Trackbastards: Injecting Hip-Hop Into Calgary’s Airwaves Since 2000

Photo courtesy of Pauline Quitzon

It’s the year 2000. We all seem to have survived Y2K, a little show called Survivor is debuting on CBS, and Shyne is still a rapper, not a Hasidic Jew. It’s a post-Golden Era, pre-Kanye world where most of us are just learning what Napster is, and using it to download mp3s that are 128 bit rate (if we’re lucky) and take 7 or 8 hours to download over our dial-up Internet. Blogs are still a little-known phenomenon reserved for only the nerdiest corners of the Web, and social media – at least as we know it in present day – doesn’t exist. And out of a small basement studio on the University of Calgary campus, "Dirtyneedles" hits the CJSW airwaves for the first time, hosted by the Trackbastards.

Fast forward to 2014, and although things have changed remarkably in the worlds of music, technology, and entertainment, that show is still on the air and still hosted by the Trackbastards, DJs Tanner and Wyzewon. They broadcast from a bigger and better studio now, made possible by years of successful funding drives put on by the station. The funding drives pull in an impressive amount of donations from faithful listeners, allowing the station to not only keep running but also improving. In the Trackbastards decade-plus on the air, the musical landscape has changed and so have their musical tastes, but their passion for bringing new music to the ears of their listeners hasn’t waned in the slightest.

Tanner and Wyzewon were both fans and collectors of music (first on cassette tapes and then on CDs) which eventually turned to DJing in the late 90s as an outlet for creative expression and to share their love of music with others. They’ve both done time on the club circuit in the city but it’s their Friday night show that they are known and loved most for locally. It’s one of the longest running hip-hop mix-shows in the country, and in the last few years has expanded beyond the Calgary city limits, now being syndicated in both Thunder Bay, Ontario and Victoria, British Columbia. Dirtyneedles remains one of the only places for Calgarians to hear hip-hop on their local airwaves after two different commercial urban stations folded in the mid-2000s. We caught up with these two before one of their shows to talk about their history, hip-hop throughout the years both globally and locally, and why they do what they do.

Noisey: Where did your name come from?
Wyzewon: I actually thought of the name in high school. Around ’96-‘97 all the rappers we loved were becoming really shitty because they were working with the Trackmasters and making terrible pop hits. So I said, “yo, we’ll be the Trackbastards because we want to keep it real,” which is lame in hindsight, but the name stuck.

How did you start doing the radio show?
Tanner: CJSW pretty much had three rap shows during the late 90s: Mental Illness, The Groove, and Crossover. The Groove was Atu (Bedroc), Gummi and Drew Atlas. Atu eventually got a spin off show called Soul Radio Phonics; he did that for about a week and realized he maybe needed cohosts so he called us. The show was a soul show, so at first we played a lot of samples, rap-related soul, funk and jazz. But then we started sneaking in some rap songs too. We wanted to play that new Talib, or this new Mos Def. So it started with a song here and there, then turned into half a show, then it just became the whole show.

Wyzewon: As DJs, we were still bubbling in the city, had a couple residencies. Once we stated getting our name established in the scene I think it trickled to the station and that's when the offered us a Friday night slot to do our own show - Dirtyneedles, an all hip-hop show.

And now here we are 14 years later. What were things like back then? Was hip-hop still really underground?
Wyzewon: It was kind of right when the two worlds of the Rawkus underground rap and the jiggy, Jay Z rap were kind of colliding. It was kind of like a rap civil war. Before we started DJing we were backpack nerds; Jay Z is now one of our favourite rappers but back then he was public enemy number one. We were all about MF Doom and Company Flow. We were also battle DJs, but then we realized like, why are we just messing with six minutes when we can go into a club and rock for four hours and have people dance? That was really the light-switch of understanding the value of different hip-hop in different settings.

And what was the Calgary scene like back at the turn of the century?
Wyzewon: In the late 90s we had a really awesome scene developing here; we had a ton of club nights, great DJs, a strong b-boy culture. One area where we may have been falling a little behind from our other Canadian city counterparts was in the MC area, but there was definitely some cats grindin' back then - IP, Nu Panella, Cloak & Dagger – some of whom are still rapping now. Because we were DJs, the scene we were definitely more exposed to was the house party and club scene.

Tanner: The scene was stronger back then. It was a smaller city but the community was tighter knit. You knew everybody. There were more people going out — people going to great funk nights and house nights and hip-hop nights. Even if you didn’t get along with this or the next guy, there was plenty for everybody. If you had a “jiggy” – and I’m calling it jiggy because that’s what it was back then – night it would be DJ Kav, PJ the Boy or Beatmatrix. If it was a hip-hop night it would be us or DJ Pump. If you want a funk or soul night you could go and see Al Testa, Melo D, Dean Clarke, DJ Rye. If you wanted to go to a dope house night it was DJ Rice (and still is). There were great club nights every day of the week. As the city got bigger we lost that; those tight-knit relationships loosened. And I think we’re really still rebuilding.

