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Remi Warner
Hiphop with a Northern Touch!? Diasporic
Wanderings/Wonderings on Canadian Blackness
ABSTRACT
On the basis of a series of separately conducted qualitative interviews, this article explores
Canadian hiphop histories and biographies, in the context of, and relationship to, black
Canadian identity formation. Focusing on the musical “element” of hiphop culture which
binds my interviewees together in hiphop praxis, the article seeks to elucidate some of the
particularities of Canadian Black youth experience, as refracted through a Canadian hiphop
musical lens. The ways in which Canadian hiphop music, culture and identities have been
socio-historically shaped and structured through diasporic “wanderings,” national and local
socio-cultural contestations, and transformations within the music and entertainment
industries and radio broadcasting is considered, as are the ways in which such identities and
society have in turn been musically shaped and structured.
RÉSUMÉ
A partir d’une série d’entretiens qualitatifs conduits séparément, cet article explore les
biographies et les histoires du hiphop canadien par rapport aux processus de formation
d’une identité noire canadienne. En se concentrant sur l’élément muscial de la culture
hiphop, qui lies les différentes personnes interrogées à la pratique hiphop, cet article
cherche à élucider certaines particularités de l’expérience des jeunes noirs canadiens telle
qu’elle est réfractée par la perspective musicale du hiphop canadien.
Les modalités par lesquelles la musique, la culture et les identités hiphop canadiennes
ont été façonnées et structurées socio-historiquement dans des « errances »
diasporiques, des contestations socioculturelles locales et nationales et des séries de
transformation des industries de la musique, du divertissement de de la radiophonie
sont considérées, ainsi que les modalitiés par lesquelles ces identités et la société en
général ont été à leur tour musicalement façonnées et structurées.
Check the lingo we spread throughout the atmosphere
So distinctive no other style comes near…
Flipping my words like my body on the apparatus
sky’s the limit so I’m bound to break through the stratus…
got people in Jamaica, Trini, and London, Australia
I bring the soul to the front like Mahalia
Rascalz, “Northern Touch” (1997)1
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It is said that Duke Ellington once sonically rendered the African-American experience
by playing a dissonant chord. Based on a series of separately conducted interviews
with four of Canada’s leading hiphop figures—K-os, Sol Guy, DJ Power, and Emcee
Motion—the following article seeks to hold in creative tension the question of how
contemporary black Canadian hiphoppers might variously respond to this sonic call
to representation in and from a Canadian perspective and context.2 The article begins
with a retrospective tour of Canadian hiphop history, as selectively recollected by
myself and my peers in Toronto and Vancouver respectively. The article then proceeds
to the historical present, reflecting on the culture’s evolution, cultural entanglements
and historical traces, as these have variously deposited themselves in our evolving
hiphop consciousness and memory. Emphasizing the musical element of hiphop
culture that binds my interviewees together in hiphop praxis,3 the article shifts to
considerations of how Canadian hiphop music, culture and identities have been sociohistorically shaped and structured. Emergent social divisions and contestations,
diasporic “wanderings,” transformations within music and entertainment industries
and radio broadcasting, have not only shaped hiphop music but our subjectivities
and society have in turn been musically shaped and structured. The article returns to
the question—hiphop with a northern touch?—laying emphasis on the appositeness
of hiphop’s incorporative, re-combinatory, pastiche aesthetic for the musical expression
and constitution of young black Canadian sensibilities and diasporic subjectivities.
History Before and After Hiphop
My discussions with K-os and Sol, Power and Motion,4 invariably began with an
invitation to wheel back their musical memories to the days just prior to the emergence
of hiphop as a musical-cultural force in their lives. Many of us obscured those “B.H.”
(before hiphop)5 days in the interests of shoring up the purportedly pristine borders
of our newly hiphop-minted and authenticated Black self-identifications. I of course
had my own B.H. confessions to make, which helped kick-start some temporal lobe
ticking and talking, as I ran through some of my own eclectic early-eighties listening
play-lists: from Blondie, Corey Hart and Bob Marley to The Specials, Tears for Fears,
Depeche Mode and Glass Tiger. Such open autobiographical confessions of wilful
genre boundary transgression prompted singer-songwriter and music producer K-os
to nostalgically reflect upon some of his own heterogeneous B.H. listening
engagements:
I was just listening to whatever man—just top 40, you know what I mean…. I’ve
always felt music that was soulful, and that, interestingly enough, was a lot of pop
groups in the eighties … Like the Eurythmics. I could feel that girl!… And for me
to grow up in a time where I knew all my friends, and it was cool just to like
whoever, just that in itself was an influence.
Among the markers of this idealized musical past for K-os was a certain openness to,
and experimentation across, musical genres and boundaries, as demonstrated in and
by the emergence of an increasingly syncretic, synthetic, “computer age” acoustic:
It seems like back then there was more of a hodge-podge, pouring over from
everyone else. It’s like, synthesizers and samplers made people be like “oh”—
everyone thought they were going to the computer age. Everyone had this vibe like
“oh everything is so open.”
This eclipsed musical era was constructed by K-os as a time when musical imaginaries
exceeded existing historical trajectories, friendships transcended musical loyalties (“a
time where I knew all my friends, and it was cool just to like whoever”) and soul/
suffering transcended epidermal qualities. “It still had that pain [grimaces] in it or
whatever,” K-os recalled of a range of 1980s musical productions, at once referencing
and suggesting a prime historic source of Black musical inspiration and the possibility
of cross-corporeal musical and ethico-political identification “I could feel that [Annie
Lennox] girl!” This soulful bridging of 1980s digital divides, K-os nonetheless lamented
(however real or imagined), was not long-lasting: “Now that will happen only once
in a while…. Now it seems everything is separated.”
Motion: I was into Michael Jackson … Rick James, you know, funk stuff, a lot of
funk. But definitely Michael Jackson was like the ultimate! And then a lot of like,
you know, that rock shit that you used to hear on the radio. I knew all that stuff,
‘cuz that was what you heard, right!
RW: [nodding in agreement] Sunday night Top 40 with Casey Casem!
Motion: Every Sunday, I used to tape that stuff … Moody Blues and Phil
Collins….
Power contrastingly constructed a more seamless musical-historical thread that wove
together his musical past with his musical present, citing among his early musical
influences “eighties mainstream—Michael Jackson, Abracadabra [Steve Miller Band]—
and funk.” Rather than referencing discontinuity as comic relief, Power positioned
his musical tastes and influences along (and within) the lines of a hiphop/r&b/funk
musical continuum:
A lot of that stuff [I was listening to] was kind of funky too. Michael Jackson’s
Billy Jean! …So I guess that whole thing was just movin’ to a funkier type of
thing…. And then when you heard hiphop, it was just even rawer so you automatically went to it. It was like a natural thing, you know?6
The increasing paring down of the music in hiphop (“movin’ to a funkier type of
thing … even rawer”) to its recursive drum and bass essentials—continuing in funk’s
foot-steps—was nevertheless far from solely the result of some “natural” or inevitable
aesthetic unfolding process. Rap’s aesthetic evolution was significantly shaped by
sonically-inscribed social responses to prevailing popular cultural and socio-economic
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Poet and emcee Motion reconstructed a similarly variable musical sound-scape as
characteristic of her early 1980s musical listening experience. Motion, for instance,
recalled:
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conditions of the time, including the growing appropriation, commercialization and
mainstreaming of Black musics (namely, R&B and disco) over the course of the
1970s.7 This coincided with the popularization of the Black Power movement in the
context of stubborn economic inequalities and growing frustrations and discontent
with the actual gains of the civil rights movement for America’s Black poor. Despite
commercialized Black musics increasingly crossing over and into white American
boardrooms and airwaves during this era, socio-political contexts remained stubbornly
exclusive of Black (particularly working class) bodies. As such, black American attitudes
towards civil rights goals of integration came to be ever more reflected, contested and
constituted in the realm of aesthetics.
