Border Block

Canadian rapper Saukrates. Photo by Steve Carty.

The story of Canadian rap music’s difficult relationship with mainstream America starts with Michie Mee. In 1987, Toronto’s first lady of hip hop bounced between high school and a recording studio to cut a single with KRS-One and Scott La Rock of New York’s legendary Boogie Down Productions. (To recast that in rock terms, imagine skipping Grade 12 algebra to make music with Bono and the Edge.) Michie’s Elements of Style made a splash stateside, landing her an international recording contract with Atlantic Records – the first-ever deal between a Canadian MC and a major American label. She began gigging internationally, opening concerts for megastars like Sinead O’Connor. Her Juno-nominated debut album with DJ L.A. Luv, the reggae-inflected Jamaican Funk: Canadian Style (1991), moved 60,000 copies south of the border, mostly in Buffalo and Detroit.

These were the early days of hip hop as empire: rap, once discounted as an inner-city fad that would flame out as disco and funk did before it, spent the turn of the ’90s tightening its persistent, platinum-fingered grip on American music. From the jazz riffs of Gang Starr through the gangsta swagger of N.W.A., rap blew out radio dials from New York to Los Angeles.

Michie, however, got left at the border. “With me doing the reggae stuff, some of it was like another language," she says now. "I didn’t go in with a Canadian accent - I went there to make American hip-hop. Nobody understood what I was doing except for the hardcore street DJs.” Atlantic dropped her contract. A comeback album, The First Cut is the Deepest (2000), found more fans among critics than consumers. Today Michie, better known in recent years for acting (as a rapper) on the defunct CBC series Drop the Beat, is recording new music - in American studios - for a group project called Crew Grrl Order.

Canada, it needs to be said, has limited love for hip hop. The music has rabid fan bases in city centres like the T-Dot (Toronto) and Van City (Vancouver), but the plain truth is this country lacks the young, urban (or urban-minded) population needed to consistently support high-volume sales for its homegrown rhymers. While mainstream pop and guitar stars like Avril Lavigne and Nickelback measure success in millions of copies sold, Canada’s microphone controllers can spend years hustling to reach modest targets like 50,000 or 100,000. Sales outside the country are a rare phenomenon.

The situation is reversed in America, where hip hop has become the musical drug of a nation: in 2000, hip hop and rap combined to supplant country as the second-most-purchased genre of music in the U.S. (Hip hop is a culture that includes rap music; the terms are sometimes used to indicate slightly different sound styles, where hip hop (Outkast, the Roots) is taken to mean a more sophisticated version of rough-and-tumble rap (the Notorious B.I.G., G-Unit).) Only rock sells more. American movies, television shows and commercials are saturated with hip-hop references; there, MCs are actors, pitchmen and red-carpet celebrities.

Michie Mee. Photo by Steve Carty.

The major labels in the U.S. like to swing for the fences, spending heaps to promote champion unit-shifters like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Ludacris and a select few others. American superstar producers are trusted to break new names – Dr. Dre is the puppet master who breathed life into 50 Cent and Eminem. For high-profile acts like these, anything less than a blockbuster is considered a misstep. (Canada’s urban labels – including our majors – tend to take a longer view of their artists’ careers, accepting that debut sales of, say, 8,000 units is a signal of promise, not disaster.)

Finding a way inside America’s multibillion-dollar rap machine is the main source of Canadian frustrations south of the border, as lived by Michie and the rhyme animals that have followed her (such as the Rascalz and Choclair, to name only two). Canadian rappers have learned that the last hurdle to breaking into hip hop’s major leagues, landing an American deal, is just one step: and a long leap shy of becoming a foreign priority. When it comes to the question of which artist to push next, America always finds a reason to back one of its own.

“You know what my boys in Brooklyn tell me? ‘Americans don’t want you to win,’” says Saukrates, the Toronto MC and producer who, along with long-time friend Kardinal Offishall, leads Can-hop’s latest crop of ace MCs. “And they don’t. A lot of the artists will suck up all the energy at their labels because they don’t want nobody to come and take their position, especially not a Canadian who can do it better than them. You gotta fight for your shine.”

