CAML Review / Revue de l'ACBM (Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres / Association canadienne des bibliothèques, archives et centres de documentation musicaux)

Doi, Carolyn

Guise, Janneka

Message des rédactrices en chef

CAML Editors

Minutes of the 2021 CAML/ACBM Annual General Meeting

Nevins, Maureen

Message de la Présidente

Watson, Jada

-, -

CAML Renewal Renewal Task Force – Executive Summary

Gagnon, Rachel

Lefebvre, Julie Carmen

Melançon, Christiane

Jolicoeur, Catherine

 
  
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021) Page 47 
Rapport sur la rencontre annuelle de la section québécoise de 
l'Association canadienne des bibliothèques, archives et centres de 
documentation musicaux (SQACBM) 
 
22 octobre 2021 (en ligne) 
Texte rédigé par le C.A. 2020-2021 de la SQACBM:  
• Rachel Gagnon, Présidente 
• Julie Carmen Lefebvre, Vice-présidente 
• Christiane Melançon, Trésorière 
• Catherine Jolicoeur, Agente de communication 
 
La section québécoise de l'Association canadienne des bibliothèques, archives et centres de 
documentation musicaux (SQACBM) a tenu sa rencontre annuelle le vendredi 22 octobre 2021. La 
rencontre s'est déroulée en ligne et a réuni une quarantaine de participant.es. Après le discours 
d'ouverture de la présidente sortante Rachel Gagnon et les salutations de la présidente actuelle de 
l'ACBM Maureen Nevins, la journée fut entamée en compagnie de Houman Behzadi qui nous 
présenta les fruits d’un long travail: les orientations stratégiques de l'ACBM (mai 2021). Le 
document vise la reconnaissance de l’ACBM en tant qu’association viable, la valorisation du travail 
de ses membres et sa contribution au patrimoine musical canadien. Rachel Gagnon nous a par la 
suite partagé ses Coups de cœur de la Conférence de l’ACBM qui s’est tenue en juin 2021 et nous 
invite à participer à la prochaine édition de la conférence de l’ACBM prévue en 2022! 
La présentation suivante portait sur le Centre de musique canadienne (CMC) au Québec. Sa 
directrice générale et artistique Claire Marchand, de même que le spécialiste en sciences de 
l’information Louis-Noël Fontaine, nous ont présenté un survol des services, de la bibliothèque et 
des archives du CMC. De plus, ils nous ont présenté leurs tout nouveaux catalogues d’œuvres pour 
chœur (octobre 2021)1 ainsi que le catalogue d’œuvres pour orchestre (mars 2021).2  
Oscar Salazar Varela a ensuite débuté la période consacrée aux conférences éclair en nous faisant 
découvrir le nouveau Pavillon, espace musical de BAnQ !3 Conçu comme un lieu d’expérimentation et 
d’apprentissage de la musique, il est accessible en tout temps aux usagers de la Grande 
Bibliothèque. Après, Catherine Jolicoeur nous a partagé : « La bonification du site web du 
Conservatoire ou comment profiter d’une pandémie! » Au printemps 2020, l’équipe s’est retrouvée 
en télétravail et en a profité pour augmenter substantiellement le contenu de la section Ressources 
 
1 Pour accéder au catalogue : https://cmcquebec.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/catalogue-choeur-complet-
octobre-2021-web-1.pdf.   
2 Pour accéder au catalogue : https://cmcquebec.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/catalogue-mars-2021-web.pdf.  
3 Pour accéder au site : https://guides.banq.qc.ca/pavillon.  
 
