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Protecting local culture against globalization

Today, a strategy for confronting consumer ennui and international cultural homogenization at the same time. Should laws mandate the distribution of local culture?

Nick Andersen: “And now, we’re going to hear from an artist who lately has been doing a lot of great things… with water.” That’s what I remember of a late-night introduction from the Canadian radio DJ Laurie Brown in 2007. And then, what can only be described as a series of melodic drips blared out of the speakers of my father’s 1997 Dodge Caravan.

Brown turned out to be my secret to discovering modern music, along with some help from a Canadian regulation called CanCon. Growing up in suburban Detroit, I could tune into Canadian radio waves bouncing across the water to our north. At the bottom end of the radio dial, near the Detroit Public School District’s all-jazz station and Eastern Michigan University’s jazz and classical music combo slot, 89.9 was a haven for weird music nerds like me, throughout our region. Thanks to CanCon, the music we heard there was even a touch weirder than other music stations. According to CanCon, Canadian radio stations’ music has to be at least 35 percent Canadian in origin, and for CBC Music, that percentage is even higher, 50 percent.

That means, as an American listener, you’re going to make new discoveries by default. I promise you, no matter how in-depth your SoundCloud up-and-comer browsing might be, you’ve likely not heard most of the “best of the Regina hip-hop scene,” as CBC Music host Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe spun recently on The Block, her weeknight show devoted to black music. Cultural protection clauses like CanCon, and France’s similar policy of Exception culturelle (“cultural exception”), guarantee that local cultural products, including movies and music, get special protection and promotion on domestic broadcasting channels and in domestic markets.

For French radio, at least 40 percent of broadcast music must be French in origin, with 20 percent of that music coming from so-called “new talents.” France and Canada were the leads in a 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which both encouraged and promoted the idea of similar cultural exceptions around the world. Needless to say, our own culturally dominant United States of America was one of two member states who declined to endorse this policy.

The impact of this kind of semi-porous cultural system is that artists from the country in question maintain a small foothold in the global attention war, grabbing the eyes and ears of their compatriots in Vancouver or Nice that might otherwise be tuned in to the latest top 40 pop hit or blockbuster franchise film from the U.S. The regulations resist the homogenization of globalization and offer some protection to the flowering of local culture, the way a greenhouse protects plants. That’s not to say that all the CanCon or exception culturelle music is good — indeed, some is quite bad! — but it is different, and for the sake of CBC Music, difference is often the point — at least from a music discovery perspective.

It’s not as if you won’t still hear the pop hits you know and love from times long gone by on the CBC. Indeed, a recent evening on Tetteh-Wayoe’s The Block featured Shaggy and Rik Rok’s “It Wasn’t Me” and the Baja Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, which surprised and delighted me. But later, thanks to CanCon requirements, Toronto-based R&B artist FeFe Dobson rounded out the broadcast, lending the entire listening experience a distinct sound that was both familiar and foreign. The song fit right in the playlist — music from 15 to 25 years ago, early hits from artists new and old — but Dobson, a pop vocalist with distinctively nasal ‘A’ sounds in her 2010 hit ‘Can’t Breathe,’ made the experience very, very Canadian.

By listening to CBC Music my entire life, I’ve discovered artists as varied as quirky Quebecois alt-rocker Lisa LeBlanc and British R&B jazz singer Laura Mvula. I’ve learned to relish the music of Indigenous Canadian musician Jeremy Dutcher [ed. Dutcher’s “Mehcinut” is quite nice] and delighted in the haunting tones of classical composer Jocelyn Morlock. If I have a quiet house and I don’t feel like making specific music choices myself, I just turn on CBC Music (it’s always livestreaming here) and let it go. I am rarely disappointed and often inspired.

Being a cultural consumer is boring when you only get what you expect. We’re often caught in the grooves of our own habits, returning to the same sources for television, movies or music. But there are other sources out there — just across a proverbial pond or a Great Lake. There’s nothing stopping you from listening to CBC Music right now, or streaming something from France or using the delightful magic of radio.garden to queue up the latest pop hits from rural Thailand, if you wanted to. I can’t wait to hear what you turn up.

Nick Andersen is an audio producer based in Cambridge, MA. He works for shows you've definitely heard of, and also some you haven't.

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