accurately described as dancehall, a style of reggae, than as hip hop. Many US hip hop artists were popular in Canada, and Black Canadian musicians such as Infidels, Deborah Cox and The Philosopher Kings had notable successes in the R&B, pop and rock genres; however, even the most prominent Canadian hip hop acts during this era, including Ghetto Concept, Rascalz, Farm Fresh, TBTBT, Graphidi Logik and Hip Club Groove, struggled to gain any kind of commercial traction. Although Toronto-market radio stations CHOG and CING-FM began to include some Canadian hip hop songs in their contemporary hit radio formats, the hip hop audience in the city remained loyal to WBLK—and for most artists the only venues available for reaching an audience anywhere outside of the Greater Toronto Area were campus radio and MuchMusic's RapCity and X-Tendamix. That began to change in 1996, when the Urban Music Association of Canada was formed to build the domestic and international profile of Canadian urban music. The following year, Dubmatique broke through as the first Quebec rap band to top Canada's francophone pop charts, and some controversy erupted in Toronto when Milestone was again passed over for an urban radio station on its second application. Instead, the CBC was awarded 99.1 to move its existing Radio One station, CBLA, from the AM band—and, ominously, this was believed at the time to be the last available FM frequency in the city. The CRTC decision was not met with as much uproar as there had been in 1990, because the ruling was not seen as much of a shock; indeed, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the CBC would receive the frequency. The most notable Canadian hip hop album during this era, Rap Essentials Volume One, was a compilation which featured the debut singles of both Kardinal Offishall and Choclair. 1998: "Northern Touch" and transformation However, 1998 proved to be a transformative year in the development of Canadian hip hop, as the Vancouver hip hop band Rascalz quite unexpectedly found themselves at the centre of a sequence of events which gave Canadian hip hop an unprecedented level of media attention, leading the Canadian music and broadcasting industries to make a number of structural changes which would ultimately give hip hop musicians a more stable and commercially visible platform going into the 21st century. First, Rascalz won the Juno Award for Best Rap Recording for their 1997