And then there’s the other problem facing our homegrown rap heroes: Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans is true. Too many U.S. labels assume this country is carpeted with ice rinks and igloos. Their urban artist-and-repertoire execs are known for signing hard-luck ghetto stories hand over fist – provided that the ghettos in question are located somewhere inside the United States.

Authenticity is the beating heart of hip-hop culture (even though most fans know that most MCs are fibbing), and Canadian artists typically find it close to impossible to export theirs to America. While the U.S. rap machine allows a middling rapper like the Game (Dre’s latest protégé, whose major-label debut just moved 587,000 U.S. copies in its first week of release) to tell and sell tall tales about thug life, it assumes that any Canuck talking tough must be lying – and is therefore useless.

Recall the career of Maestro Fresh-Wes, to date Canada’s top-selling hip-hop artist. In the late ’80s, his Let Your Backbone Slide became this country’s first full-on rap anthem. The Maestro was already a pro when the song hit, having made his radio debut at age 15, all the way back in 1983; later, he opened local concerts for American giants Public Enemy, Ice-T and the Beastie Boys as half of Toronto’s Vision Crew. Wes wowed as a soloist at the 1989 edition of New York’s annual New Music Seminar, coming away with a contract from American independent Lefrak-Moelis Records.

Backbone, released as a single, became the first Canadian song to land on Billboard’s rap charts, moving 25,000 U.S. copies its first few weeks of release; MTV added the Maestro’s video to its rotation. The song re-appeared on his 1989 debut album, Symphony in Effect, which was originally available in Canada only as an American import. After Wes signed a domestic distribution deal with Attic Records, Symphony went on to sell 190,000 copies in Canada, approaching double-platinum status. His follow-up, The Black Tie Affair, came out in 1991. As with Michie’s second effort, Affair performed better in magazine columns than checkout lines. The Maestro, peeved by a perceived lack of support from Canadian radio programmers, decamped to New York in 1992.

The Maestro moved, but so did the music: ’92 was the year Dr. Dre released The Chronic, establishing the G-funk sound (at root, a combination of George Clinton’s funk with Snoop Dogg’s swagger) that defined America’s West Coast through the turn of the century. One year later, Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan delivered Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a dark, violent album (“I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward / I’m on the trigger, plus I got that Wu-Tang sword”) that sent most of New York rushing to mimic its grit.

Hip hop turned hard and dirty; the Maestro, who made his name wearing and rhyming about “a black tuxedo with a cummerbund,” stood still and became an anachronism. America’s mythical street, the ultimate arbiter of hip-hop taste, turned its back to him.

Wes’s third album, 1994’s tragically titled Naah, Dis Kid Can’t Be From Canada?!!, fell flat on both sides of the border. (Perhaps deservedly so. The album’s first chorus: “It’s Fresh Wes y’all / I’m drinkin’ milk now / I’m drinkin’ milk y’all / I’m drinkin’ milk now.”) The Maestro moved home to Toronto in 1997; he had a minor comeback in 1998, rhyming over a Guess Who sample on the summer hit Stick to Your Vision. Today he is still touring, but also acting, on Omni Television’s Metropia, using his birth name, Wes Williams.

Michie, the Maestro and the Dream Warriors, who found a huge following in Europe, formed the vanguard of Can-hop’s first generation. Jump to now, and the potential for an American breakthrough feels closer than it did then. Toronto rhymer K-Os is an MTV mainstay. Vancouver’s Swollen Members are equally popular on iPods in Aspen as they are in Whistler. But according to the American street, two names rise above those and all other Canadian rhymers: Kardinal Offishall and Saukrates.

To foreign ears, Offishall is the closest thing Canada has to rap royalty. He is the unofficial lord and master of Toronto’s hip-hop scene, and a legitimate underground sensation from Atlanta to Zurich. Kardinal is a frequent collaborator on U.S. stars’ albums; last year’s work included scorchers with Method Man and Pete Rock. He routinely equals, and sometimes outshines, his foreign partners.

