Hang the MC

Illustration by Sam Weber.

IV. When keeping it real goes wrong: rap’s influence on the mean streets of Toronto the Good

During this series, we’ve looked at Los Angeles, where gang wars crippled a generation of hearts and minds. We’ve checked out Paris, where racial and social alienation are breeding discontent in that city’s impoverished suburbs. And now we return to Toronto, where all of the above are in full, sad swing. T.O.'s recent surge in gun violence represents a 100 per cent increase over shooting deaths just five years ago: 52 in 2005, versus 26 in 2000.

Last spring, Madd Russian, a 22-year-old amateur filmmaker and hip-hop fan, shot and released The Real Toronto, a 65-minute DVD that tours nine of the city’s most notorious gang neighbourhoods (including mine, Parkdale, which came as a minor surprise). In the opening frames, a hooded male swings an assault rifle towards the evening sky. A cut comes quickly; the gun is there and gone in a blink. Next, a man named King Friday narrates as he walks — no kidding — past the end of my street. “Cats get into a lot of drama out here, you know what I mean? They be doing a lot of f---ing home invasions, and all types of bulls--- like that,” he says a couple blocks over. Actually, I didn’t know. And preferred it that way.

Throughout the low-tech documentary (the camera is hand-held, the audio sounds muddy), groups of young men smoke marijuana, flash gang signs and perform freestyle raps of varying quality. Many shade their faces behind ball caps and bandanas. Guns return 20 minutes into the action, and are shown from that point forward with increasing frequency. Towards the end, about a dozen males gather in a highrise hallway. Several wave handguns; one brandishes what looks like a miniature Uzi.

“At the end of the day, [this behaviour] is happening everywhere across the world,” says Nem-S-Iss, the 21-year-old MC and part-time producer who anchors The Real Toronto’s closing chapter. Born Kevin Smith, he’s from Black Creek, a hard-luck area on Toronto’s northern edge — and, unlike the majority of his castmates, is actually proficient at making music. He taught himself how to rap at age 12, and released his first album, My Word, at age 17. It sold 5,000 copies, an impressive achievement for underground music in any city. Nem-S-Iss says he now has more than 200 songs under his belt, with titles including Before tha Fame, Stick ’Em Up and Rated R Dubplate. He counts former gangsta stars Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur and the Lox among his inspirations.

Nem-S-Iss, from Toronto's Black Creek neighbourhood, throws up hand signs for his label, Made Men Music. Photo Sean Getti.

“When they were rapping about roaches in the kitchen and all that stuff, I could relate to it. When I’d wake up and I turn my lights on, I could see the roaches, you know what I’m sayin’? [Rapping about gun violence] is also something that I can relate to because if it’s not me directly, I know friends, or friends of friends, who are doing exactly what [gangsta MCs] are rapping about,” he says, seated in a basement studio where he’s recording new songs for local label Made Men Music. “Everybody is going to jail, everybody is getting shot. You can’t hide from the facts.”

The Real Toronto was followed by the debut of Rapsheet DVD, a video magazine that depicts similar material: aspiring MCs flash guns and gang signs, and boast their supremacy on the streets of Toronto. (Other cities have lookalike DVDs — most notably Baltimore’s Stop Snitching, which includes a controversial appearance by NBA star Carmelo Anthony.) Last October, a Rapsheet production titled Premier Edition Pt. 2 was entered as evidence at a sentencing hearing for one of its subjects, a young man who’d been convicted of weapon charges, breach of recognizance and cocaine possession. His cameo was submitted as proof of his gang affiliations. (This manoeuver sent other Rapsheet stars ducking for cover, fearing that their appearances could be used against them in future criminal cases.) Also, police have speculated that two Rapsheet chapters, showing members of rival gangs making threats against each other, provoked a series of shootings last summer.

These are the foot soldiers of gangsta rap’s growing army. When I watch titles like The Real Toronto, I can’t get past thinking that their subjects are living a fantasy, convinced of their ability to ride a hip-hop career to fame and fortune in the same way that they might have dreamed about professional sports a generation ago. Or that no matter how tough they seem on the exterior, these are still just teenagers and early adults, young enough to be swayed by the sights and sounds of mass media.