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Charles Keil’s (1991) analysis and conceptualization of “appropriation-revitalization”
cycles within black American music history is particularly apposite in thinking through
the semantics of hiphop aesthetics. “Appropriation-revitalization” is deployed by Keil
to refer to that process by which Black popular music has become “more African in
its essentials” in response to the appropriation and incorporation of previous Black
musical styles into the Euro-American mainstream. Keil’s model risks hypostasizing a
set of musical “Africanisms” and casting “Black” musics in an overly reactive political
mould, downplaying the role of pleasure and more formal aesthetic considerations in
Black musical evolution. It does, however, effectively highlight the socially embedded,
relational character and context of African-American musical evolution, and it steers
musicological analyses away from an obfuscating raciology towards an engagement
with history and society. In this context, we can begin to hear the recursive beats,
rhymes and layered rhythms of the closely related genres of hiphop and funk, both of
which foreground musical elements traditionally signifying Black particularity:
percussive emphasis, pitch bending, repetition, etc. These element are not so much
the effusion of some essential racial genius, as much as an aesthetic expression of
heightening Black consciousness and affirmative subaltern socio-cultural positioning,
in response to an ongoing history of marginalization and cultural appropriation.8
K-os concurred with Power’s positing of a 1980s pop/hiphop musical continuum,
though constructing an alternative basis of similitude. Whereas Power foregrounded
hiphop’s black R&B/funk lineage, K-os highlighted the connection between hiphop’s
pastiche aesthetic and its emergence in a decade of diverse musical appreciation. “It’s
like before hiphop, I was hiphop, because 80s set us up to be hiphop, ‘cuz you were
like listening to everything, you know what I mean?” Paying homage to hiphop’s
once avaricious and boundless musical-cultural appetite, and memorializing this as a
hiphop ideal, K-os went on to contrast his own eclectic musical palate with that of
his contemporary peers. “It’s only kids now where, we start telling them outside
[hiphop] there’s something and they’re like, ‘I don’t know about that guy,’ you know?
They’re not even trying to feel anything else…. You either get deep into drum ‘n’ bass
or deep into hiphop.”
The Production and Distribution of Culture
One of the factors influencing the greater heterogeneity of musical tastes and
proclivities of many “old school” Canadian (and American) hiphop music fans and
artists as compared to their “new school” counterparts,9 K-os suggests, is the greater
range of musical sounds and genres featured on popular 1970s and early 1980s radio
playlists. As Russel Potter recalls of this pre-format radio era prior to the growth of
format radio and its implementation of musical apartheid (as he calls it): “it was still
possible to hear Stevie Wonder or Miles Davis on a ‘rock’ station—or to hear the
Doobie Brothers or Rod Stewart on a ‘soul’ station” (Potter 1995: 40). Format radio
is radio driven by and subdivided into specialty formats and genres such as talk radio,
sports-radio, adult-contemporary, easy-listening. Format radio first emerged in Canada
and the United States in the early 1950s, in no small part due to the introduction of
television broadcasting and its displacement of radio as the prime mass national
broadcast medium. This had the effect of transforming radio into a medium
increasingly targeting and prioritizing more local, regional, segmented markets for
sustainability and profitability.10 The mid-1950s economic successes of CHUM Radio
in catering to an expanding, rock-and-roll-driven youth market (youth targetmarketing being a novelty at the time) further stimulated this formatting trend in
Canada. Even more significantly, the introduction of FM radio in the late 1960s
supported an exponential growth in radio station broadcasting.
The streamlined evolution of radio formats and subsequent musical tastes over the
course of the 1980s and 1990s was further complemented and reinforced by
developments within the music industry itself over this same period, most notably as
a result of the emergence of an increasingly post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation
(cf. du Gay and Negus 1994). This new business regime was characterized by a
symbiotic relationship between a decreasing number of “majors” and an increasing
number of “minors” (formerly and less accurately known as independents),12 with
the latter generally occupying the risk-prone, innovative edge of the industry
(moulding new acts, artists and genres) and the former monopolizing marketing and
distribution, forcing the minors into various licensing and distribution deals. Negus’s
description of this new symbiotic production regime as “‘loose-tight’ control”—“a
strict, centralized approach to financing, combined with a devolved structure of
personnel in marketing, A&R and so on” (qtd. in Hesmondhalgh 1996: 144)13—
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With increasing American corporate penetration of Canadian airwaves through
network radio, and a flood of private applications coming in for the new FM radio
frequencies opening up over this period, the Canadian Radio-Television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) soon began developing an evermore
elaborate series of broadcasting policies and format regulations which they were able
to enforce through the radio licensing process. Defending such ideals as “representative
diversity” and the need to maintain Canadian cultural “integrity” and “sovereignty”
(Grenier 1990: 221),11 CRTC format regulations notably came to require a promise
of performance which included “promising” the kinds of music that were going to be
played. The kinds of formats that evolved, nevertheless, came to be defined much
less strictly by musical attributes as by reference to intended audiences, in ways
conveniently assuaging both acclaimed political concerns with diversity, and advertiser
interests in identifying target markets. With the number of formats mushrooming
each passing year in sync with broader trends in late capitalist (postmodern) economics
and culture (cf. Jameson 1984), Gorman (2000) synopsizes one of the more ambivalent
impacts of Canadian liberal-pluralist policies of multiculturalism writ large: “It could
be said that in its FM definitions, the CRTC, unwittingly, invented ‘narrowcasting’”
(see Yon 1999, for a similar critique of liberal multiculturalism’s reifying conceptualization
of, and policy formulations around, culture and difference).
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was further attested to by Sol Guy and DJ Power on the basis of their respective and
extensive personal experiences in the Canadian and American hiphop music
industries.14
Sociologist of popular music Simon Frith aptly registers and describes the musicalcultural impact of such shifts in production on the consuming end of the cultural
chain as precipitating the decentering and fragmentation of the Anglo-American
rock music “master narrative”: in short, hastening “the pop-world version of the
‘postmodern condition’” (Frith 1988: 150). In this context one can hear the synchrony
in tales of increasing proliferation, differentiation and fragmentation of musical genres
and (sub)cultural spheres of influence as narrated by Toronto rapper, K-os, and
Vancouver native, Sol Guy, in relation to their musically-mediated growing up
experiences on Canada’s West Coast and Eastern mainland respectively:
Sol: Back then, there wasn’t as many [genres]—like there was 80s pop music and
there was a little bit of hiphop over here. And now it’s like there’s pop music,
there’s hiphop, there’s metal. It’s like everyone can … you can kind of go find and
sit in your own cipher [circle]. But before it was like everyone was listening to
anything from Wham to New Order to … all that stuff was coming down the
pipe and we were just all soaking it in.
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K-os: …back then there was more of a hodge-podge, pouring over from everyone
else…. [Now] you either get deep into drum‘n’bass or deep into hiphop….