The Toronto-born MC and production wizard – Kardinal is also a beat factory, always hustling to make music for himself and other artists – was raised in the embrace of Scarborough’s West Indian community. He has often said that he feels more comfortable identifying with his Jamaican roots than his Canadian identity. His combination of influences is dizzying, blending rap, reggae and soul – Bakardi Slang, Money Jane and Gotta Get It rank among the peak songs in Canada’s hip-hop canon.

American titan MCA Records released Kardinal’s international debut, Quest for Fire: Firestarter, Vol. 1, in May 2001. The album set heads nodding on both sides of the border. Kardi started getting recognized on the streets of New York, and stopped waiting in line at its clubs. “I’d be in L.A. or some place and I’d see myself getting played on MTV and BET [Black Entertainment Television] and all the rest of it,” he says, taking a break from making music in his Toronto studio.

In 2002, Offishall began work on a follow-up, The F-Word Theory. MCA, the illustrious home of the Roots, Common and other U.S. gold stars, put him in a sound booth with super-producers Timbaland and the Neptunes. (Only Dre rivals their sales power.) He seemed poised to become Canada’s first real-deal, cross-border rap superstar.

But The F-Word suffered a raft of delays. Kardi, lacking the proven fan bases of his label mates, got bumped and lost in MCA’s release queue. When Geffen Records swallowed the label in May 2003, forcing layoffs and restructuring, he lost his chance to release the record. Kardinal spent months climbing out of the wreckage.

Kardinal Offishall. Photo by Steve Carty.

“With this label bullshit, I had to sit on my hands for a while when we went through all the red tape,” he says. “Fans don’t understand all that industry stuff.” Late last year, on an underground mix-tape called Kill Bloodclott Bill: Vol. 1., Kardinal used his microphone to gun down the major labels – i.e., Bloodclott Bill – that rule the U.S. machine: “This ain’t just some music story / It’s about how real niggas return for glory / Bill tried to leave me out in the cold to die / I told y’all before we just multiply.”

At the moment, Kardi is sitting on a war chest of 100 new songs. He is weighing release options for his next solo album with big-name labels in Canada and the U.S., with hopes for a June release date. “After all that MCA foolishness that went on, I was a bit weary about hooking up with a major again,” he says. “But the way we’re structuring my deal this time, it feels like going in there with a fresh suit of armour. No matter what goes on, we’ll be all right. We won’t have to suffer at the hands of labels being shitty.”

That’s a story Saukrates knows too well. He, like Kardinal, is a key member of the Circle (né Figurez Ov Speech), a loose collective of Toronto’s top urban artists. He, like Kardinal, has been undervalued, delayed and dismissed by the American machine: Saukrates was screwed over by Warner Brothers and Def Jam, in that order.

“American labels end up with this bottleneck effect. The [label] presidents get a little wild, they start partying a lot – and they give all their attention to the one or two most famous artists at the top of the bottle. The other artists inside the bottle can’t get out because there isn’t any space to fit through,” he says, shaking three sugars into a mug of coffee at a downtown Toronto café. It is mid-afternoon on the day after he opened a sold-out show for New York hip-hop hall of famers De La Soul.

“With U.S. labels and the way that they work, I always had to have nine people sign on one piece of paper for me to burn a CD in the studio. Before anything happens, nine planets gotta align,” he says.

Saukrates has already given 10 years to the rap game; his latest single, Saukrates Season, is currently climbing U.S. hip-hop charts. Like Kardinal, he is busy shopping for a home for his new solo album, Bad Addiction. In the meantime, he is producing records for upstarts Big Black Lincoln and Andreena Mill (“she’s a young black Cyndi Lauper”) for his boutique label, Toronto’s Capitol Hill Music. Saukrates intends to see Bad Addiction on store shelves this summer, with the others to follow this fall or early next year.

“I won’t be satisfied until the world accepts us. I don’t want to be pigeonholed just in Canada – only touring in Canada, only viable in Canada. No, no, no. Hell no. We’re going to do more than compete. We’re gonna get in there,” he says. “America has heard the east, they’ve heard the west, they’ve heard the south – now here comes the motherf---in’ north.”

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.