  
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021) Page 48 
du site web par l’ajout de guides par instrument et d’une section sur ses donateurs.4 Et puis, s’est 
enchaîné « Le guide sujet à la Bibliothèque de musique Marvin Duchow de l'Université McGill:  un 
outil évolutif » par Melissa Pipe. Cette présentation portait sur la nouvelle itération du guide sujet 
Jazz de la Bibliothèque de musique Marvin Duchow.5 Retravaillé au cours des derniers mois, ce 
guide témoigne des efforts que mène la bibliothèque à enrichir ses guides existants et à en créer de 
nouveaux pour mieux répondre aux besoins de ses usagers dont les guides LGBTQ+ et Women 
composers.6 Trevor Deck (Université de Toronto) et Mélissa Gravel (Université Laval) nous ont par la 
suite partagé leurs réalités et « Expériences d'utilisation de nkoda en bibliothèques universitaires ». 
Leurs témoignages ont soulevé beaucoup de questions et de commentaires: un sujet d’actualité qui 
ne laisse personne indifférent. 
Lors de l’assemblée générale, des élections ont eu lieu afin de remplacer Rachel Gagnon et 
Christiane Melançon dont les mandats se terminaient. Les personnes élues pour les remplacer sont 
Frédéric Tremblay de l’Université de Montréal et Marie Ève Cossette du Cégep de Saint-Laurent. De 
chaleureux remerciements ont été adressés à Rachel Gagnon et Christiane Melançon pour leur 
dévouement, leur implication et leur engagement depuis de nombreuses années dans cette 
communauté passionnée de musique! 
 
Report on the Quebec chapter of CAML (Canadian Association of Music 
Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centers) 
 
October 22, 2021 (online) 
Report prepared by the Board of Directors 2020-2021 of the Québec Chapter of ACBM:  
• Rachel Gagnon, President 
• Julie Carmen Lefebvre, Vice President 
• Christiane Melançon, Treasurer 
• Catherine Jolicoeur, Communications Officer 
  
The Quebec chapter of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation 
Centers (SQACBM) held its annual meeting on Friday, October 22, 2021. The meeting took place 
online and brought together roughly forty participants. After the welcoming speech by Rachel 
Gagnon, our outgoing president, and the warm greetings from the current president of CAML, 
 
4 Accédez à la section Ressources (https://biblio.cmadq.gouv.qc.ca/ressources) ainsi que les guides numériques 
(https://biblio.cmadq.gouv.qc.ca/) sur le site web du Conservatoire de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec. 
5 Visitez le guide sujet Jazz de la Bibliothèque de musique Marvin Duchow : 
https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/jazzguide.  
6 Visitez les guides sujets LGBTQ+ (https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/lgbtqmusic) et Women Composers 
(https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/womencomposers) de la Bibliothèque de musique Marvin Duchow. 
 
  
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021) Page 49 
Maureen Nevins, our day started off in the company of Houman Behzadi who presented us with the 
outcome of CAML’s recent work: their newly created Strategic Directions (May 2021). Following 
Houman’s presentation, Rachel Gagnon shared her favourite moments from the CAML conference 
held in June 2021 and encouraged participants to attend the next edition of the CAML conference 
scheduled for 2022.  
The next presenter focused on the Canadian Music Center (CMC) in Quebec. Claire Marchand, 
general and artistic director of the CMC and Louis-Noël Fontaine, specialist in information sciences, 
gave us an overview of the CMC's services, library, and archives. In addition, they proudly 
introduced their brand-new catalogs of choral works1 (October 2021) as well as the catalog of works 
for orchestra (March 2021).2 
Next, Oscar Salazar Varela began the period dedicated to the “flash conferences” by introducing us 
to the new Pavillon, espace musical de BAnQ!3 Designed as a unique place to experiment and learn 
music, it is always accessible to users of the Grande Bibliothèque. Following this, Catherine 
Jolicoeur shared with us her presentation titled “Improving the Conservatory's website, or how to 
take advantage of a pandemic!” In the spring of 2020, the library team found itself working 
remotely. They took advantage of this opportunity to substantially increase the content of the 
Resources section of their website by adding subject guides for instruments and a dedicated section 
to honor their donors.4 This led the way to the next presentation on subject guides at McGill 
University's Marvin Duchow Music Library by Melissa Pipe. This presentation focused on the new 
iteration of the Jazz subject guide.5 Recently redesigned, this guide reflects the efforts of the library 
to enrich its existing guides and create new ones to better meet the needs of its users. Other newly 
created guides such as the LGBTQ+ and Women composers guides were also featured.6 Trevor Deck 
(University of Toronto) and Mélissa Gravel (Université Laval) then shared with us their realities and 
experiences on using nkoda in their respective music libraries. Their testimonies raised many 
questions and comments: a topic that leaves no one indifferent. 
Before bringing the meeting to an end, elections were held at our general assembly to replace 
Rachel Gagnon and Christiane Melançon whose terms were coming to an end. As a result of this, we 
are pleased to welcome Frédéric Tremblay from Université de Montréal and Marie Ève Cossette 
 
