The mixtape to Hip Hop is like memes to the Internet. If you’re here you might have heard us reference the Flow 93.5 Mix CD in our latest episode – well, here’s a little primer on the mixtape, Flow 93.5FM and the most famous mixed CDs to get distributed across Canada – The Flow Case.

Let’s jump back into it…

Story of the mixtape

Before 1983, hip hop was not aired on TV (and definitely not MTV) and it wasn’t played on the radio. The only places you could access it, was at shows, in the parks and on mixtapes – because mainstream media wasn’t ready to accept hip hop as a viable cultural product that was worthy to be sold.

The vinyl record is probably most closely associated with hip hop, but it’s not very portable, expensive and hard to produce. In a pre-Internet era, for young artists, the mixtape was instrumental in getting the sounds of new artists out in the world. Cassettes were small, stealthy and could easily be duplicated – they were pretty much ideal. And, as a result, mixtapes became the distribution platform of choice for the hip hop community – a bit of a tradition.

So when Flow 93.5FM was the first black-owned radio station in Canada to play black artists got their license to air – they also began to release their own mix CDs – The FlowCase. The CDs were distributed to anyone and it provided an infrastructure that started to highlight artists whether they were signed or not. This meant, anyone who wasn’t a privileged DJ would have access to the artists – and it also meant that artists could get heard outside of Toronto as the CDs travelled across the country.

Here’s pics of the URBAN FLOWCASE VOLUME 9 – the same one that Chrissy owns… we don’t have immediate access to it right now, but when we do, we’ll try and make a copy so you can hear the tracks!

A little piece of Canadian hip hop history!