One afternoon in January, parked in a van outside the Toronto offices of Jay-Z’s clothing label, Rocawear, I ask for his thoughts. “It’s a double-edged sword, it’s a bit of both,” the reigning don of Canadian hip hop says. The Toronto-born MC and producer balances on the edge of that sword, hustling to please both the mythical streets that supported his rise, and the middle-of-the-road radio and video programmers who now control his mainstream exposure.
“It’s a situation that some [MCs] use as a crutch to say, ‘I’m talking about what’s already in the streets, I’m talking about what’s real.’ But at the same time, by doing that, they’re creating new situations.” Offishall was an opening act for 50 Cent’s Canadian Massacre concerts, and says he got on well with the American star.
(In private, Curtis Jackson is often described as laidback and kind.) He saw violence only in Saint John, where “some of the fishermen got into a fistfight.” After Boxing Day, though, Kardi worries that a pendulum has now swung too far.
He argues that hip hop and the media machine that hypes its negative elements must accept their influence on street culture, and then work to improve it. “It’s not fair to blame hip hop as the sole reason for [gun violence], but at the same time, we have to take some responsibility,” he says. “I don’t need to hear about the stories that are going on in the street, because I have to live it.
Smelling gunpowder, having shots ring out in your neighbourhood and hearing police sirens — all that s--- is not cool. These kids who hear this are living wherever they’re living [i.e.
, in their parents’ houses], and they’re like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
’ Eff that. I’m trying to get out.” Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.
ca. “Hang the MC,” a four-part series about blaming hip hop for violence, continues this week. 6: A view to a kill: Toronto's 50 Cent show.
All over the world, hip-hop music is being blamed for a litany of violence. The chorus of outrage is loudest in Toronto, where gangsta rap has been accused of inspiring a rash of shootings, and Paris, where scores of politicians have pointed to rap as the reason for suburban race rioting. A four-part series on when, where, how and why hip hop became a sonic supervillain.
7 : Gangsta rap, from past to present. In the late 1980s, hip hop’s hardest strain, gangsta rap, was born on the battlegrounds of America’s crack cocaine war. A study of the ultraviolent rhymes of founding fathers NWA and Ice-T, the rise and fall of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.
I.G. — and gangsta’s 21st-century comeback.
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