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The pioneering MuchMusic program RapCity is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.<\/p>\n
For generations of Canadians, RapCity was the show to watch for all things hip-hop. It aired on the MuchMusic cable channel from 1988 to 2014 \u2014 and it was not to be confused with the BET TV show of the same name, Rap City.<\/p>\n
To mark the occasion, original creator and producer Michele Geister joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to look back on how the show came to be, as well as its rise to prominence and lasting legacy.<\/p>\n
We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.<\/a><\/p>\n WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:<\/p>\n Elamin: This is a question that people have had for decades, at this point. MuchMusic had RapCity. BET in the United States also had Rap City, with a space in the middle of it. Those shows sort of came into being around the same time. What’s the story there?<\/p>\n Michele: We had no idea what was happening south of the border\u2026. When John Martin said, \u201cOkay, you’ve got the go-ahead. Do this. Come back to me with a list of names.\u201d And you know, I always did my research. I always went and kind of gauged what was the temperature with certain things with people that I knew, whether they were b-boys or serious connoisseurs of the music.<\/p>\n So I got together with two gentlemen, who were young men at that time \u2014 Kwame Younge, who went on to be a promoter in the city here \u2026 and Chris Chilco. There may have been somebody else there. And we kind of brainstormed, and the list came together. So I would give those guys a lot of credit [for] this list of names. I went back to John Martin with the list of names and he goes, \u201cI like RapCity.\u201d And of course MuchMusic being the sister station to CityTV, [it] makes a lot of sense. But he’s like, \u201cOh, we’re gonna spell it like one word,\u201d because that was kind of on brand. The bigger group was the ChumCity group, so on brand for ChumCity television projects, where The NewMusic all one word, MuchMusic is one word, so it became RapCity, one word.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n So we start working\u2026. The senior producer is working on that montage with Runt, and I’ve given him music that I want to be used in it. And Kwame, we run into each other or he calls me or something, and he\u2019s like, \u201cBET’s doing a show. It’s called Rap City!\u201d And I’m like, oh, snap. What do we do? I was a little stressed. And I went to John, who was just down-to-earth; I don’t think anything ever, you know, ruffled him.\u2026 And he was like, \u201cEh, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. We’re spelling ours differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Elamin: And that was it.<\/p>\n Michele: That was it.<\/p>\n Elamin: That’s beautiful.<\/p>\n You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen<\/a> or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n Interview with Michele Geister produced by Ty Callender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-324756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}