The proliferation of musical labels and genres available to youth over the course of
the 1980s and 1990s, as described above, was matched by an inverse process at the
musical-industry base, which saw an unprecedented degree of concentration of capital
and ownership achieved by a few giant music/media/entertainment firms over the
same period. Music industry relations—no longer just local but increasingly global
in scale—increasingly resembled the institutional arrangements and power
configurations of the late capitalist, liberal-pluralist state. This facilitated the growth
of an increasing diversity of hermetic genres and their musically-spawned subcultures
on the industry’s periphery and a consolidation of power at the frequently unnamed
hegemonic centre.15
Lest we romanticize the 1980s as an era of musical plenitude, diversity and camaraderie
across musical borders, it should further be noted that this was also an era which saw
the music industry’s hit-driven, super-star system consolidate itself after rebounding
from its first major recession since the 1940s. In a bitter-sweet irony of musical
history, the unprecedented runaway success of Michael Jackson’s (1983) Thriller album
played an instrumental role in getting the music industry back on its feet; this success
also helped to cement a new industry formula consisting of product concentration
on a narrowing, directly-signed cast of superstar artists and range of blockbuster hits,
combined with an unprecedented expansion into global markets (Garofalo 1999).
Hiphoppin’ over the Black Atlantic
The imprint of Black Atlantic16 cultural exchanges and networks were particularly
pronounced in my interviewees coming-of-age accounts in the “hiphop nation.”
K-os’s first introduction to rap music, he related, occurred over Trinidadian airwaves
before the onset of format radio and its characteristic genre apartheid, as he amicably
recalled:
For me my first days of hiphop occurred when I was in Trinidad, which was when
I was 11, 12, 13 and I used to hear stuff on the radio. The first hiphop song I ever
memorized was “Jam On It” by Nucleus. I taped it off the radio. And so often
with Black music, it’s like it wasn’t even really hiphop. It was just music and
people would be buggin’ out and break-dancing to it. I never saw it as defined like
“hiphop.” I heard a Sting song on the radio then I heard “Jam On It.” Everything
got played. It was just tread out, just like that, just mixed up…. It wasn’t until
later on that I started to define it, and my friends were all rappers and stuff.
A note of nostalgia marked K-os’ recollections of this progression from a time when
hiphop was “just music,” and friends were just friends (irrespective of musical loyalties),
to a “defining” moment where the two came to intersect: K-os coming to define
hiphop and hiphop coming to define him and his circle of friends.
[I got] tapes from the radio, tapes from New York, from Mister Magic’s show and
from DJ Red Alert’s show, you know…. All those scraggly tapes people used to
bring, you know. I remember ‘nuff man used to … like, I had a boyfriend who
used to go down there all the time, then bring me back tapes of Doug-E fresh
shows and stuff like that at the Roxy and all these places. It was almost like, it was
like this legend of stuff that was goin’ on over there, and you’re just trying to taste
pieces of it!
It was not long before Toronto spawned urban legends of its own, formidable enough
to compete successfully with a cast of New York’s best hiphop all-stars, in a historic
“New York invades Toronto” city to city battle that indelibly ingrained itself into
Motion’s hiphop historical consciousness and memory.18
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Emcee Motion had another “Black Atlantian” hiphop genesis tale of her own to tell,
with her first real love for hiphop as a bonafide lyricist, having been honed in Botswana
where she lived for ten months after her Antiguan-born father took up a two-year
teaching post in the southern African country. Among the plot lines of her captivating
story was her meeting with “two youths from New York who had just reached
[Botswana] as well… [who] had ‘Sugarhill’ label records with them.” “As soon as I
saw that,” she narrated of the subsequent spate of events leading her along a career
path as a lyricist, “I was like ‘Oh shoot, you have that song I’ve been hearing about!”
referring to rap’s first commercially-recorded song by the Sugar Hill gang. The song,
“Rapper’s Delight” became instrumental in spreading rap music to audiences outside
the South Bronx, New York (indeed as far as Southern Africa).17 “Once we recognized
that we could flip the labels and do rhymes on the b-side—there’s instrumentals!” she
further recalled of the disco-era, twelve-inch record invention, “first we tried to rap
what was on the a-side, then we started to write our own rhymes [and] formed a
group…. So I was twelve at that time [and when] I came back [to Canada], from
then I was consistently writing rhymes.” Upon returning to Canada, Motion extended
her Black Atlantic networks to the United States, acquiring a plethora of highly
prized hiphop materials from her friends’ journeys to the States, the fruits of which
were spread through a whole new (audio and video-cassette) underground railroad of
its own:
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Power also spoke of the importance of Black Atlantic family networks in spreading
the hiphop gospel to Canada through hand-to-hand, tape-to-tape distribution. Power
accorded particular significance to Ron Nelson’s first Toronto hiphop radio show
which, broadcast on 88.1 CKLN (Ryerson University community radio), in his
opinion became the most important vehicle and continuous source of hiphop
dissemination to youth in the Greater Toronto and surrounding areas. My own
recollections of religious Saturday afternoon (1 to 4 p.m.) radio tape-recording sessions
as a youth growing up in Hamilton yet religiously tune to Toronto’s community
station 88.1—aided and abetted by a homemade FM radio antennae that had to be
continuously adjusted and relocated in my attic room for maximum stereo reception—
being a youth growing up in the city of Hamilton, some 80 km away from Toronto,
further confirmed the critical importance of Ron Nelson’s weekly radio show in feeding
our voracious hiphop appetites.
The presence of local Jamaican reggae sound-systems in the Greater Toronto Area
also played a particularly significant and contributing role to hiphop’s evolution in
Toronto, as attested to by both Power and Motion. As Power recalled:
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Our hiphop and New York’s hiphop is kind of similar, like, how it came out
because they used to have the sound system out in the park with the block parties
and that’s what Toronto had, with the sound crews. Not many other cities started
like that. It was Toronto and really New York with the sound crews and people
having sound systems…. That’s how all the music got out there, the sound crews
[which] was a Jamaican thing, right … and the Jamaican community is really big
here…. The black Canadian culture basically has a lot of Jamaican influence in
it…. So having that culture in us—the natural link between reggae and hiphop is
like this [crosses fingers], it’s like they’re brothers basically—it’s like, it was natural
for it to come into the culture.
Power and Motion more specifically elaborated upon the crucial role of the Sunshine
Sound System—transplanted from Jamaica to Toronto in the 1970s—in exposing
Toronto audiences to hiphop music through “blockos” (block parties) and event
promotions (promoting one of hiphop’s first shows featuring RUN DMC in 1984),19
tasks subsequently taken up by Ron Nelson who succeeded Sunshine as Toronto’s
most prominent hiphop promoter.20
Among some of the important vehicles of hiphop cultural diffusion to Canada’s west
coast described by Sol were: Much Music’s Rap City; TV show; b-boy movies like
Beat Street and Breakin’; College and University community radio stations (Kilo-C
and Incredible EZE on 102.7 in Vancouver in particular); American rap magazines
(Word Up, Right On); travel to friends and family living in the United States (resulting
in the transference of highly-prized hiphop paraphernalia); and the occasional live
act in Vancouver (Ice-T in particular having had a lasting impact on Sol). “But a lot
of it for me….I think the way the Rascalz got their own little sound is just we
interpreted it,” Sol explained. “We didn’t have anything to really go off of except for
what we were absorbing. So you didn’t have people telling us it was wrong or right,”
he fondly recalled, evincing a desire to return to this prelapsarian hiphop historical
moment and non-judgmental ideal.