1 View the catalogue of choral works: https://cmcquebec.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/catalogue-choeur-
complet-octobre-2021-web-1.pdf.  
2 View the catalogue of works for orchestra: https://cmcquebec.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/catalogue-mars-
2021-web.pdf.  
3 Visit the website of Le Pavillon, espace musical of the BAnQ: https://guides.banq.qc.ca/pavillon.  
4 Visit the Resources (https://biblio.cmadq.gouv.qc.ca/) section of the website of the Conservatoire de musique 
et d’art dramatique du Québec, and their subject guides (https://biblio.cmadq.gouv.qc.ca/).  
5 View the Marvin Duchow Music Library’s Jazz subject guide: https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/jazzguide.  
6 View the  Marvin Duchow Music Library’s LGBTQ+ (https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/lgbtqmusic) and Women 
Composers (https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/womencomposers) subject guides. 
 
  
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021) Page 50 
from Cégep de Saint-Laurent to the Board of Directors! Heartfelt thanks were expressed to Rachel 
Gagnon and Christiane Melançon for their dedication and commitment of many years in this 
passionate music community! 


English

Rapport sur la rencontre annuelle de la section québecoise de l'Association canadienne des bibliothèques, archives et centres de documentation musicaux (SQACBM)

Brenda Muir
Peter Higham
Joan McGorman
Lisa PhilpottBrenda Muir
Peter Higham
Joan McGorman
Lisa Philpot

Les membres de l'ACBM réfléchissent (1)

 
CAML REVIEW / REVUE DE L’ACBM  49, NO. 1 (JUNE / JUIN 2021) PAGE 44 
Report on the Music Collection Assessment Summit 
 
April 21-23, 2021, University of Toronto (online) 
Report by Janneka Guise, Director, University of Toronto Music Library 
 
The University of Toronto Music Library has undertaken a large-scale assessment of the music score 
collection. The team responsible for the assessment work consists of all the music librarians plus 
the music archivist: 
• Trevor Deck, Collections Management Librarian, Music and Film 
• James Mason, Digital Initiatives and Metadata Librarian 
• Tim Neufeldt, Instruction Librarian and Circulation Supervisor 
• Rebecca Shaw, Music Archivist 
Apart from the fact that regular collection assessment is a best practice for libraries, we face 
specific, critical challenges that necessitate this work: 
• We are out of shelf space in the Library, despite 30% of our collection having been moved to 
Downsview, the U of T Libraries’ off-site shelving facility. We currently have a reactive 
approach whereby we weed one item for Downsview for every new acquisition we shelve. 
We want to be proactive: develop criteria for what stays in-house and what moves to 
Downsview; move a large number of materials to Downsview at once; use the criteria to 
direct new acquisitions to Downsview or to the Music Library as appropriate. 
• The Faculty of Music began a space audit in 2019 in order to make a case to the Provost for 
a new building/renovation. The Music Library is located in the Faculty and is part of the 
space audit. We need to answer questions such as: How much space do we need, ideally? 
How much of the collection can move to Downsview? Which materials should remain on-
site and why?  
• We want to investigate the diversity in our collection: what percentage of compositions are 
written by women, by Black or Indigenous people, or people of colour? What countries of 
origin are represented in our collection? We hope to uncover and celebrate this diversity, 
understand the uniqueness and specialties of our collection, teach users how to search for 
these materials, and fill gaps in important areas. 
The collection assessment work began with a literature review which taught us that although there 
are many approaches to weeding book and journal collections, there have been few published 
studies on how to weed music score collections. We expect to publish our literature review at a 
later date.  
We decided to reach out to peer institutions to share ideas on music score collection assessment. 
We chose five peers based on similarity of music programming, size of enrollment, and size of music 
 
