The Art of Recycling Bikes

September/October 2010 | Momentum Magazine | Download PDF

The 13th puncture turned out to be a lucky one for Graham Bergh. As he prepared to replace the heavily patched inner tube, he wondered: “Okay, what do you do with this?”

Unable to bring himself to just throw it out, the recycling educator turned it into a cradle for his speakers.

“I just started tinkering with the material, talking to bike shops, finding out they throw away like a thousand tubes per shop,” Bergh said. “There are 4,000 shops in the US. I did the math: There were four million tubes no one was doing anything with.”

Da Gryptions Ride Bixi Rap Into Summer

June 23, 2010 | Momentum Magazine | Online here

Patrick Guay, Trevor Barnes and Evan Cranley of Montreal group Da Gryptions. Photo courtesy Da Gryptions.

Since going live on YouTube June 8, The Bixi Anthem, Da Gryptions’ ode to Montreal’s bike-share program, has garnered more than 10,000 hits and is being heralded by some as the city’s “song of the summer.”

“Not,” says lead rapper Patrick Guay, aka Dark Science, “that Bixi needs the help being cool.”

The program, which celebrated its first anniversary in May, has nearly 5,000 bikes at 400 stations around the city. For $5 for 24 hours, $28 a month or $78 a year, Montrealers can borrow a bike for up to 30 minutes (longer rides accrue additional fees). Riders seem to be on board with it – by the end of October, 10,000 people had signed up for the program, and made more than 1,000,000 trips.

With that kind of following, Guay isn’t surprised at the popularity of The Bixi Anthem video. “We knew from the beginning that we had something,” he says. “People reacted to it.”

The dusty foot philosopher makes tracks

July 2005 | The Martlet

Photo by Kris Krug

Asked to describe his music, Canadian rapper K’naan is at a bit of a loss.

“It’s tough to describe, to be honest,” he said. “Musically, it’s something that’s kinda new. It’s a medium between two continents.”

The same could be said of K’naan himself.

Growing up in Somalia, K’naan was given hip hop records from his father, who worked as a cab driver in New York. The young, would-be MC spoke only Somali, but taught himself to mimic the American rappers perfectly.

It wasn’t until he left Somalia — on what turned out to be the last commercial flight out of the country — and moved to first the U.S. and then to Canada that he learned what the words meant.

Even more than a rapper, K’naan is a poet. It’s in his blood — his grandfather is one of Somalia’s best-known poets — and it’s how he started. In fact, it was as a spoken word poet that he first earned notoriety.