Hiphop’s “ultramagnetic” force
Among the early magnetic forces and sources of attraction to hiphop for myself and
my interviewees, above and beyond immediate aesthetic pleasures—particularly in
the context of an increasingly globalized, larger-than-life, superstar-driven eighties
musical hit parade—was hiphop’s conferral of a distinctive sense and representation
of everyday blackness routed in vernacular black North American experience, in ways
that offered and spoke to hitherto submerged recognition of non-articulated subject
positions, as conveyed in the recollections of Sol Guy:
Sol’s newfound, hiphop-delivered, confident sense of alterity (“all of a sudden I had
my own thing”) was subsequently reinforced upon moving to Vancouver, where he
met up with the Rascalz to form a b-boy crew in their local high school. Our mutual
recollections of movie (Beat Street, Breakin’) and TV induced (Much Music, Rap
City) and mediated intensive labours of b-boy mimesis further evidenced the growing
centrality of multimedia modes of marketing popular musics over the course of the
1980s.21 Indeed, the fact that almost identical hiphop genesis tales were told relating
to the key influence of this same repertoire of b-boy movies by hiphop headz22 from
Los Angeles to Cape Town, South Africa, further illustrates the global scale of the
entertainment industries as they evolved over the course of the 1980s (cf. Warner
forthcoming). Such simultaneity of the hiphop experience, across space and in time
and through shared mediums of cultural transmission, clearly calls into question notions
of hiphop “authenticity” premised solely on geographical proximity to hiphop’s earliest
centers of cultural production.
Another major source of attraction to hiphop for my Canadian interviewees was
hiphop’s endowment of a rich and highly democratic, participatory and localizable,
multi-medium cultural repertoire which demanded little in the way of costly
instrumentation or formal training.23 The ability of hiphop to incorporate a wide
range of musical-cultural influences whilst maintaining an identity/integrity of its
own was another highly prized characteristic of hiphop reinforcing its appeal. As
Power related:
It was like the greatest invention!... You can have so many different styles of
hiphop [and] I think that’s the captivating thing—what you can do with the
song—and the music…. Like R&B uses it, slow jams use it, reggae uses it,
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For me, I grew up in a small town in BC and there wasn’t much outlets for hiphop
or any jams or anything going down. No one was even listening to hiphop. It
wasn’t cool. In the schools, it wasn’t the music to listen to. It was like all metal and
stuff back then…. I went through my little metal stage! Then hiphop started
becoming a little more mainstream, so it started seeping out to somewhere like
Grand Forks—that’s where I grew up. I was something like 13-14 years old [and] I
started seeing movies like Beat Street, Breakin’ and stuff like that [which] started
coming available more, ‘cuz break-dancing kind of blew up…. I started really
looking for it … and then when I realized that everybody else didn’t like it, that
made me just like it even more. All the rocker guys that I didn’t really think, like, I
had any connection to, but I was trying to be like them for so long—then all of a
sudden I had my own thing and I was like (waves his hand), “whatever”!... When I
found hiphop I got rid of that real quick: threw out my KISS and RAT t-shirts!
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everybody uses it, ‘cuz hiphop beats, they’re just so hypnotic…. There’s a lot of
fusions. There’s Ghanaian rap, using the native language and incorporating
traditional music…. It’s like everybody is just grasping on to it and using it, which
is wicked still. To me, that’s what it’s all about…. That’s the music that can
communicate to all these people, and they’re doin’ that with reggae too….
The incorporative and boundary-less quality of hiphop’s pastiche aesthetics was also
highly cherished by K-os, in keeping with his earlier statements to this effect:
I remember Busta Rhymes said you can do anything in hiphop. You can bring any
music into hiphop. Opera, anything. You just have to stay within that beat. Once
you got the head nod, it’s hiphop…. That’s why hiphop is also a martial art
because you hear these guys [A Tribe Called Quest] saying “I left my wallet in El
Segundo” but you knew they were really from Queens. Like what do they know
about El Segundo [mimics intro of song]. How did they get the passport to even
do that, you know what I mean. So its like, I think that’s the thing about
hiphop….
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The fluidity and open-endedness of hiphop’s art forms well suited and facilitated the
complex kinds of cultural negotiations and translations required of black Canadian
diasporic subjects. K-os here alludes to the analogous ability of hiphop and martial
artists to flip and turn cultural scripts and tables, with naught but their bodily means
and arts (weapons of the weak), in guileful, artful showdowns with more powerful
(hegemonic) opposing forces. Russel Potter similarly observes the Shaolin-like qualities
of the hiphop arts: “hiphop undermines the dominant not by opposing it on a large
front … but via a tactical, vernacular strategy, a guerrilla resistance that not only
nullifies but transforms hegemonic utterance” (Potter 1995: 78). Such “deformation
of mastery” so characteristic of the kung-fu film plot, may well constitute one of the
enduring appeals of this film genre in hiphop culture, as Nelson George has suggested.24
The tactical sensibility of the hiphop/martial artist found further expression in K-os’s
reflexive ruminations with respect to the dialogical nature and bases of language, art
and self-hood, as evidenced in his memoirs of his artistic evolution:
My biggest influence was like Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip or whatever. In the
beginning that’s what I jumped on to, to kind of ride the wild horse of hiphop.
Those are the reins that I used…. The key is just assimilation, imitation, and
somewhat copying, but with in mind knowing you’re gonna take it to the next
level.25
K-os returned to this point throughout our conversations: “And that’s why, again….
It’s like, you might be talking to me, but maybe my views … if you really were to
check where I got it from, it might be Krishnamurti or something.” This dual dispelling
of romantic myths of autonomous and autochthonous cultural-artistic creation and
authorship did not threaten or erode his sense of distinctive subjectivity or unique
artistic productivity:
[It] doesn’t mean that I can’t use [someone else’s views or words] in a way that
transcends the actual people who made them, because that’s the thing about what
slang is and hiphop is in the first place…. You can take from that and still not
have to be completely that. Just strain, you know what I mean.
Old School, New School, True School Rules
As our conversations shifted to discussions about the evolution of the Canadian
hiphop scene, a recurring lament of the “old school” world-wide, was repeatedly
registered and articulated, which pertained to the perceived regressive and myopically
profit-driven, narrowing scope of hiphop representation and creativity. “It’s funny to
see how [money has] changed the being of hiphop” K-os lamented:
Like, no one could put on your record, “rhymes written by so and so” when I was
comin’ up. You couldn’t! Now Dr. Dre blatantly puts on his record “Written by
Jay-Z” and people just say, “oh, that’s cool”, you know what I mean?... But hiphop
was always something you’re supposed to define for yourself or even your crew.
People will say, “ok, this is how we get down to hiphop”.... So it’s like hiphop is
not even really hiphop anymore…. Like, it’s in the form of hiphop, but it’s an
impostor.
Sol: Back in the day, if you couldn’t dance and stuff it wasn’t fly, you know what I
mean. Now it’s fly to just post up like DMX posts up in the video, and be thugged
out, and girls to be all, you know what I mean…. It seems like it’s more on some
watchy, profile and front vibe…. Watchin’ the next man instead of having just a
pure party vibe.