CAML REVIEW / REVUE DE L’ACBM  49, NO. 1 (JUNE / JUIN 2021) PAGE 45 
library collection: Harvard University, Yale University, Eastman School of Music, Indiana University 
Bloomington, and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Librarians at all five institutions 
had taken a variety of approaches to music score collection assessment. We decided to hold a 
Summit: each institution would prepare a presentation and we would invite library workers, music 
and iSchool students and faculty to attend.  
Planning began in the Fall of 2019. The peer group met in-person for an initial conversation at the 
Music Library Association conference in Norfolk, VA in February 2020. Once the pandemic hit and 
travel was restricted, it became clear that we would need to host the Summit virtually. In order to 
make the virtual event as engaging as possible, we asked the participating librarians to prepare pre-
recorded presentations as well as a virtual tour of their libraries. We posted the presentations and 
tours on the Summit website a week before the Summit began. Then we devoted the live Summit 
sessions to Question/Answer periods with each presenter.  
 
We used our institutional Zoom account for the live sessions. Here is a list of speakers, institutions, 
and abstracts: 
 
Managing user expectations with an abundance of space 
Jim Farrington, University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music  
The Sibley Music Library is the largest academic music library in North America. What started out in 
1904 as a public music library in Rochester, Sibley merged its 9000 books and scores with the 
nascent Eastman School of Music in 1921. The following hundred years saw an explosion of 
acquisitions during which the library outgrew three physical spaces, opening the doors of its latest 
home in January 1989. The current building has 45,000 square feet of space housing some 650,000 
physical items. A survey done in 2000 reported that we had only used about 1/3 of the available 
shelf space for the circulating collections (a statistic almost unimaginable in most libraries today). 
The long-standing support of the library from our administration combined with this abundance of 
shelf space for so much of the collection has led to interesting collection development decisions 
with implications for user services. 
 
What stays and what goes? Music Score Collection Assessment at the University of Toronto  
Trevor Deck, Jan Guise, James Mason, Tim Neufeldt and Rebecca Shaw, University of Toronto 
The Music Library at the University of Toronto is out of space. Shelves are crowded, aisles are too 
narrow to navigate. We make use of the UTL @ Downsview off-site storage facility, where 
 
CAML REVIEW / REVUE DE L’ACBM  49, NO. 1 (JUNE / JUIN 2021) PAGE 46 
approximately one-third of our music score collection is located. The criteria and policies we use to 
determine what stays on-site and what goes to Downsview is outdated and not well communicated. 
With a capital project renovation on the horizon, we need a clear understanding of what our 
collection looks like now, and what we want it to look like in a future space. The University of 
Toronto Libraries are having important conversations about anti-racism and de-colonization in our 
spaces and collections, and we want to ensure our music score collection reflects the curricula and 
diverse programming of the Faculty of Music. Normal weeding criteria such as publication date and 
circulation count are not appropriate for music scores, and there is little music-specific direction to 
be gleaned from the library literature. Our team will share our process to date which includes data 
analysis and preparation for user surveys and focus groups.  
 
Acquiring Multiple Copies and Editions of Music Scores 
Keith Cochran, Indiana University, Bloomington 
I frequently make decisions about the quantity and types of editions that we need for scores in our 
collection. Because we serve an unusually large and diverse community, I often acquire multiple 
copies and multiple editions of the same work in order to meet the demands of users. In my talk, I 
will focus on several different works that can serve as case studies that illustrate the kinds of 
questions that I must answer on a regular basis about collection development and management. It 
is my hope that these case studies will be helpful to other librarians who regularly confront similar 
situations.  
 
