Canadian hip-hop

The Canadian hip-hop scene was established in the 1980s. Through a variety of factors, it developed much slower than Canada's popular rock music scene, and apart from a short-lived burst of mainstream popularity from 1989 to 1991, it remained largely an underground phenomenon until the early 2000s. Canada's multicultural and multilingual fabric has given rise to various subgenres, including Indigenous, French, and Punjabi Canadian hip hop. Also notable is the influence of Caribbean rhythms in creating a sound unique to Toronto. In the early 1990s, Canadian hip hop artists like Maestro Fresh-Wes, Main Source, and Dream Warriors were popular in the underground hip hop scene. In 1998, the collaborative single "Northern Touch" brought hip hop back into the Canadian mainstream. Since the 2000s, Canadian hip hop saw a rise to mainstream success led by Drake, and to a lesser extent Kardinal Offishall, Tory Lanez, and Nav. Backxwash a Zambian-Canadian rapper and producer is known for a unique, heavy-metal-infused horrorcore sound.¶

Early 1980s

Canada had hip-hop artists right from the early days of the scene—the first known Canadian rap single, Mr. Q's "Ladies' Delight", was released in 1979 just a few weeks after The Sugarhill Gang's historic "Rapper's Delight", and the first French rap single, Lucien Francœur's "Le Rap-à-Billy", was released in 1983. For the most part, however, the infrastructure was not there to get most artists' music to the record-buying public; even "Ladies' Delight" was overlooked by Canadian music historians for many years, instead media and reference works erroneously credited Singing Fools' "The Bum Rap", which was released three years later in 1982, as the first Canadian rap single. In addition to "Ladies Delight", Mr. Q (Jay McGee) released a handful of other rap singles through the last several months of 1979; one, "Party Rapp", included lyrics about the 1979 Mississauga train derailment. He was also featured on Rap the Night Away, a 1981 album by Bobby Boyer and Demo Cates which has been credited as the first full-length Canadian hip hop album. Toronto's CKLN-FM was an early supporter of the genre, with Ron Nelson launching Canada's first hip hop program, The Fantastic Voyage, in 1983.¶

Late 1980s/early 1990s: The rise of Canadian hip hop

Artists such as B-Kool, Devon, Maestro Fresh-Wes and Dream Warriors did briefly manage to break into the mainstream in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, Maestro's first single, "Let Your Backbone Slide", was the first Canadian hip-hop single to break into the national Top 40, and the first to make the Billboard charts in the United States. It remained the bestselling Canadian hip hop single of all time until 2008. Other notable rap singles of this era include Maestro's "Drop the Needle", Devon's "Mr. Metro", Dream Warriors' "My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style" and "Wash Your Face in My Sink", Ground Control's "Another Dope Jam", MCJ and Cool G's "No Sex With My Sister" and "So Listen", and Kish's "I Rhyme the World in 80 Days". The group Get Loose Crew created their own independent hip-hop label, East Park Productions, in 1987 and are credited as generating visibility in and beyond Canada. Signing a distribution deal with Electric Distribution, they brought about the first Canadian rap group to record and release an authentic Hip-Hop mini-album distributed and sold internationally. In 1988, Michie Mee became the first Canadian rapper to sign a deal with a US record label. This action did not result in significant chart success for her. She has asserted in interviews that the reggae influences on her 1991 debut album Jamaican Funk—Canadian Style were met with resistance from US label executives and radio programmers. The Toronto/New York-based hip-hop group Main Source released their classic debut album Breaking Atoms in 1991, which featured the debut of a young Nas before his rise in popularity.¶

Early to mid-1990s: Fight for recognition

In 1990, Denham Jolly's company Milestone Radio applied to the CRTC for an urban music station in Toronto, which would have been the first such station in Canada, but that application was denied in favour of a country music station—which Toronto already had on its radio dial. The decision was controversial, and hurt the Canadian hip hop scene considerably. Hip-hop and R&B fans in Toronto relied on Buffalo, New York's WBLK, a US station with no Canadian content responsibilities, while other Canadian cities often had no access to any urban music radio stations at all. After 1992, Michie Mee was the only Canadian rapper to make an appearance on the national pop charts until 1998—and even she didn't accomplish the feat with a hip hop song, but by partnering with the alternative rock band Raggadeath for 1995's "One Life". Sol Guy, a hip hop promoter with Figure IV Entertainment, said in 1999 that¶

"...after "My Definition", nothing happened for two years. No labels were signing, or trying to sign, anything. Nobody was getting a shot. Radio disappeared with Wes and the Dream Warriors and it still hasn't come back." A special collaborative single, "Can't Repress the Cause", was released under the name Dance Appeal to advocate for greater inclusion of hip hop in the mainstream of Canadian music.¶

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 album Cash Crop. Because of Canadian hip hop's lack of commercial visibility, the award was presented during the non-televised portion of the ceremony, along with the technical awards, rather than at the televised main gala. The band had not yet arrived at the ceremony when the award was announced—when they did arrive, they were simply pulled aside and told that they had won the award. Alleging that racism was a factor in the award's scheduling, the band refused to accept the award. Speaking to the press afterward, the group and their co-manager said that¶

In view of the lack of real inclusion of black music in this ceremony, this feels like a token gesture towards honoring the real impact of urban music in Canada. Urban music, reggae, R&B, and rap, that's all black music, and it's not represented [at the Junos]. We decided that until it is, we were going to take a stance. For several weeks, cultural critics and hip hop musicians debated the issue in the press.¶

2000s: The breakthrough

On June 18, 1999, the CBC's Toronto station completed its move to FM.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Canadian hip-hop”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Canadian hip-hop is music genre or scene, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