% of the music broadcast on Québec commercial radio be performed in French. That means Québec has its own unique star system, including musicians like singer-songwriter Cœur de pirate, folk-rockers Les Cowboys fringants, and the hip-hop collective Alaclair Ensemble. Much like the MAPL system, the French-language requirement has its own imperfections. For example, there’s no hard-and-fast rule on how much of a song needs to be sung in French to qualify as French-language. This causes issues for groups like the Montréal-based Alaclair Ensemble, who perform in a mixture of English, French, and French Creole. But, in speaking to Fader, Alaclair Ensemble member and rapper Ogden Ridjanovic speculated the group loses radio airplay opportunities because the industry “boycotts ‘rap québécois.'”

• Jeremy Dutcher – Pomawsuwinuwok Wanakiyawolotuwok

According to census data, there are over 70 unique Indigenous languages currently spoken in Canada, all of which are either endangered or at risk of being endangered. But musicians like Jeremy Dutcher are part of a movement to revitalize Indigenous languages in Canada, led by Indigenous communities. Outside of his music, Jeremy and his family are making an effort to revitalize their ancestral Wolastoqey language with an immersion school. The New Brunswick-based nature school Kekhimin, which means “teach me,” provides immersion classes to children, and writes children’s books in Wolastoqey. “We’ve [since] seen this explosion in literacy around our language,” said Jeremy in an interview with producer max collins for 99% Invisible, “it’s so beautiful to see.”

• Sloan – I’ve Gotta Try

Thanks to Sloan’s early-career success, the Halifax four-piece have had the good fortune not to need government funding to record their numerous hit albums. But the band has made use of a couple grants for their creative ventures, including the music video production fund known as VideoFACT, later renamed to MuchFACT. VideoFACT was created in 1984 and bankrolled entirely by the Canadian music video channel MuchMusic. Sloan used VideoFACT to produce a handful of videos, including the music video for their song I’ve Gotta Try. The fund was a condition of MuchMusic’s license with the CRTC (Much is the Canadian equivalent of MTV), which allowed for only one music TV channel in the country. In their application for the license, Much promised to fund the production of Canadian music videos, so long as the CRTC maintained the monopoly. This effectively banned MTV from Canada for decades, and added to Canadians’ skewed vision on which musicians are global sensations, not just home-grown.

• Tia Wood – Sage My Soul

Although there is little representation of Indigenous music on commercial terrestrial radio in Canada, Indigenous musicians in Canada still find ways to reach their fans. Pop-R&B singer-songwriter Tia Wood is a perfect example of this: she amassed over 2 million followers on TikTok by singing overtop of popular sounds on the app. This attracted the attention of Sony Music Canada, who offered her a record contract before she had ever released any music. Though she may be the first Indigenous woman to be signed to Sony Music Canada, she’s not the first successful musician in her family: Tia is the daughter of Earl Wood, a member of the Grammy-nominated Northern Cree Singers, and Tia’s sister, Faye Wood, is the winner of a JUNO Award—the Canadian version of the Grammys. Despite the acclaim, none of the Wood family members have managed to break the top-ten charts in Canada. Such is an example of a disparity of the MAPL system.

• Kardinal Offishall – Dangerous

In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, before Drake had turned his teenage acting career into juggernaut musical stardom, the Toronto hip-hop crown belonged to Kardinal Offishall. As the city’s hip-hop scene grew at the end of the 20th century, Kardinal developed a loyal and diverse fanbase by mixing his Jamaican dancehall roots with more traditional styles of hip-hop. His success landed him record deals with American labels, where he began collaborating with Senegalese-American R&B star Akon. Kardinal composed his biggest hits working with Akon, including the song Dangerous. But while the duo were topping the charts internationally, Kardinal’s pairing with Akon caused some stations to pause on his new music. Speaking to host Ty Harper on the CBC’s This Is Not A Drake Podcast, Kardinal described how Canadian radio programmers would call him to ask if the hit passed the MAPL test. “It’s literally a number one hit around the world,” said Offishall, “are you telling me, you’re only going to play it if it’s CanCon?”

• Rough Trade: High School Confidential

Canada’s cultural mandate laws outlined the country’s cultural differences from the U.S. in more ways than one. In 1980, the Toronto new wave band Rough Trade, fronted by queer Canadian icon Carole Pope, released the song High School Confidential. It was one of the most sexually explicit songs to reach the Canadian pop charts, and was intentionally written with strong queer overtones. “It’s basically a lesbian love song,” said music historian Alan Cross, speaking to 99% Invisible producer max collins. “And you know, you didn’t do that in the U.S. You just did not do that.” While some radio stations refused to play the song, High School Confidential made it into Canada’s top 20 charts. Rough Trade continued writing LGBT characters and perspectives in the lyrics of their songs, and faced similar controversy when they released a song featuring a gay couple.