Collaborative Music Collections with Borrow Direct 
Sandi-Jo Malmon, Harvard University, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library and Ruthann Boles McTyre, Yale 
University, Gilmore Music Library 
The collaborative collection development plan that began in 2009 with music librarians from the 7 
academic libraries of the Borrow Direct partnership has expanded over the past 10 years to include 
a total of 13 participating music libraries including those from the Ivy League and from MIT, Johns 
Hopkins, Duke, the University of Chicago and Stanford. The cooperative collection development 
plan for purchasing scores of contemporary composers has remained robust and truly collaborative 
as it has been updated to represent more broadly diverse collecting practices shared across 
institutions. Malmon and McTyre will discuss the history of this partnership as well as ongoing work 
to keep the collaboration and the collections fresh and relevant. 
 
 
CAML REVIEW / REVUE DE L’ACBM  49, NO. 1 (JUNE / JUIN 2021) PAGE 47 
Maximizing Limited Space for Music Scores 
Callie Holmes and Matthew Vest, University of California, Los Angeles, Herb Alpert School of Music 
The UCLA Music Library's physical collections have grown over 56 years from 36,000 to over 
400,000 items while remaining in the same location. Strategies for housing the collection in limited 
space have evolved over time, including adding shelves, maximizing collections spaces, and moving 
items to a remote storage facility. Currently, each year we deaccession or move to storage 
approximately the same number of items that we acquire. Our process involves using circulation 
statistics to identify candidates for removal followed by collaborative item-by-item consideration, 
factoring in characteristics that cannot be determined via statistics, such as condition, current 
faculty and student research interest, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. 
 
We designed the program to take place over three days, from 2-5pm Eastern Time (Toronto time) in 
order to accommodate colleagues on the West Coast who wanted to attend. If we had held the 
Summit in person, we would have organized a tour of the Toronto Reference Library (a main branch 
of Toronto Public Library, or TPL) which holds the largest music score collection of any Canadian 
public library. It is within easy walking distance of the Faculty of Music. For the virtual Summit, we 
invited TPL to create a virtual tour, and they also had a spot on the program for a live 
Question/Answer period. 
On the last day of the Summit we organized an open panel discussion with the six peer participants, 
followed by two hours of small group discussions using Zoom’s breakout room feature. We 
crowdsourced the small group discussion topics during the first two days of the Summit, by posting 
a link to a shared document where attendees could type discussion themes as they thought of 
them. Eight topics were suggested, so we created four breakout rooms in the first hour, and the 
other four in the second hour. Attendees could move themselves between breakout rooms 
depending on what they wanted to discuss: 
1. Small music collections: Score selection/weeding processes for smaller institutions with 
fewer than 100 music majors, limited budgets, and no off-site storage. 
2. PDF Scores: How to implement a program for making PDF scores from composers available 
for download. Trevor and Houman discussed a project they started at U of T, and I would 
love to hear more about it. 
3. Climate change: mindfulness in our collection development and management practice. 
What do people do (or what can we dream up on the spot) to minimize carbon emissions 
(shipping & digital data/materials storage), deforestation and chemical waste (paper 
making, printing, and binding), landfill waste management (weeded materials have to go 
somewhere) etc. 
4. Collaborative collecting: Resource sharing / consortial buying 
 
CAML REVIEW / REVUE DE L’ACBM  49, NO. 1 (JUNE / JUIN 2021) PAGE 48 
5. Addressing anti-racism: Specifically: assessing/filling collection gaps on compositions by 
BIPOC composers and choices around identifying and weeding materials that include 
racist/outdated narratives. 
6. Shelving and values: "What do we want people to see when they walk in?" Discuss the 
optics/balance of composer diversity on the shelves, and what our shelves say about our 
values. 
7. Off-site retrievals: Communications and expectation management (internal and external 
audiences) when implementing a requesting program to accommodate collections 
separated from their circulation point. 
8. Open Access Scores: How about open access publishing? UCLA mentioned open access 
scores. 
The University of Toronto team took turns moderating the live Question/Answer sessions and the 
breakout room discussions.  
We were delighted by the response to the Summit: over 200 people registered, from at least 10 
countries. Approximately 80 people joined the live sessions on each of the three days of the 
Summit; some registrants were in time zones unconducive to joining live. We recorded the live 
sessions and saved the accompanying chat transcripts so we could mine them for themes and 
relevant resource links that may help us with future directions for our work. Following the Summit 
we sent a link to the recordings to all registrants along with a link to a post-Summit survey.  


