Hang the MC

Illustration by Sam Weber.

I. A view to a kill: Toronto’s 50 Cent show

Welcome to the Massacre. It’s December in Toronto, five nights before Christmas, six days before a downtown shootout that will end the life of Jane Creba, a 15-year-old innocent fated to become the last of the city’s record 52 victims of gun murder in 2005. Police have linked dozens of the shootings to gang violence, a creeping danger in high-density, low-income neighbourhoods across Toronto. But that’s outside in the real world, where bullets have consequences, and crime is punishing. Here in the Ricoh Coliseum — a soulless, converted hockey rink near Lake Ontario — for tonight only, violence is fantasy, belligerence a business plan. Hip-hop superstar 50 Cent patrols a mega concert stage, blasting rhymes into his microphone.

The semi-auto spray, run, if you get away
We’ll find your whereabouts and clap at you another day
N---- play with the bread, get a hole in your head
You touch a dime of mine, thug, and your ass is dead

Midway through his performance, 50, famed survivor of nine bullet wounds from a single attack, has stripped to an oversized white T-shirt, the standard uniform of the modern gangsta. A bra, thong panties and some poor woman’s wig, all thrown onstage, hang from a pocket of his jeans. (“Which one of you bitches lost your hair?... I’m gonna keep this s---, so now I got a ponytail to remember tonight.”) Lloyd Banks, loyal soldier of 50’s G-Unit posse, booms at his boss’s shoulder, firing machine-gun raps of his own. Both MCs wear enough gold and gemstones to give Mr. T chain envy. A DJ pumps simulated gunshots between their raps. Five thousand fists churn the air in response.

This was supposed to be a controversial concert. On Canada Day in 2003, a Hamilton man was gunned down while leaving a 50 Cent show at Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre. Fireworks cloaked the shots, his killers vanished in the crowd. They’ve yet to be found. In 2004, another shooting followed a 50 Cent concert at Montreal’s Bell Centre. That victim’s life was saved by the rarest of accessories among Canadian concertgoers: a bulletproof vest.

50 Cent at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards in Miami, Florida. (Photo Getty Images/Kevin Winter)

By the summer of 2005, when Fiddy came to Toronto to shoot scenes for his semi-autobiopic, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, music like his had become an assumed, pervasive backbeat to the city’s cult of the trigger. “You see these guys watching rap movies and videos, and look at what these guys are carrying — the money, the flashy cars,” a detective from the police department’s guns and gangs task force told the Globe and Mail in August. “If you’re driving a flashy car, it’s not enough to have a cheap gun. You have got to have a Smith & Wesson.” (The Toronto Police Service declined comment for this story.) That same month, the Phoenix Concert Theatre, a downtown nightclub, cancelled its Sunday hip-hop and reggae night — a 14-year tradition — after consecutive weekends of fatal shootings on its surrounding streets. Gun violence claimed 22 more Torontonians from then through the end of the year. The final tally: 47 males, five females, average age 26.

Come November, Liberal MP Dan McTeague (Pickering-Scarborough East) penned a letter to Joe Volpe, then federal minister of Citizenship and Immigration, asking him to prevent 50 Cent from entering Canada for seven stops on his worldwide Massacre Tour. The 29-year-old rapper, born Curtis Jackson III in Queens, N. Y., has a criminal record linked to his past life as a crack dealer, and thus requires a temporary resident permit to visit our country.

“This is not a question of censorship. This is a question of trying to protect impressionable young men,” McTeague wrote. “I don’t think people in Toronto or any urban centre need or want to hear Mr. Jackson’s message right now. We need to do a better job at protecting Canadians from people whose message runs counter to all of our efforts of trying to curb gun violence.” Volpe’s ministry was unmoved. Fiddy got his permit.

Here at the Ricoh, though, 50 and Banks represent a depleted G-Unit. Fellow members MOP, Mobb Deep, Tony Yayo and Olivia were all denied at the border. Security is tight, beginning with a metal-detectored frisk at the coliseum doors. Camcorders on tripods film everyone who enters. Inside the rink-cum-concert hall, several mountains in sweatshirts pace the stage — G-Unit’s Republican Guard. There are at least two dozen uniformed cops in sight, plus an unknown number of plainclothes officers mingled in with the masses. A pair of constables stand near my seat at stage right. One scans the mosh pit for misbehaviour. The other stares into the darkness behind me, eyes flitting across the stands like she’s watching tennis. Venue security outnumber police. Fort Knox is protected with less rigour.

I’m sitting amongst a small group of black adults, the men in baggy jeans and jackets, the women in short skirts and full effect. Down the row, there’s a preteen girl who’s a dead ringer for Jonathan Lipnicki, the child actor who played Renée Zellweger’s son in Jerry Maguire. Looking past her (and, I guess, her family), the coliseum is two-thirds full, with much more of the same. This is the youngest, whitest crowd I’ve seen at a rap concert. Toronto’s impressionable thugs — white, black or otherwise — are at home or elsewhere, not willing or able to pay the $59.50-69.50 it cost to be here. Instead, 50 Cent, the baddest boogeyman in contemporary pop culture, is wilding out for a crowd of pubescent kids and their parents. The experience feels no scarier than seeing PG-13 at a multiplex. When it’s over, I walk home through the snow, passing a GO Transit station where a knot of concertgoers waits for trains to carry them to the suburbs and beyond.

Less than one week later, as dusk falls on Boxing Day, alleged members of rival gangs open fire on downtown Yonge Street. As many as 15 teens and young men sling bullets through a crowd of bargain shoppers. Six people are wounded, Jane Creba is killed. The city is stunned, appalled. Hip hop tastes the blame. “Is it merely a coincidence that Toronto youths who engage in the same reckless, sociopathic behaviour as U.S. ghetto youths also listen to the same music, watch the same videos and dress and talk the same way?” the Globe and Mail asks in a Dec. 29 editorial. “Or do these influences help legitimize the resort to violence?”

Good questions. From Toronto to Boston to Paris — where scores of politicians blamed rap music as the fuel that fired last fall’s suburban riots — hardcore hip hop has reclaimed its role, first played in the late ’80s, as sonic supervillain. Pastors, police officers, youth workers and community leaders have joined the chorus of outrage, condemning 50 Cent and his soundalikes for promoting murder and mayhem. This, though, is a chicken-or-egg conundrum: Do gangsta MCs incite violence by glorifying its gains? Or are crime, poverty and the accompanying despair so entrenched in ghetto reality that their music is actually a reactive art, the brutal telling of hard choices made in everyday struggle?

Toronto MC and producer Kardinal Offishal. Photo Anna Keenan. Courtesy EMI Music Canada.

One afternoon in January, parked in a van outside the Toronto offices of Jay-Z’s clothing label, Rocawear, I ask Kardinal Offishall 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.

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