The Rebel Beat’s Best of 2017

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The year is almost up, and we get ready to turn our calendars on a year that has been marked around the world by rising sea levels, rising far-right movements, and rising repression. Luckily, there will always be social movements out there to confront these injustices, just as there will always be artists and musicians ready to put a deadly beat behind a righteous message.

As we get ready for 2018, here are some highlights of radical music and podcasts that we have enjoyed at The Rebel Beat throughout 2017. If you dig these artists, and if you have some cash to spare, do consider buying their music, as this is really the only way to support independent music in our digital age.

Also, if you enjoy The Rebel Beat, please consider throwing $1 per month (or more!) our way! You can sign up easily on our Patreon page today.

Oh, and we’re about to release the next episode of our podcast, which will feature an interview with Lido Pimienta! So if you don’t wanna miss that, subscribe today on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you like to get your podcasts.

 

Fiver – “Audible Songs From Rockwood”

Fiver (aka. Simone Schmidt from Toronto) is a phenomenal singer-songwritter who crafted this amazing album based on the archives of a women’s prison that locked people up in southern Ontario from the 1850s-1870s. It’s hard-hitting, insightful, and the wild thing is that pretty much all the issues that Fiver sings about on the album can still be seen in the prison industrial complex today.

 

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The Rebel Beat 079: Hitting the Ice With Propagandhi

 

Welcome to the latest episode of The Rebel Beat! Class war on the dancefloor, delivered to you once a month, in a podcast.

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Our special guest on the show this month is Jord Samolesky, drummer and founding member of Propagandhi! We spoke with Jord while he was in Montreal touring the band’s new album “Victory Lap”. We spoke about the history of the band, the state of the world, and most importantly, hockey!

Plus we hear some new stuff from Ryan Harvey, Shireen Lillith, Kareem Samara, Talib Kweli, and the Snotty Nose Rez Kids.

Finally, in our Turn it Up segment, we give another shout out to Lido Pimienta for carving out positive spaces for women of colour in the music scene. Read more about that here.

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Playlist

Snotty Nose Rez Kids – KKKanada

Talib Kweli – All of us

Propagandhi – And we thought nation-states were a bad idea

Propagandhi – Fuck the border

Propagandhi – Victory Lap

Propagandhi – Dear Coach’s Corner

Propagandhi – Resist/comply

Ryan Harvey, Shireen Lillith, Kareem Samara – Omar

A Tribe Called Red w/ Lido Pimienta – For you (The Light pt. 2) 

 

Check out the video for “Omar” by Ryan Harvey, Kareem, and Shireen!

Rebel Beat Summer Playlist

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What’s up Rebel Beat massive! Hope you all have been having a great summer so far. Inspired partly by our homies at SubMedia who have made some amazing music playlists this summer, and partly inspired by our need and desire to keep sharing and amplifying the rhythms and rhymes of resistance, we’ve put together a special Rebel Beat playlist for you all to rock out to this summer. There’s a bit of everything here – some punk, some folk, some hip-hop, and some new tunes from Firebrand Records. Enjoy!

 

Rebel Beat Special: Radio Free Winnipeg

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We’re back with another Rebel Beat special! This time, we bring you a treat from the Canadian prairies. Aaron from the Rebel Beat was recently a guest on the program Radio Free Winnipeg on CKUW community radio in The ‘Peg. Hosts Scott Price and Greg Gallinger spoke with Aaron about his years of involvement in community radio, the history of the Rebel Beat, and the essence of political music. Hope you enjoy!

For a full description of the show from their website, click here.

Our regular Rebel Beat podcast will be back in a couple weeks with an interview with Alas! Stay tuned.

Click here to download this podcast.

 

The Rebel Beat Podcast 044 – G7 Welcoming Committee Retrospective

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Click here to download this podcast

 

Happy new year! Welcome to the first podcast of The Rebel Beat for 2016! It’s gonna be a great year for this show, filled with tons of interviews, special guests, and top-notch revolutionary music.

We wanted to start the year off with a bang by going back to a record label that was extremely influential for prairie punks and radicals of all stripes in so-called “Canada”, and further afield. G7 Welcoming Committee records was started back in 1997 in Winnipeg by members of Propagandhi, The Weakerthans, and other activist/musicians from central Canada. Up until 2010, it was putting out some of the best radical music, books, and spoken word CDs around. In fact, plenty of the music that we’ve featured on The Rebel Beat is from releases that G7 put out. Continue reading