K-os: You [Sol] said “profile and front,” not as much as just people “trying to be”
… like I said with the Trinidad thing, there’s a point when I went to parties
hearing hiphop and I didn’t think about that. I was totally consumed by the music
to the point where I had no time to observe anyone else. The only time I observed
anyone else was when they bumped into me, or someone was doing something
extra hyped…. So I think hiphop, all it really is—this goes back to the same thing
as eating from the tree of anything—you just become aware. And that’s the perfect
thing with innocence lost. When you are aware, you can no longer just be. You
have to worry about if you’re “it” or not.... You have to keep gauging where you are
as opposed to everyone else. But when you are it, then you’re just totally absorbed
by it. You don’t have time to think, “am I doing this step right?” I think music
TOPIA 15
K-os and Sol poignantly narrated a progressive eclipsing of jouissance (bliss) within
hiphop circles and its replacement by increasingly diluted and adulterated, half-baked
forms of hiphop plaisir. Barthes distinguishes between literary texts of plaisir and
literary texts of jouissance or rapture in The Pleasure of the Text (1975). Plaisir is seen
to be bound up with the reader’s sense of contentment in having his/her values and
cultural mores recognized and re-affirmed in the text—with the effect of re-affirming
the consistency and stability of his/her sense of selfhood. Jouissance (literally translated
as “coming” or orgasm), contrastingly, only occurs when the reader experiences a
subjective sense of loss and rupture vis-à-vis his spatio-temporal coordinates and
conventional cultural-historical mode of self-consciousness. Jouissance, in many ways,
reflects the end state of “dope” music, as described by LeRoi Jones (later Amira Baraka),
who famously stated of the characteristic goal of his favoured “new jazz”: “New Black
Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” K-os’s and Sol’s descriptions of the waning of
hiphop jouissance resonated forcefully with such distinctions between modes of
aesthetic appreciation. They both related:
55
now is so much more about trying to fit into something…. It’s just so categorical.
So how can you really just come to the jam, and music was supposed to be
releasing yourself or wailing or “getting it out”—how can it be that if you’re so
worried about trying to look right or wear the right clothes or…? Music can’t take
you over anymore. You can’t just get into it.
Such tales of musical-cultural ossification and decline were further related by DJ
Power, who equated the intensification of “posin’” and “flossin’” in contemporary
hiphop circles with a decline in joy and freedom.26 As narrated by Sol only moments
earlier, the increasing visibility and distinctive sense of identity and alterity afforded
to black Canadian and other youth, by and through hiphop, in many ways came to
function like the proverbial pharmakon, providing at once a form of medicinal relief
and poison; freedom and new captivity. The cherished experiences of musically-induced
jouissance, as narrated by Sol and K-os, will likely continue to decline in relation, if
not in proportion, to the degree that hiphop “selves” are attached to an increasing
range and variety of commodity “sales” and “lifestyles.”
DJ Power offered some alternative speculations about, and explanations for, the waning
of hiphop jouissance in more recent history:
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56
It’s like the same thing that happened with jazz…. Like the hard core hiphop, the
Black population doesn’t really come out to see it. It’s mostly Asian, European,
White and that’s because basically Black people are about creating, so we created
something. But why did we create hiphop? It was a form of expression to get out
of our mind what we had to say, and at the same time it was something for us to
enjoy ourselves. You see, music is something you got to relieve your stress, relieve
your trouble and that’s how hiphop was. It started over disco beats then you had
drum beats and people were breakin’ to these drumbeats…. So it was always a
party. Now it’s like the hiphop that’s being created, a lot of it isn’t being created to
party, to dance to. It’s more straight boom bap boom boom bap. It’s more
downtempo like you just sit down and you listen to it…. It’s more laid back—the
“hardcore hiphop”—and that appeals to people who just want to listen and dissect
every lyric and stuff like that. It’s more of an analytical mind who listens to that
hiphop, more as a person who just loves the music…. So I think there’s a big
division there…. Cause when we go to a club, the hiphop we wanna hear is more
something that can make us move. It’s very upbeat as opposed to the other
hardcore hiphop, [that’s] not really set to dance to…. A lot of people like that
stuff, but it’s not the hardcore Black audience, you know…. We’re a rhythmic
people, the rhythm has to be the core of it.
The contingency of such constructions of Blackness as affixed to particular rhythmic
tempos and manifestations are articulated by Power in his description of the waning
are of hiphop’s tempo and dance-ability in concert with the growth of White and
Asian underground hiphop audiences. This is ironically demonstrated by the fact
that many of the black South African “headz” I met while doing doctoral research on
hiphop in Cape Town came to identify (with) that same “boom boom bap,” downtempo, underground sound as “the real,” unadulterated, authentic hiphop (cf. Warner
forthcoming). “Hiphop man, I don’t think it’s for the clubs, you know, what I
understand as hiphop,” Johannesburg Ground Works producer and emcee, Gemini,
argued for instance, in sync with Cape Town Ground Works emcee Hue-Man:
“Hiphop is boom bap man! Yo, I don’t want to shake my hips. I want to bump my
head!” The racialized division of hiphop constituencies between those who would
just prefer to dance and “get their groove on” and those, of a more analytical-mental
persuasion, who would rather analyze and “dissect every lyric”—in keeping with
historic racialized associations of Blacks with the body and whites with the mind—
was further defied by the hiphop musical ideals of black Cape Town rapper, Emcee
Breeze who argued:
It’s all in here [points to head]…. If I catch your song all at once, it’s wack. It’s
something that I must play over and over and over to try to catch all of it…. And
that’s the type of shit I want to impact on somebody. Something that can make
them think.
Evidence of the growth of racialized fault-lines within the Canadian, more specifically
Torontonian, hiphop scene were further registered in MC Motion’s assessments of
more recent developments within the Toronto hiphop scene. Contrasting the present
underground scene with the past, Motion for instance observed:
The stated opposition between those who “studied” hiphop and those who “lived
it”—though not without some merit in terms of the mere quantity of hiphop
commodities available for study to youth of all persuasions today (particularly those
with sizeable disposable incomes)—was nevertheless clearly contradicted by our earlier
conversations about hiphop cultural diffusion to Canada through “studied” movies,
tapes, records, videos and magazines among other media (especially in the formulation
of b-boy/girl dance moves). Given the continued deepening of race-class disparities
within Canadian society,27 it is likely that such racialized processes of hiphop
schismogenesis28 will continue indefinitely into the future, contrary to the claims of
hiphop rainbow nationalists.
Observing a significant increase in the number of female hiphop practitioners in our
conversations around gender dynamics of the Toronto hiphop scene and its evolution,
Motion further discussed the continuing difficulties of being a female hiphop head
in a male dominated hiphop world:
[Hiphop is] still extremely male-dominated. It still has that whole thing that there
can only be one or two or three…. Like when a woman raps, it’s a special ting!...
There’s still not enough role models out there for us…. I want to hear more female
voices, ‘cuz I think it’s good to see what women write about, what we spin about,
our analogies, what records we select from the crate.
Particularly disturbing in the eyes of Motion was the narrow, fixed, range of subject
positions representationally on offer to women in hiphop, which constricted their
free hiphop range of movement, thought and expression. As she related:
TOPIA 15
Those “Live at the Barbecues” that DJ-X used to put on [back in the day]. That
was like so pure unadulterated hiphop from the emceeing/DJ-ing point of view.
The amount of acts that hit that stage. It’s like the vibe was so…. It kind of
reminds me of how the Illamentalz are now at the Comfort Zone. But it’s not the
same. Well, the whole racial make up is so different now, you know what I mean.
Like those kids seem like they studied it, but we were just living it, you know….
57
There’s so many different aspects I don’t think men have to go through. Like when
you’re doing a video, trying to think about “ok, are you the diva of hiphop?” or
“are you the b-girl of hiphop?” “are you sophisticated or this?” or “are you
the…?”—like why can’t you just be yourself? There’s much more pressure in
regards to presentation—physical things—outside of just the music. And even just
pressure of the decisions you make, like if you do a song like “this” will it be
misconstrued. Maybe you want to do a slack song ‘cuz we all have a little slack in
us. But if a woman does a slack song, it’s like “oh, is she trying to be Little Kim?”
Like you’re in these categories—or else you’re like the “Earth Mother” Lauryn Hill.
Or else you’re like the rough tough female like Raw Digga. Like you have to be like
somebody in order to be identified, you know. And I figure all those women are
many things. All of us are many things. But male MCs, they just come out and do
what they want to do.
