Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud

It’s been just over a year since the CBC show The Fifth Estate aired its documentary about Buffy St. Marie, raising questions about her claim to Indigenous ancestry. In this group chat, we explore what's shifted in Indigenous art and music in the past year or so. Our guests are - Marc Meriläinen, an Ojibwe musician and producer who runs a record label called Meriläinen Music. He’s also created a program that aims to verify the identity of Indigenous musicians. And Michelle Cyca, a freelance Journalist and a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6. She has done lots of reporting and writing and thinking about false claims of Indigenous ancestry and how they should be handled.

Moments after we learned that Brian Thompson, the head of a healthcare insurance company, had been shot in midtown Manhattan – the internet was full of speculation about the suspect’s motives. What we did not see coming were the memes or the look alike contests that were held in New York over the weekend. Internet culture reporters Miles Klee and Rebecca Jennings join Elamin to talk about it all. Plus, this past weekend, one of the top-grossing films at the box office was the 10th-anniversary theatrical re-release of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar, a film that was met with a mixed reception upon its initial release in 2014, but has since come to be seen as one of the Oppenheimer director’s most important films. Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri explains why the film is resonating more strongly today than 10 years ago.

With Taylor Swift’s epic Eras Tour wrapping up in Vancouver this past weekend, the Commotion Group Chat—Toronto Star writer Aisling Murphy, music journalist Suzy Exposito, and Swift Alert app creator Kyle Mumma—convenes to talk about the tour’s massive impact on the music industry, on fan/performer relationships and rituals, on social-media behaviours, and on Taylor herself as she closes this eventful chapter of her career and embarks on another.

'Tis the season for holiday movies, and the group chat is here and they're not all Grinches. Thomas Leblanc, Radheyan Simonpillai and Kathryn VanArendonk wade through what deserves your time and how holiday movies have changed. They also chat with Elamin about The Sticky, the new TV series based on the infamous $18 million dollar maple syrup heist in Quebec.