Gowan – Completely Ignored

Ignored 192: This is CanCon 2018

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Ignored 181: Pat Mastroianni on the music of Degrassi

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In this special bonus episode, we spend over an hour with Canadian TV mainstay Pat Mastroianni, best known for his portrayal of the fedora-lovin’ Joey Jeremiah on Degrassi Jr. High, Degrassi High and Degrassi: The Next Generation. We talk about the music of the Degrassi universe, both the real stuff and the fake stuff: the Zit Remedy, the Gourmet Scum, the Savages (the fake Degrassi universe band), Savages (the real British indie band), the Pogues, Pink Floyd, Images in Vogue, the Spoons, Gowan, Harem Scarem, Drake and (strangely) Dean Martin. We also chat about the legendary Fantastic Voyage program from Ryerson’s CKLN, how Jonathan Torrens played a key role in the Degrassi reboot (and eventually shapeshifted into “Shane”) and the healthy appetite for face time w/ Degrassi alumini amongst the Comic-Con/Fan Expo crowd.

Right click here to download the episode or visit The Completely Ignored Podcast on iTunes to stream this episode.

Ignored 97: Q107 in 2016

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Ignored 42: This is your #CanCon

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Q107 (a.k.a. “the mighty Q”) redefined classic rock radio in Toronto when they underwent a slight format change in the spring of 2014.

Veteran shock jock/guy John Derringer gave this audio explanation at the time, talking about the station adding much more post-1994 “rock” to the playlists. JD said the station was swerving to meet the listening demands of “Ryan and Johnny in [their] late 30s” who apparently respect Led Zeppelin, even if they didn’t grow up on Led Zeppelin.

In short, Q107 now plays a lot more Stone Temple Pilots. Who seem underrated at this point. More on that later (or never).

With the format change, Q107 also had to recalibrate their CanCon quotas, which basically meant mixing a little Sam Roberts and Finger Eleven amid the Kim Mitchell and Triumph “deep cuts”.

Curious (for some reason) about how this CanCon shuffle shook down, I took a sample of every Canadian songs played by Q107 between September 10-16, 2014.

Click on these graphs to tell the story of what now defines classic rock in a CanCon context:

Ignored 21: 1990s CanCon SEO bait

In recent discussions with my close personal friend @GaryEdgar, we both agreed that an entire generation of Canadian bands just missed out on the Internet ubiquity of the 2000s onwards. This made us sad as many of these outfits entertained us for good portions of our 10s and 20s.

It’s not as if having a strong web presence is some sign of righteousness for our local recording artists. However, there is a risk of (partially) losing these acts to history if fresh online content is not created pronto to preserve their legacies/”legacies”.

We’re doing our part via this carefully-constructed PDF document. It contains a transcript of a Gmail chat between Gary and myself on our individual CanCon memories from Burlington, Thornhill and beyond.

Click here to read our full “1990s CanCon SEO bait” PDF