As a youth growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the 80s/90s, I was pretty isolated from hip-hop music. The mainstream had taken to a sprinkling of tracks here and there, but rap in general wasn’t as easy to find out there as it is now a days (read: THE INTERNET). Surely in larger cities it was easier to track down, but the resources were pretty low for a kid who didn’t get out of town much. In Junior high (mid-nineties) a friend and I discovered college radio in the form of a man named DJ Critical and his Tuesday night radio show “The Bassment” on CKDU 97.5 FM. Here, we began hearing all these b-sides and remixes we had been reading about in The Source and other music magazines, along with a bunch of new stuff we had never even heard about (Wu-Tang side projects, early Kool Keith side projects, Latyrx, Shadow, Q-Bert, many vinyl-only releases). Needless to say, we became loyal listeners and got turned onto a lot of new music that way. It definitely shaped my ear and kept me fed as a music fanatic. I’ll always tell people that’s where i first expanded my ears to different types of music.

Critical later went on to become Jesus Murphy and host “The Treatment Program”, which veered away from mostly hip-hop music and definitely had me listening to certain things I would have never listened to otherwise. Around this time I met him through DJ battles and we would trade scratch information and practice. As Critical’s rap and production career under the moniker Buck 65 started to build more steam, I started to fill in for shows he couldn’t make and eventually took the program over for a year or two before again passing it off to Jesse Dangerously (who changed the name to “The Pavement”) before I moved to Montreal. They were some big shoes to fill and I never felt like I could meet up to the legendary status that the show had garnered, but I did my best. Buck now hosts “Radio 2 Drive” on Canada’s national radio station, CBC.

My main man DJ Moves just posted a bunch of cassette rips from 93-94, a bit earlier than when i was tuning in, but definitely classic times for the program. I remember hearing one of my mentors DJ Gordski playing old episodes in his apartment, and I’m sure some of those are the ones ripped here. DJ Moves was the DJ for Hip Club Groove (and later Len), and they are featured live in the studio here. He will be ripping more episodes, so make sure you check his blog in the coming weeks to see what he comes up with. Tune in, check out these links and get a taste of what it was like discovering hip-hop sans internet.

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