So what do you think about it hip-hop in Calgary now?
Wyzewon: I think hip-hop is losing its grip on club value. There’s the spinoffs like trap and the like are obviously blowing up. But you can’t walk into a club anywhere in Calgary and “do” hip-hop.

Tanner: And that’s a Calgary thing, because I’ve been to other cities, in the States and other cities in Canada, and gone out to pure hip-hop nights that are still rammed.

Wyzewon: And I think that speaks to Calgary’s people a bit; we do have a bit of that small-town attitude and mentality. In larger cities there are more people who stay in the nightlife scene longer, just out of sheer numbers. Here you reach 30-something and you say, “Okay I'm not longer going to be in the clubs.” And to be fair, there isn’t really a venue for older people who may want to go out. We have friends who do a party for “Grown Folks” once in awhile and it pops when they have it but it’s not often. And then you look at somewhere like Philly, where older people enjoy going out to a really dope soul night and having a night on the town.

So does that make what you guys do – bringing new music to the masses that might not be in the clubs to hear it anymore – even more important?
Wyzewon: I think what we do is very very very important for this city, not gonna lie. Not only us as a rap show but CJSW as a station is SO important. If it’s a matter of us putting old people like us – I keep calling us old, but let’s say 35 year olds – old school heads onto new good rap then our job is done. And if we are taking young heads and putting them on to our classic rap, then our job is done. We take it very seriously. As much as I may be an old guy on my lawn shaking my fist saying, “you kids don’t know what good rap is,” it probably pisses me off even more to hear an older guy like myself say “they don’t make that shit like they used to.”

So you guys are doing a Prince show tonight. You did a Stones Throw show a few weeks ago. And you do an all Dipset show very Good Friday which you call What’s Really Good Friday. What are some of your other favourite theme shows you’ve done?
Wyzewon: Dilla. The first week of February we always pay homage to the greatest.

Tanner: We’re probably due for a De La show this year.

Wyzewon: We did a Whitney tribute when she passed away that we loved. We hate doing tribute shows because it means someone had to pass away. We did a Gang Starr one, a Beastie Boys one. They come on a whim for us and that’s the beauty. I could call Tanner up on Thursday before the show and say, “Did you hear it’s the 25th anniversary of whatever? Let’s do a whatever show.”

Tanner: We recently did a Nas show for Illmatic XX. And we do dumb shit too. Even that Dipset was a one off, almost joke around the name "What’s Really Good Friday", but now people love it and they can’t wait for Good Friday cause they know that’s what they’re gonna get.

And just so people are clear – you are a mix show. You don’t just come on here and press play. You DJ and mix tracks together.
Tanner: I don’t want to toot our own horn but I’m going to: on CJSW nobody was really doing that before us. At the old station before the renovation a few years back, they didn’t have turntables set up permanently. We got the idea from The Groove because Drew and Gummi would mix their show once in awhile. It happened around the time we switched to Friday nights; we were just like, “Fuck it, let’s do it every week!” And so we did. And it totally sucked. Hauling turntables, hauling our records. There was no Serato back then. We did it the old fashioned way, except it wasn’t even the old fashioned way, it was just the only way. Eventually it became a thing that Friday nights on CJSW from 6pm onwards – all the DJs who had time slots around us started mixing their shows, including Lotus Queen, Moonlips, Shidoshi and Double D.

Wyzewon: And CJSW really enabled that greatly by hooking us up with gear. They dropped two 1200s in the lab so we didn’t have to haul the tables anymore. Big up to everyone who sponsors the CJSW funding drive; it’s because of you guys that it was possible. And I gotta say, if you haven’t listened to CJSW on a Friday night, I can’t think of a tighter more awesome and unique DJ culture based lined up on a radio station, for an entire evening. I know there’s guys in TO and Vancouver some doing amazing stuff. But as far as mix-shows go we gotta be one of the longest running in the country. And that’s because of the station, and the listeners. That’s the effect on the community that you realize you have. If someone is willing to pledge $300 on your rap radio show so the station can continue to operate, you know you’re doing something right. I think people realize the value and how lucky we are to have something like CJSW here.

You can listen to Dirtyneedles between 9 and 10 PM on Friday nights on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary, or here. Hit them up on Twitter for their full playlists.

Josephine Cruz is a writer living in Calgary. She's on Twitter.

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