Motion’s powerful ode to male hiphop privilege demonstrated some of the parallels
in race and gender domination, highlighting a familiar casting of roles vis-à-vis the
unmarked, subject space of the universal and the attenuated space of those assigned
to the particular.
Hiphop with a Northern Touch?
TOPIA 15
58
My conversations with K-os, Sol, Motion and Power, each concluded with their final
thoughts regarding the initial problematic framing this research project: Can there
be said to be a northern touch defining and distinguishing the Canadian hiphop
experience? And, if so, what might that northern touch sound like, if transduced into
sound? In their attempts to grapple with this question, Sol, Motion and Power all
foregrounded the Caribbean-Canadian cultural ingredients as prime constituents of
any such musical translation. “I think there’s a sound…. I don’t know if there’s an
actual….” Sol ambivalently paused before going on to conclude:
The only real fusion in the hiphop in Canada is the reggae, dancehall influence,
which is very legit with the kids from here ‘cuz that’s their connection. First
generation Canadians from the West Indies are the ones blowing up the hiphop
scene right now.
Motion and Power concurred with this view, with Power likewise observing:
We import the hiphop but we already have our own culture which is strong in us,
so we’re mixing the two in a way that is different than anywhere else…. There’s a
strong West Indian influence in our music and our whole dialect, the way we put
words together. Look at the artists out there—Nefarious, Motion, Kardinal—all of
these artists take their roots and use it.
The tendency of young black Canadian hiphoppers to foreground and lay claim to
identities rooted elsewhere was indeed among the observed (northern touched)
regularities of black Canadian hiphop particularity. “Ask a kid born in Canada where
he’s from and he’ll say, ‘I’m Jamaican’, ‘I’m Trini’, ‘I’m Antiguan’ before they’ll even
say ‘I’m Canadian.’ That doesn’t happen in the States,” Sol observed on the comparative
basis of his experiences living in both Canada and the U.S. Power similarly contrasted
the Black immigrant experience in Canada and the U.S.:
They like to say it’s a mosaic [in Canada], right. Well what it really is, is that we
don’t really assimilate into a Canadian culture ‘cuz Canada doesn’t really have too
much culture. It’s like, the Black people here, we bring our own culture. Whereas
in the States, it already has a black American culture which has been there for
years. So when you come from Trinidad or somewhere else to America, you kind
of assimilate into American culture. But here there’s no flavour in the Canadian
culture, so we more keep our own culture.
The spectre of multiculturalism exerted a hidden structuring force in such explanations
of island-bound black Canadian cultural identifications, which sub-textually referenced
and evidenced the ongoing history of white hegemony (and thus perceived invisibility)
as the nation’s (un)official, public “core culture” (cf. Mackey 1999).
Black exclusion from, and marginalization within, the Canadian nation and its
dominant self-representations, was apparent in K-os’ reluctance to self-identify as
Canadian, nationally:
The strongly polarized terms of this outer-national, Rasta-influenced, supra-human
cultural identification (“Original Lion” … “Why would you think of yourself as
something else, perpetrated by their people”) clearly bore the trace of its abject
constitution (“I never see myself on TV … mainstream, prime-time”). K-os’s
ssubsequent observations regarding the unequal relations of power underlying and
structuring his rare moments of prime-time appearance and visibility (notably and
preferably in hyper-visiblized, ethnicized, Afrocentric garb) aptly captured the kinds
of “stage-managed independence” and “managed diversity” characteristics of
hegemonic, liberal-multiculturalist, late capitalist state formations (cf. Mackey 1999;
Bannerji 2000).
K-os nevertheless went on to highlight some of the more positive results of creatively
thriving on the marginalized side of the Afro-Canadian hyphen, alluding to the
continuous multidirectional diasporic multi-cultural influences cross-fertilizing his
music. “That’s the one thing we have going for us,” he explained:
Because Toronto in the actual aboriginal language means “meeting place” and I
think that’s what comes out of our music. Like, there is no particular sound.
There’s just a bunch of sounds…. Like, if you listen to a Saukrates or Kardinal,
they’re going to sound like they’re from an Atlanta. They’re going to sound like
TOPIA 15
I never see myself on TV, which helps…. Like on the mainstream, prime time
shows, there’s never me…. So why is that? You know what I mean. And if I am, it’s
always aesthetically, as some kind of Afrocentric just bringin’ it in ‘cuz they want
to add that element. But I’m never the guy tellin’ the White guy, “no, I don’t want
that” or “actually you’re wrong, I want this.” It’s always the guy in the suit. So I
think for me, I just see myself as ... an Original Lion, personally.... Based on that,
that’s what I write my rhymes with, with that attitude, because, that’s how it is
anyways…. So why would you think of yourself as something else, perpetrated by
their people?
59
they’re from LA on a track. They’re gonna sound like they’re from New York.
They’re going to do something where they switch to soca and West Indian twang,
then, they’ll do some straight Toronto hiphop over a jazz beat, and you’ll know
that’s the stuff ‘cuz it’s fried by Queen or Yonge St….
The very attempt to define the Canadian hiphop sound in this “fried by Queen or
Yonge Street” view, risked muting the cacophony of sounds continually and creatively
being merged and produced in the many meeting places across the Canadian nation.
“So I think that’s the thing,” K-os answered in response to the opening question,
inspired by Duke Ellington’s dissonant chord and my desire for a Canadian translation.
We don’t really sound like anything and I think that’s why—since everyone is
always saying ‘well this is the so-and-so sound’—why people might look twice at
Toronto, because it’s almost like an enigma. Like who are they? And you’ll think
you’ll know what someone sounds like but….
Conclusion
TOPIA 15
60
Numerous music critics have observed how Black “new world” musics have been in
part defined by the “struggle against words” impelled by a desire and need to express
and communicate sentiments and existential predicaments “which can only be
described in terms of sound” (Frith 1983: 36). This desire to come into representation
is in no small part shaped my interviewees’ (K-os, Sol, Power and Motion) gravitation
to hiphop. Prized for its at once boundary-less and fluid cultural-aesthetic qualities,
hiphop, as artistic practice and cultural repertoire, provided my interviewees and
many more black Canadian youth like them with a requisite and welcome new means
of crafting and articulating ever-evolving, Black diasporic-Canadian subjectivities
and sensibilities. The evinced desire to come into representation, however, was matched
by an equally resolute desire to resist the kinds of identity closures and socio-cultural
strictures all too frequently accompanying such acts of representation—even of a
sonic kind—as expressed in differing forms again and again throughout our
conversations. Any acoustic attempt at representation of the black Canadian youth
experience—given an ongoing and ambivalent (inside/outside) relation to the
Canadian nation and its dominant self-representations—will undoubtedly share some
of the dissonant quality and tone articulated by Duke Ellington in his attempt to
convey the predicament and double-consciousness of the African-American experience.
Any Canadian translation, if it is to remain true to the “poly consciousness”29 of the
black Canadian experience, will need to add its own “northern touch,” which may
indeed be precisely defined by that enigmatic, ineffable musical quality gestured to
by K-os. While my interviewees, like many other Canadian “hiphop nation” citizens,
inhabit multiple social and cultural worlds, each partially of their own making, all
were nevertheless differentially shaped by the historical processes and transformations
of late capitalism within music, media and entertainment industries.
Notes
1. “Northern Touch” is the name of the Rascalz produced hit single, featured on the
Rascalz Cash Crop album released in 1997 by the independent record label managed
by Sol Guy at the time (Figure IV). The song received high video rotation on Much
Music, and features an all-Canadian, east-west coast cast of emcees including the
Rascalz, Checkmate, Choclair, Kardinal Offishal, and Thrust. The two verses cited here
are by the Rascalz (Red-One) and Checkmate respectively.
