Charity Marsh is Director of the Interactive Media and Performance Labs and associate professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. Mark V. Campbell is assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. They have come together to present an edited collection to present an overview of Canadian hip hop with We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel.

We Still Here is not a straight ahead history of Canadian hip hop, but it is an excellent starting point if you haven’t spent much or any time with the hip hop coming from our neighbors to the north. Through a collection of eleven articles written by Jesse Stewart, Liz Przybylski, Mary Fogarty, Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Laurent K. Blais, Margaret Robinson, and Salman A. Rana, as well as Marsh and Campbell themselves, you get a nice overview of the different pieces of Canadian hip hop and the factors that help shape the sound and the culture. This includes everything from the history of the African Canadian population in Halifax to the beat scene in Montreal to dancing and deejaying to Indigenous artists to the role of feminism within the culture. It’s a lot to cover, but the collection assembled here finds a great balance between being academically rigorous and being accessible and enjoyable to a lay audience. This is to say that whether you’re a scholar that does research on Canadian hip hop, or you’re just someone that’s curious about the history and the culture as an outsider, you’ll get something valuable out of this book. I like to think I do a decent job of keeping up with my Northern neighbors, but there was plenty of new pieces of knowledge and different issues to think about to keep me engaged from start to finish.

We Still Here is a great collection that shows that there is a lot to Canadian hip hop, and not just from the perspective of emcees and producers. It’s a rich culture with a unique history, and Marsh and Campbell have done a great job in putting together this book to hopefully give you a lot of new food for thought, and hopefully they’ll encourage you to dive deeper and learn more about a particular area that you didn’t already know about.