I sympathize. As a teenager in semi-rural Ontario, I blasted albums by Houston’s Geto Boys — less famous than established gangsta gods like NWA, but at least as enraged. And now as an adult, I like some of 50 Cent’s songs, and will cop to a begrudging affinity for the cocaine boasts of Young Jeezy’s music. If I had children, though, I wouldn’t like them listening to any of those acts. (I might, however, drop a needle on Suprême NTM’s Pose Ton Gun — i.e., Put Down Your Gun — then answer the questions that I hope it would provoke.)

“The problem with this whole street-life thing is that you end up in jail, you get shot or you have a hundred enemies looking to kill you. Either you’re on the run or they already got you,” Nem-S-Iss says. “When I write my music, I try to stick as close to reality as possible. I’ve never once said that I’ve killed somebody in my songs. I’ve never once said that I sold a crack stone, because I haven’t. I haven’t seen a day in a jail cell yet, and hopefully I won’t. Really and truly, who wants to be in jail?”

In 1993, NBA all-star Charles Barkley ignited an op-ed controversy by denying that he should be considered a role model. His critics were correct: fans emulate their heroes, whether those heroes like it or not. When 50 Cent wears a bulletproof vest and brandishes a gun for his movie posters, he has to know the power that he wields. He has to understand that the so-called streets will see his example, and that some of its borderline personalities might try living it out. The risk is that his violent fictions could become their reality.

Does that mean that rappers like 50 have blood on their hands for the sins of their fans? I’m not ready to make that leap, but will admit to leaning towards it. For weeks, I’ve been mulling our chicken-or-egg dilemma: does hip hop cause harm by promoting violence in its lyrics, or do MCs describe situations that would exist with or without their words? In Pt. II of this series, we met Rodrigo Bascuñan, who is co-authoring Enter the Babylon System, a book about the intermingling of hip-hop and gun culture. During his research, Bascuñan has asked something similar in disadvantaged neighbourhoods across the United States.

“When we started working on the book, that was one of the questions I wanted to answer for myself: how much is the music informing, how much is the music affecting people’s behaviour?” he says. “As I travelled throughout the United States, the more f---ed up the neighbourhood was, the more ridiculous that question seemed to be to the residents. You start to realize, even before you ask the question, that there are so many problems [in those neighbourhoods]. Those places are so run down. There’s so much violence, so much neglect. Music is so far from anything that could be causing them suffering that the question seemed ridiculous. But I would still ask it.

“People would be like, ‘What are you talking about? Look at this place, how could music have caused this, how could music be at the root of this problem? If anything, music is one of the few salvations we have in all of this mess.’”

I want to believe that. Really I do. As someone who loves hip hop like a sibling, I feel compelled to defend its honour. Every behemoth has good and bad sides. A focus on murder-minded MCs like 50 Cent ignores the positive social contributions that people are making in the name of rap music and culture every day.

MC Collizhun helps Toronto schoolchildren write songs about diversity and anti-violence. Courtesy the 411 Initiative for Change.

Here in Toronto, in many of the same neighbourhoods that are seen in The Real Toronto and Rapsheet, an MC named Collizhun is using hip hop to teach elementary school students valuable lessons about diversity and anti-violence. Collizhun, who lives downtown, began the project while working at a day care in the Jane and Finch area. “It started with me being at work, chillin’, giving the kids something to do. They knew that I rapped and stuff,” he says. “First they made me make up rhymes for them, here and there. Then they started coming up with their own verses. Next thing you know, they asked if I could record them.”

Collizhun, whose real name is Tristan Graham, used his own money and equipment to record and press a CD for that first group of interested children. He later arranged funding for them to visit the Toronto offices of Universal Music and Flow 93.5 FM, the city’s only urban radio station. Now he is partnered with the 411 Initiative for Change, a non-profit, Canada Council for the Arts-supported program that promotes public education through partnerships with musicians and schools. He runs workshops in classrooms across the city, helping groups of Grade 4-6 students write and record their own rap songs during a single day. (Fifty schools applied for inclusion, 10 were accepted.) Three weeks later, he returns to give them a finished CD, complete with a photo of their class on its front cover. Collizhun works with as many as 125 students a week, and limits their lyrical content to focus on positive messages about multiculturalism and stopping violence.