Report on the Music Collection Assessment Summit

Carmen Lefebvre, Julie

White, Kimberly

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion: Reimagining the Subject Guide

McLeish, Claire

 
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021)      Page 115 
 
 
We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel, 
edited by Charity Marsh and Mark V. Campbell. 
Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University 
Press, 2020. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780228003502. 
Reviewed by Claire McLeish, Third Side Music 
 
From the East Coast–West Coast feuds of the 1990s to 
the rise of the so-called “Dirty South,” location has 
always mattered in hip-hop.1 We Still Here: Hip Hop 
North of the 49th Parallel enters the fray, asking how 
race, space, and place matter in hip-hop created in 
what is commonly referred to as Canada. Editors 
Charity Marsh (University of Regina) and Mark V. 
Campbell (University of Toronto) curate a rich and 
inclusive collection of chapters; instead of tackling the 
impossible question, “What is Canadian hip hop?” the 
book’s contributors explore what hip-hop in Canada 
can look and sound like, what it means to its practitioners, and the social and political change it 
creates. The chapters span topics such as solidarity between Black, immigrant, and Indigenous 
communities, Canadian hip-hop’s place in the existing scholarship on diaspora, and the challenges 
and imperatives of writing hip-hop history in a Canadian context. One of the strengths of We Still 
Here is its insistence on hip-hop as culture first and commodity second, if at all. Although the 
editors name-check chart-topping artists such as Drake and The Weeknd, the book is more 
concerned with portraying the diversity of hip-hop practices in Canada, weaving together the 
common threads of racial identity and spatial politics. 
We Still Here features several distinct methodological approaches, such as archival curation, video 
and song analysis, and oral histories. Indeed, it is in this regard that Marsh and Campbell truly 
present a “polyvocal notion of hip hop in Canada” (p. 6). In a literal sense, the collection also 
incorporates a multitude of voices, from child participants in the Hip Hop Project in Winnipeg 
(Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon) to professional artists such as True Daley and JB the First Lady. Black, 
Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) voices, and especially the voices of Women of Colour, 
consistently stand at the forefront. We Still Here strives for diversity but never resorts to tokenism, 
instead approaching inclusion as a central theme with infinite variations. For example, in her 
 
1 For the foundational work on this topic, see Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in 
Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 
 
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021)      Page 116 
 
 
outstanding contribution “Rapping to and for a Multivocal Canada,” Liz Przybylski argues that the 
search for a unified national identity is inherently exclusionary: abandoning it makes space to find 
new ways of existing within the nation (p. 87).2 Her analysis of the song “Plan Nord” (2014) by 
Algonquin rapper Samian explores one example of an irreducible, multivocal musical utterance. 
“Plan Nord” combines a hip-hop beat, Inuit katajjaq (vocal games), natural sound effects, intertribal 
instrumentation, and French language rapping to critique the titular Plan Nord, an extractivist 
natural resource policy proposed by the Québec government. In this sonic mixture, each element is 
important; none is subsumed into another. While the resulting music may not sound stereotypically 
“Canadian” (if such a thing exists), Samian’s utterance is deeply involved with a swath of Canadian 
territory and its people (p. 71). In case studies such as this, Marsh, Campbell, and the book’s 
contributors deftly avoid the homogenizing trap that often befalls discussions of national musical 
styles. 
There is, however, one “uniquely Canadian” thread that runs through the book, and that is the role 
of government granting agencies. In Canada, publicly funded projects have been vital to both 
nascent local scenes and the long-term survival of hip-hop communities. Traces of granting agencies 
can be found in most chapters, but two examples demonstrate the importance of institutional 
support. In her chapter on Toronto’s innovations in hip-hop dance, Mary Fogarty writes that the 
Fresh Arts program “has been cited by many dancers turned rappers or musical artists as being 
instrumental in their development” (p. 104). Fresh Arts was founded in 1993 as a Jobs Ontario 
youth program primarily targeting immigrant neighbourhoods; the program provided both physical 
rehearsal spaces and mentorship for young artists. Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon’s chapter examines 
the “aural imaginaries” of immigrant and Indigenous youth in Winnipeg through the creation of the 
multi-media hip-hop stage production, Winnipeg Child (2009).  The production was facilitated by 
the Crossing Communities Art Project, in turn funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and other 
organizations (pp. 116n2, 136). Public funding is a cornerstone of Canadian arts industries, so it 
comes as no surprise that hip-hop projects have benefit from these initiatives. We Still Here’s 
discussions of institutional support connect to broader patterns in Canadian music and demonstrate 
a key difference from hip-hop south of the border. 
In its “direct refusal to fetishize” mainstream hip-hop, We Still Here makes an important 
contribution (p. 4). However, its engagement with the divide between mainstream and 
independent or community-based music is not fully investigated. Despite her proviso that 
“understanding hip hop through this sort of false binary is concerning,” Marsh’s concluding chapter 
on “Powerful and Fierce Women in Hip Hop in Canada” makes tacit assumptions about mainstream 
hip-hop. Marsh and the panellists at the 2013 edition of Raincity Rap (Vancouver) generalize 
 
