on koalan urbanity

I was recently asked to contribute some thoughts towards a master's paper in ethnocultural studies focusing on the music of Kid Koala and how he fits under the 'urban music' paradigm. So here it is. Fear not, more Road Stories to come as well. and Juno highlights? the lighting for Coldplay was really pretty.

* * *

After thinking a lot about it, I wonder how much Kid Koala really
fits in under this context of the 'urban music' umbrella. Here in
Toronto, 'urban' as a musical reference basically means 'black',
and is sort of resented to some degrees by the city's african
and caribbean communities as being too much of a blanket phrase
for something a lot more diverse and complex. Toronto's urban heroes
are hardly geographically urban as well, with figures like K-os, Maestro
Fresh Wes and others all being raised in the city's outlying bedroom
communities. Eric San, aka Kid Koala, is of course also far removed
from your typical 'ubran artist' profile. And maybe that's what makes
his music so different. I've seen him live a number of times now and
he continues to blow me away with his very unconventional approaches
to presenting his music.

His most recent visit here was a summertime show on the city's
harbourfront-a free show in a large outdoor bandshell which attracts
crowds in the thousands over the hot summer weekends. His usual 4
turntable setup was augmented by several large video screens which
had cooking show-like elevated camera angles to showcase the masterwork
of his hands scratching and setting tracks and mixing. The set from this
night was in full crowd-pleaser mode, very similar to when I saw him open
for both Bjork and radiohead in the past couple of years-
that is, sampling bits of hit songs like the Cure's 'Close to Me' and
the Beastie Boys' 'So watcha want' to get the crowd's attention, and
then make it his own thing entirely.

From these experiences, it's clear that Koala saves his more
experimental material, the stuff that's really pushing the
boundaries of urban, for his recordings. It's no secret that his
records, like DJ Shadow's share an output
level similar to that of the Olympics, perhaps due in both cases to
those artists putting in Olympian amounts of crate-digging to find
only the most obscure and unused old samples (no James Brown
breakbeats here) to tear apart and reconstuct
for their albums. And while the artwork of 'Nufonia Must Fall' fits
your standard urban aesthetic of alleways and record shops and
apartment buildings and the like, the music is more electronic,
atmospheric and frankly more difficult than his
previous 2 albums. There are no heavy beats, no throbbing bass
lines, and this is definitely NOT something you're going to hear
pounding out of a car on yonge street during Caribana.

But the construction remains the same. Little blips and turns
and scratches fit into the fabric of Nufona's music in its entirety.
But is it still urban? Does it feel urban? For this project the images
matter more to me than the music, so I would say yes.

Koala is thorough and relentless about how he presents
things, whether it be a sample-based bingo game at one of his
live shows, the free chess board that came in the packaging of his
2nd album, or the comics that came with both albums, his output is
always new, fresh, and sort of immaculate. I'm honestly not sure how
many other labels would be willing to satisfy Kid Koala's artistic vision.
I used to work at one and know just how expensive and difficult it is to
produce and package such elaborate album art projects. Ninja Tune is
fabulous for not only having signed Koala, but allowing and financing
his rampant artistic desires.