“Starting this project, I really underestimated the kids,” he tells me. “But a lot of them had important things to say, and it wasn’t anything corny. They write some stuff that’s really amazing. They know what’s going on in their environments; I hear it in their songs. They’re like, ‘Sometimes I hear people arguing / I don’t want to hear any arguing.’”

“We’ve found that using hip hop in the classroom was a way of getting kids who couldn’t spell to actually write, to get kids who wouldn’t speak up to say, ‘This is how I feel,’” says Anita Wong, the 411 Initiative’s director of programming and development. “When we started [working with Collizhun], we used 50 Cent beats and Eminem beats to inspire the students to rhyme. [The children] would often say, ‘He talks about X, Y and Z over this beat, but I’m going to talk about diversity and helping my community and respecting my peers.’ They said they would prefer to hear themselves over the beat to someone else who is telling them what to think.”

Hip-hop culture reaches no higher level than that, but still our original question lingers. Should rap music be considered a positive or negative force in our society? The final answer, for better and worse, is both. The real work to be done is not to point a finger of accusation — but rather to offer an open hand of assistance for the root problems of Paris’s suburbs, the slums of Toronto, Los Angeles or any other place in need of social support. Blaming rap is no different from shooting a messenger.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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Letters:

There has been so much talk in the media about Hip Hop and violence, and no one is looking at the actual problem. You cannot blame violence on Hip Hop plain and simple. You cannot blame people like Biggie, 2Pac and 50 Cent, they may give you an idea, but they are not the ones who are making the choice for you. Music is an expression of emotion, and if these people are rapping about the projects, guns and drugs they've actually experienced these things, and want people to know what it was/is like. Think about Biggie's "Juicy", he's telling his story. I think Matthew has done a great job of bringing the issue to everyone's attention and hopefully people will stop trying to use Hip Hop as a scapegoat and address the actual issue.



Jen Balfour
Toronto, Ontario

Congratulations Matthew McKinnon for an insightful series of articles addressing difficult but very important issues. Nice work. And good for cbc.ca for publishing it. Congrats all around.

A few afterthoughts...

In my opinion your article leaves out an extremely important context that woud help answer the question you are asking about the social impact of hiphop. Specifically I'm talking about the impact of the recording industry on the evolution of hiphop. The whole gangsta thing, the whole blingbling thing didn't happen in a commercial vacuum but as an explicit marketing strategy by billion dollar corporations who were smart enough to realize that fear sells, that dreams of wealth sell, even if these same corporations have ensured that very little of the wealth that is actually generated makes its way back to the artists or their communities. Gangsta rap has been peddled by middle-aged white execs whose titillated kids dance to Snoop in a socio-economic zone as distant from South Central as your rural Ontario adolescence. Hiphop's transformation from a community-oriented public idiom to an vertical privatized industry reflects a long-established pattern of commercial exploitation of black music by corporate interests. That starry-eyed kids from the hood were easily seduced into repudiating their social roles and instead embracing a delusional American Dream isn't surprising. I mean why wouldn't they get rich or die trying? But why don't we hold the labels responsible for the violence that they promote for profit? At least the artists are trying to be artists and articulate some kind of version of themselves whereas the labels are 100% mercenary. And the radio stations and MTV? Let's hold them accountable -- the adults in suits with the big bank accounts who should and do know better -- at least as much as we do the popular artists, who are mostly just kids following the money and being spun by corporate brand managers.


John Sobol
Quebec

I would like to commend Mr. McKinnon for his wonderfully insightful column "Hang the MC". As an avid fan of hip hop who has lived in fairly overprivileged neighborhoods all of my life, I have often been surrounded by people who held negative, and ultimately ignorant, views on the nature of the relation between hip hop and gun violence. This series of articles serves as a wonderful tool to educate everyone on not only the history of hip hop, but also on the evolution of the "gangsta" culture which is unequivocally associated with hip hop every day. We quickly come to understand through the articles that gangsta-rap, though not entirely devoid of irresponsibility in the apparent celebration of a violently material lifestyle, certainly is not the source of western society's problems with urban violence, and that to blame hip hop is to avoid the real social and economic issues that lie at the heart of the problem.

Philippe Rostaing
Ottawa, Ontario