2 Here Przybylski builds on concepts from Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian 
Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 12. 
 
CAML Review / Revue de l’ACBM  49, no. 2 (December / Décembre 2021)      Page 117 
 
 
commercial hip-hop as “slick and seductive” (p. 234) and based on the “wilful degradation of 
women” (p. 227). While these assessments may describe a particular segment of the industry, they 
are not universally true. In practice, there is slippage between the categories, as in the political (and 
immensely popular) music of artists like N.W.A. and Kendrick Lamar. Violence, materialism, and 
misogyny also percolate through complex power dynamics. In “‘Don’t Hate Me Because I’m 
Beautiful’: Black Masculinity and Alternative Embodiment in Rap Music,” Antonia Randolph writes 
that mainstream, Black rappers “design … masculinities not only to satisfy their own desires, but to 
meet their White audiences’ stereotypes about Black men.”3  These rappers indeed take part in 
oppressive systems, but their images are also “conditioned by the institutional power of dominant 
men,” typically white record executives.4 Though the experiences of the Raincity Rap panellists 
speak to real issues, Marsh misses an opportunity to engage with how hip-hop artists from different 
segments of the industry grapple with the same oppressive structures, albeit with different 
strategies and outcomes. The book’s insistence on community music making and independent 
artists is generally a strength, but We Still Here might have benefit from a more thorough 
engagement with hip-hop’s segmentation into mainstream and independent contingents. 
Nearly all of the chapters would be suitable for an undergraduate readership, albeit with some 
contextualization and guidance.  Some selections may prove challenging for a general survey course 
(especially for students outside the fields of music and cultural studies), but would be well suited to 
upper-year courses on Canadian music or hip-hop. In order for students to engage fully with the 
texts, instructors may need to present critical concepts such as historiography, decolonization, or 
diaspora. Still, the contributors largely present their theoretical underpinnings in an approachable 
and transparent way suitable to undergraduates. 
In sum, We Still Here is an important contribution, lending a much-needed first volume on hip-hop 
in Canada. This edited collection will serve as a fruitful point of entry into discussions on race, 
power, colonization, and locality in hip-hop culture on Canadian soil. It provides excellent 
methodological models for future studies, and lays out the contributions of several key scenes and 
artists. We Still Here will be of special interest to instructors looking to teach hip-hop in Canada: its 
introduction, in particular, offers a great place to start. Above all, We Still Here is a testament to 
how space and place still matter in hip-hop through a radically inclusive set of Canadian case 
studies. 
 
3 Antonia Randolph, “‘Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful’: Black Masculinity and Alternative Embodiment in 
Rap Music,” Race, Gender & Class 13 no. 3/4 (2006): 201. 
4 Ibid., 203. 


We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel - edited by Charity Marsh and Mark V. Campbell (book)