‘El hijo del TEO’ takes the rap in Toronto
Taking the Rap in Toronto
Ay yo! Gibraltar has extended its long arm of the music across the Atlantic to Toronto, where producer, graphic designer and rapper SpitShine released his debut album Let There Be Light, whose cover art seems borrowed from an alien invasion movie poster.
by Elena Scialtiel
Don’t judge SpitShine’s musical collection, featuring Canadian rapper theMedicis and UK R’n’B singer Laurence 0802, on its cover picture, and instead indulge in 17 tracks, promoted as ‘hard hitting yet mellow and melodic hip hop beats’, inspired by Genesis. Not the UK band, Genesis, but the Bible book, Genesis, which is for SpitShine, a.k.a. Gideon Bentata, engraved in the stone of his Jewish upbringing! Gideon enjoys serving us food for thought with his original rhymes and angry, but not too angry, tirades about life’s injustices, as much as ‘spirituality and conspiracy theories’, seasoned with some references to jazz, progressive rock music and even ’60s and ’70s’ sound. His nonconformist attitude emerged at an early age, when hip hop and rap were newborn genres blasting from the speakers of newborn MTV, while almost everyone else was taken with the ‘jeans-clad long-haired rock bands that saturated popular music at the time’. Instead, the ‘unfiltered for the masses’ rhythmic speech hit his
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soft spot for poignant poetry and booming drums, and he immediately connected with these “regular young guys having fun with their music.” He was fascinated by breakdancers spinning on their heads at the rhythm of Run DMC or Herbie Hancock, and saw in ghetto beats a pioneer movement not only in music, but “in everything”, which brought significant change to many art forms, introducing concepts like graffiti, scratching, and emceeing to mainstream.
Nicknamed El Hijo del TEO, Gideon was ‘hypnotised’ by the TV facing the entrance of his father David’s Gibraltar clothes store, where MTV videos were always on. MTV was a new phenomenon in his formative years and influenced him as much as many other teenagers, who got acquainted with the visual side of pop music, its costumes and cool dance moves highlighting and complementing lyrics and melody. It was his window on the music business and taught him about artists of the
With “no schooling, no job and no real direction in life” he was mugged and gang beaten one night, so he moved to Toronto
calibre of Kriss Kross, Beastie Boys, Naughty By Nature and especially Michael Jackson. Writing poetry became the therapeutic outlet of his adolescent unease when he was boarding in Manchester, a city which had “little novelty” for him. With “no schooling, no job and no real direction in life” he was mugged and gang beaten one night, so he moved to Toronto to pursue qualifications in graphic design and audio production. Later he worked for The Naked News, designing their website and editing their photo shoots: “It was definitely an original and fun place to work, but after a couple of years I needed a change and wanted to do something more related to my music passion,” Gideon says. So he moved on to freelancing in the music industry, designing cover art, logos, posters, flyers, and pro-
GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2011