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Music

Why Is DJ Smooth the Only Hip-Hop DJ on Montreal Radio?

DJ Smooth is carrying the hip-hop community on his back in the province of Quebec.

All photos by Visually Tasteful

It’s easy to let your imagination run wild with all of the potential activities tucked into the forests surrounding Kahnawake, a Mohawk reservation 20 minutes outside of Montreal’s core. The roads around the reservation are blank, and the few people who sit outside are smoking their cigarette watching the cars go by. A wild german shepherd shadows me and my photographer as we make our way to the K103 headquarters, which makes it hard to think about anything other than the big dog. There’s little incentive for city folk to come out here other than to gamble or buy wholesale cigarettes, unless you’re looking to talk to the only man in the province playing consistent hip-hop on FM radio.

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Don Smooth is a radio DJ for 103.7, Kahnawake’s community radio station. Aside from being a juror for the Juno awards and organizing open mic events in Montreal, Smooth runs a segment called The Vault, where he plays urban music from 10 to midnight, Monday through Thursday. This is a flaccid radio representation of the genre compared to other major cities, but Smooth’s segment is a sanctuary for a Montreal hip-hop community whose other FM options broadcast once a week, if that. For a city whose concert ticket sales reflect a clear demand for the genre, this is highly suspect.

“When I first started going to hip-hop concerts in Montreal they were in school cafeterias. Erik B and Rakim, EPMD… they performed in cafeterias or wherever there was a stage,” Smooth reflects. “Since then it’s grown tremendously. Everybody comes here—the big mainstream guys, and the independent guys.”

Attendance topped 38,000 when Eminem came to Montreal’s Osheaga music festival in 2011, setting a new record at the time that crushed Coldplay’s numbers. This year Kendrick Lamar pulled in over 45,000 people to the festival. Underground acts like Death Grips and Run the Jewels perform in respectable venues to sold out crowds. Montreal likes rap music, so what’s with the lack of rap radio?

There are a few things to consider here: For one, there's no room on the FM dial for a new frequency. Opening up a slot is feasible, but it would require some reformatting amid current incumbents. Way before that ball could get rolling, the suits who own the radio stations would need to see how they could profit from broadcasting rap several hours a day, which Smooth thinks is an issue. “They still feel that hip-hop is niche and that it caters to a small group of people. I totally disagree with that. Hip-hop hasn’t been niche for maybe 20 years.”

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If the city’s rap community pulled its resources together and made a focused effort to get a station off the ground, that could be a step in the right direction. That said, consumers have virtually all their needs met by the internet. The absence of a united movement toward a radio station isn’t a major shock in a time when people go online and listen to anything they want at their leisure. Smooth’s hip-hop segment on K103 used to run from 6PM until midnight, but according to the station’s program director, weak ratings forced them to trim the segment to a tight two hours.

Smooth suggests that radio is still entirely relevant despite the internet. “It’s like comparing Youtube and being on television. Even though Youtube will have billions of people watching, it still carries more weight when you’re on TV. Same thing with radio.”

Having a solid presence of rap music on the FM dial wouldn’t merely be a vehicle for instant gratification—it would be a long term investment in Montreal’s hip-hop scene. If hip-hop was a click away at the office or at work, people who would never think to seek it out themselves could be attending concerts a year later. They might even crawl into a hole in the wall to check out some of Montreal’s indie rappers, who would be the real beneficiaries of a bigger rap presence on radio.

Full Course is a Montreal rapper whose career spring-boarded significantly after being featured on The Vault. Smooth stumbled upon one of Full Course’s songs on a mixtape featuring other Montreal artists, mixed the song himself, and put it in rotation. “I played the song for a good year, but now he’s known around Montreal. He goes and performs this song and people in the audience are rapping and singing along with him.”

Kardinal Offishal opened the gates for Canadian rappers in 2008 when he teamed up with Akon on “Dangerous.” Since then Toronto’s sent out Drake, who’s essentially only two or three tiers away from being a world leader. Then there’s The Weeknd, who’s steadily making his way up to Drake’s level. But we have yet to see an urban musician break internationally out of Canada’s second largest city. No one’s come even close. Is that because Montreal doesn’t have the radio foundation necessary for an upcoming artist to grow in the city, or is a native superstar necessary to even get the conversation of rap radio started? What comes first, the rapper or the radio?

“With the internet, you can reach a global level much quicker,” Smooth says. “But if you’re an artist, you have to have your city behind you before you can get other cities to embrace you.”