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generation, so it’s funny to see them now become what my dad was. My dad hated hip hop. But now it’s old-style hip hop versus new-style hip hop. They don’t want to listen to it. I understand too, because a lot of it you’re kind of like “ugh.” But if it’s good music, it’s good music. I think there’s also an interesting way that commercialization plays a role, too. A lot of that old school hip hop was so much more underground. It started off as grass roots that slowly got bigger, whereas now there’s a totally different attitude and drive for fame. It’s hip hop as pop music. It’s true and that’s the thing. I remember back when I was in grade nine and ten and really into hip hop, the only place you could hear hip hop was on this show the Krispy Biscuit. [Laughs] Great name! Yeah, and it was the greatest show. It was on at midnight on Tuesdays I think. I would have to stay up late, and I could barely stay up because would play basketball in the mornings and had to be there at like seven in the morning. So I could stay up until midnight in order to put my tape on record and then I could fall asleep and listen to the tape the next day on my walkman. But that was the only place I remember hearing it. You would see Rap City on Much Music back in the day. So that was basically it. Now it’s [so different]. The Internet [has contributed] to the commercialization of it.
The anyone-can-get-famous kind of mentality? Yeah. I think the whole thing with Miley Cyrus right now, you know she’s taken a form of hip hop music and kind of made it her thing right? But whatever, it is what it is and just as much as there is that commercialization, there’s still tons of underground stuff happening, which is really good. Totally. That’s kind of like what we were saying before. How there’s so many people out there. Even though there are the ones that everyone hears about who are on the radio, there are definitely the ones that aren’t so well known that are still really rad. Back to one of your earlier questions, Vancouver I think has a very vibrant underground, independent, grassroots hip hop scene, which is very much in the spirit of what was going on before. Do you think that’s something that deserves more recognition, or do you like it to stay at that grassroots level? I think it definitely deserves more recognition. I would love for it to get more recognition. The problem is though, the reason it doesn’t get more recognition is because it’s not particularly sellable. It’s good as a grassroots, it would be great to have more recognition and money behind it to push it, but [that] also keeps it what it is. And I know there’s also a lot of people in the scene who are there because they’re rejecting the commercial side. There’s a lot of Vancouver
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acts who are pushing to be the famous rapper doing the harder pop-rap, and there’s a lot of guys who are doing it really well. So, there’s that whole scene too. You’re not just a DJ, you’ve also got your hand in audio engineering and producing, so can you tell me a bit about that? I went to school, it’s AI [Art Institute of Vancouver] now, but was CDIS [Centre for Digital Imaging and Sound] when I went and took audio engineering. Actually, my full-time day job is doing audio engineering. I do basically editing TV shows, and I also do descriptive video, which is describing video for the blind. I record and work with that, so if you’re visually impaired or blind you can listen to what’s happening and you would understand what’s happening even if you couldn’t see exactly what’s going on. It would fill in the blanks. Because you are a jack-of-alltrades, is there something you consider yourself to be first and foremost? It’s funny that you ask, because I was struggling with this. Having a bit of an identity crisis for a bit because, being a jack-of-alltrades, I feel like I neglect certain things and am maybe not the best at everything. I would say I’m a producer, beat-maker, artist first and foremost, and then DJ second. I was asking myself the question, “well, what do I consider myself more?” Everyone can be a DJ these days, right? It’s easy to be a DJ and there’s a lot of competition, but you have to put in tons of time, and I used to put in tons of
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