2. K-os is a Toronto-based Emcee, producer, singer, and songwriter whose debut album,
EXIT, has entered him onto Canada’s centre musical stage. Among his videos in rotation
are “Rise Like the Sun,” “Follow Me,” “Superstar Pt.0” and “Heaven Only Knows,” the
latter of which was awarded Best HipHop/Rap Recording and Best Songwriting Award
at the fourth-annual Urban Music Association of Canada’s Urban X-Posure Awards. K-os
is also well known for his outspoken social and political commentary.
Power is a reputed Toronto “foundation” hiphop DJ and Producer, known by longtime hiphop aficionados in the country for his DJ-ing exploits with the Soul Controllers
crew. Founding the Blacklist record label in the mid-1990s, he is reputed to have
pioneered the hiphop dubplate/reggae remix style,2 while producing some of Toronto’s
finest hiphop artists. In 1990, he founded Toronto’s hiphop airwave staple, CIUT
89.5fm’s The Masterplan Show, which broke innumerable Canadian artists onto the
scene, recently winning a UMAC Award for best radio show. He also provides the
selections for Toronto’s popular Trauma Unit radio show on FLOW 93.5 fm.
Motion, also part of the Black List family, is another household hiphop name in
Toronto. Her 1997 single “Use What U Got” (produced by Power on the Black List
label) is considered by many a Canadian hiphop anthem. She is also a founding host of
CIUT’s Masterplan Show, as well as an award-winning poet (winning the 2002 nationwide CBC National Poetry Face-Off Championship recently) and writer, recently
publishing a critically acclaimed book on Toronto’s Women’s Press, Motion in Poetry.
She is also well known for her community work and activism.
3. Hiphop consists of four main elements—rapping, disc-jockeying, break-dancing and
graffiti—with “culture, knowledge and understanding,” according to many of the
culture’s original pioneers (namely the shaper of this element, Afrika Bambaataa and
the Universal Zulu Nation), constituting the guiding and integrative fifth element.
4. The semi-structured interviews were conducted on separate occasions in the
summer of 2000: the first consisting of K-os and Sol, the second Power and the last
Motion. My discussants were selected not so much because of some desired or
purported (elusive) Canadian “hiphop nation” representativeness, as much as because
of their wide-ranging and long-time involvements in, and formative impacts upon, the
Canadian hiphop scene. On a more pragmatic note, my personal familiarity with each
of the interviewees further facilitated the intimacy and forthrightness of our dialogue.
TOPIA 15
Sol Guy is a Vancouver native who has worked in the Canadian music industry for
more than twelve years, helping to break new ground for many of Canada’s leading
hiphop artists, working as manager for such “top-ranking” Canadian hiphop artists as
Kardinal Offishall, K-os, and the Rascalz (his own crew, originally). He has also worked
on an industry level in Canada with BMG Music and in the U.S. at Arista Records, Bad
Boy, LaFace, Motown and Universal. Specializing in International Artist development
has allowed Guy to travel extensively and he has recently expanded such travels off the
industry tracks on behalf of numerous hiphop-laced social justice initiatives, which now
command the bulk of his attention. In recognition of his longstanding contributions to
the national urban music industry, Sol received a Special Achievement Award at the
2001 (UMAC) annual Urban X-Posure Awards.
61
5. The term B.H. is employed so as to convey the historic significance of the birth of
this cultural-musical moment/movement in the lives of many Black (and other)
Canadian youth.
6. The ways in which funk and other 1980s musical genres (from rock to disco)
prepared the way for hiphop strongly resonated with my personal history and
recollections of splicing together drum breaks from 1980s radio hit tape recordings
(from Thomas Dolby to the Police), the labour of which made hiphop a welcome
innovation/renovation.
7. The 1970s ushered in the end of an era of Black independent distribution (e.g.,
under Motown) and the beginnings of the “corporate annexation” of Black music labels,
which precipitated the contemporary era of dependant Black boutique labels
distributed by majors, as signalled by CBS’s distribution deal with Gamble and Huff’s
“Philadelphia International” that decade (Neal 1999: 106; cf. George 1998: 124).
8. Although disco also had a formative impact on hiphop’s cultural-aesthetic evolution,
hiphoppers progressively leaned toward, and drew from, the more raw and dissonant
(gritty sonority) funk genre, which had close relations to a Black nationalist politics and
(Black pride) cultural orientation. Hiphop’s growing antagonism to disco—which
increasingly became associated with a white middle-class (as well as its earlier gay)
audience—is further signalled in Afrika Bambaataa’s recollection of the early 1970s
musical scene:
TOPIA 15
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Some of the New York radio stations weren’t into Sly and James anymore. You stop
hearing those hard beats on those records coming through the radio. You stop
hearing the soul music of James Brown. All you heard was disco, disco and disco.
Hiphop was a rebellious answer to disco.
This antagonistic relation to disco also helped contribute to hiphop’s evolving
masculinist, race-class laced (ghettocentric) ethos.
9. Far from solely a Northern phenomenon, numerous “golden age” (late 80s) American
rappers have similarly commented on the heterogeneity of their early musical
influences. Dove and Posdnuos of De La Soul, for instance, list among their musical
progenitors: Anita Baker, Phil Collins, Suzanne Vega, Loose Ends, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili
Peppers, Maceo Parker, the Brand New Heavies, Chicago, Hall and Oates and the
Eagles. Neither is such musical eclecticism solely the propriety of “b-boy bohemians,”
as Black nationalist rapper Chuck D similarly recalls in an interview with Russel Potter:
“I’m an old guy. I’m like, thirty-three, so … Y’know, I [also] liked a lot of the rock music
in the early 70s, because that’s what was played in my area, WABC, y’know, it’s a top40 station, they played everything” (Chuck D interview with Potter http://www.ric.edu/
rpotter/chuck).
10. In the U.S. this had the effect of thrusting Black musics onto the airwaves like never
before. In part as a result, radio went on to become the privileged medium for
rock’n’roll musical-cultural diffusion across America, contributing to the formation of
America’s first mass youth musical-cultural movement in American popular history,
which in turn precipitated youth target marketing and the formation and profitability of
radio formats directed exclusively at youth-specific audiences (cf. Thornton 1996: 68).
11. The introduction to the 1975 FM radio policy, for instance, announced as the main
objectives of its new broadcasting system as follows:
The disparate groups in Canada’s society deserve to have available on their
airwaves a clear choice of different kinds of programming which recognize their
particular needs and concerns. Radio should serve the public when it wants to be
entertained and also when it wants to be informed and enlightened (Canadian
Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission 1975, 3, cited in Grenier
1990: 221).
12. Laing usefully differentiates between majors and independents as follows:
To the extent that they carry out the three functions of origination, manufacture
and distribution, record companies are known as “majors.” Independents are
smaller companies which simply originate material, relying on majors or others for
manufacture and distribution. (1986: 333).
13. Hesmondhalgh cites Negus’s 1990 PhD dissertation, Concentration and Diversity in
the International Phonogram Industry from the University of Gothenberg. Norman
Kelley (2002) describes such corporate arrangements in the hiphop industry, between
Black boutique labels (e.g., P Diddy’s Bad Boy, Antonio Reid and Kenneth Edmond’s La
Face) and their major distributors, as neo-colonial in form, as similarly observed by
Neal:
14. Highlighting the ambiguous, character and symbiotic relation between major and
minor record labels, Sol observed:
those [major] corporations need organisations like us to feed them with the real
shit, right, with the real new stuff and hot stuff, but at the same time, when it
narrows your choices that much, when there used to be six major labels and now
there’s four and maybe about to be three places to go to, it’s kind of all under one
roof, you know what I mean. So regardless of what you say “major corporations
are this, that and the third,” you can only do so much as an independent because
they hold the distribution.
