Ryan's Radio Radio review

I'm going to start this with a bit of a digression that's not really related to music at all. I'm a bit of a cinema fan, and have always had something of an interest in international cinema. When I was in high school, and first started getting into more independent and 'arthouse' type films, I would often encounter an opinion from other cinephiles that international film was just better than what North America produces. I mean, after all, Hollywood is happy to put out schlocky Schwarzenegger movies and Pauly Shore comedies, but internationally you get real filmmakers like Felini and Kurasowa.

I was young at the time, so it was a convincing argument, and I felt that way until I finished school, and started living in a really ethnically diverse neighbourhood. The local independently-owned cinema wanted to cater to the different communities that lived in the neighbourhood, so they showed a lot of Polish and Southeast Asian films. When I first heard that they were doing this, I thought it was going to be great. Turns out, though, that what the local communities wanted was mostly cheesy action movies and romantic comedies – just ones in Polish, Tagalog, or Hindi rather than in English. It taught me an important lesson: that there is no relationship between nationality and quality, and that artists from any culture are just as capable of the odd stinker as those that I grew up surrounded by.

Which brings us to Radio Radio's Belmundo Regal. I'd been listening to more Francophone music over the past year – Polaris nominees like Malajube and Karkwa, and other stuff like Couer de Pirate and Caracol. Listening to those artists, it's easy to fall into a trap that thinks that the residents of la belle province are just better at this music thing than the rest of us, especially with the likes of Drake and Justin Beiber being so popular among English-language music fans. This made me oddly thankful to listen to Belmundo Regal because I absolutely did not connect to it at all – it seemed like the same kind of cheesy mainstream rap that, normally fills up the charts on top 40 radio and get scornfully dismissed by critics.

So I'm thankful that I've listened to it, but I can't say it's any good, and I'm in agreement with both Dave and Gary in wondering how it got on the list of Polaris nominees. I can fully understand French albums being on the Polaris shortlist, and rap albums, but I just cannot understand this album being there, especially when much more worthy albums (XXXX by You Say Party We Say Die and Hannah Georgas' This Is Good, for example) didn't.