The proliferation of minor hiphop labels in Toronto in the contemporary era was
attested to by DJ Power, who observed a rapid growth in the number of Toronto hiphop
labels from five in 1995 when he started his Blacklist label to over 25 at the time of our
interview. That distribution and licensing deals remain a primary objective of “minors”
was further evidenced in my discussions with Power: “Nowadays majors look to see if
you have something out already. Once you put it out and get a buzz then hopefully
you’ll get picked up. Your demo tape is basically having a record out type of thing….
That’s the main goal of a lot of labels: to get distribution.”
15. Miles well-captures the ways in which independent label status is “often a facade
which amounts to little more than a sophisticated marketing ploy on the part of the
majors,” designed to cater to youth’s desire for alterity, exclusivity and identification
with the margins, while camouflaging ongoing relations with the hegemonic centre (in
this case major music labels) (cf. Miles 1998: 118).
TOPIA 15
Many of these artist/producers [with minor labels and various contract agreements
with the majors] remain distanced from the real seats of power within their
respective corporate homes—power that could be defined along the lines of joint
or sole ownership of recording masters, control over production and promotional
costs, and the authority to hire and replace internal staff members. In many
regards, many of these ghetto merchants are little more than glorified managers or
overseers, involved in what was little more than a 21st-century plantation operation. (Neal 1999: 149).
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16. Paul Gilroy (1993) employs the term “Black Atlantic,” and the metaphor of
continuously-sailing ships traversing this oceanic body of water since the onset of the
triangular trans-Atlantic slave trade. It captures and conceptualizes the multidirectional, deterritorialized and mobile qualities of cultural (re)production in the Black
Diaspora.
17. Produced and distributed under the auspices of the New Jersey-based, Black
independent label Sugar Hill Records, “Rapper’s Delight” was the first of its genre to
receive extensive mainstream radio airplay, and became instrumental in spreading rap
music to audiences outside of the South Bronx.
18. Motion elaborated in response to my questioning of her biggest Canadian hiphop
memories:
Eighty-five or ‘86 with the New York invades Toronto battle always will be in my
memory. So wicked! With KRS against Rumble. Mighty Mouth Rock out of here
against Biz Markie D. Michie Mee against this girl named Sugar Love. The DJ’s—
I can’t remember who the DJ’s were. I just remember that it was so ram, it was so
wicked. Big Daddy Kane was here…. It was like a lot of different people who were
just coming out. Big Daddy Kane didn’t even have his record out yet and they
interviewed him on City TV like “Who are you?” and (him like) “oh, I’m about to
drop a record” you know what I mean, and them type of things. So that was a
wicked show. That’s one of my favourite hiphop memories.
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19. As Motion specifically recalled:
One name that comes to mind is the Sunshine Sound Crew [which] was like an
everything sound ‘cuz in them days, like, you just played [everything at] the
parties, you know what I mean…. The reason why I was aware of Sunshine was
because I grew up with the kids of the father who owned the set, the Sunshine
set…. Apparently Mr. Webbley, who owns it, was a sound crew back in Jamaica,
right, and then he established a sound crew up here. It was a very important sound
in the seventies and eighties, you know. And they went to my school and stuff like
that. So I’d always hear, when the Sunshine set was playing out, and stuff like that.
They had block-o’s [large outdoor fêtes] and everything like that [which] in those
days were really important in getting hiphop up here, ‘cuz Sunshine is the ones
who … I remember the first hiphop show I ever tried to go to was RUN DMC
and that was like ‘84, and that was a Sunshine Jam. But after that it was like, a lot
of Ron Nelson was bringin’ up them, you know. Both of them actually.
20. I recall attending many of Ron Nelson’s promotions as a teenager, including, most
memorably, the Monster Jams at Concert Hall, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions
and Big Daddy Kane. Motion was of the opinion that Ron Nelson also had some sort of
connection to the Sunshine crew, though I was unable to verify this since my interview
with Ron was cancelled at the last minute due to the immanent birth of his baby.
21. The 1980s saw the growth of cross-media invested giant entertainment firms whose
new mission was to develop as many “revenue-streams” through cross-media
investment, marketing and content provision. The increasing importance of music
videos in musical promotion, particularly after Michael Jackson’s ultra-successful
“Thriller” video, profoundly impacted the evolution of hiphop music and culture,
especially following the 1988 establishment of Yo, MTV Raps! which went on to garner
the highest ratings in MTV’s history, ending a long history of hiphop’s racist exclusion
from the network.
22. The term “head” is a term of endearment and respect amongst hiphoppers, a
shorthand for authentic hiphop fan or practitioner.
23. As K-os argued:
That’s the thing about hiphop. A lot of the people who are in it are doing something in it—like someone was a DJ or a rapper; your friend was singing in back-up
behind you. Like everyone went into it together. It wasn’t like singing or playing
the piano where some kid had already been doing it for five years, so you couldn’t
really mess. Everyone could make their conscious decision right now that you are
going to be hiphop.
24. Noting the many kung fu influences in hiphop culture—from Grandmaster Flash to
Afu-Ra and the Wu-Tang Clan—George argues that “kung fu provides a non-White,
non-Western template for fighting superiority” (George 1998: 105).
25. Interview from http://www.kosexit.com/.
26. Comparing the contemporary hiphop scene with the past, Power observed:
27. Such race-class disparities in Canadian society are conveyed in the following
Toronto statistics:
In the 1996 Census for the Toronto area, 44.6 per cent of African Canadians lived
below the poverty line compared with 14.4 per cent of Whites (Europeans), 29.6
per cent of East and Southeast Asians, 34.6 per cent of South Asians and 44.1 per
cent for Latin Americans (Michael Ornstein, Ethno-Racial Inequality in the City
of Toronto: An Analysis of the 1996 Census, City of Toronto, 79-84).
The unemployment rate for African Canadians in Toronto tends to be twice as
high as that of the general population (32.3 and 16.5 per cent respectively or 19
per cent overall). This is also a more significant level of unemployment than most
other racialized groups, e.g., East Asians (10.5 per cent), South-East Asian (9.3 per
cent) (See Ornstein 2000: 53; also Turner 1991: 55).
28. The concept of schismogenesis, first developed by Gregory Bateson, refers to
patterns of progressive differentiation through cumulative interaction and reaction
(Bateson 1958: 171-97; 1972: 61-87, 107-27).
29. Describing the black Canadian experience as necessarily contending with a “polyconsciousness” over and above the “double-consciousness” famously attributed to
black Americans by W. E. B. Du Bois, Clarke thus warns: “Certainly the danger in
talking about ‘Canadian Blacks’ is that one can elide the real differences among, say, a
Vancouver Rastafarian, an Anjou Senegalaise, and a ‘Scotian’ African Baptist” (1997: 3).
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There was a lot, lot more freedom [back then]. More people just enjoying themselves. It’s changed a lot, in general … the whole mood, the whole environment.
It’s not, like, just the videos, the music. Everything is more about posing, not really
just about coming there and enjoying themselves. That’s what the rhymes were
about back then. Now it’s about, you know, how you’re flossin’…. It’s a whole
different mentality.
65
For the diversity of Canada’s Black populations—which some have described as a
microcosm of the pan-African world, worldwide—is a distinguishing feature of black
Canada, as is the lack of a common or unified Black ethnic heritage upon which to
draw.
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