…Everything Remains Raw: Photographing Toronto’s hip hop culture from analogue to digital

Mark V. Campbell’s …Everything Remains Raw is an in-depth look at Toronto’s burgeoning hip-hop scene from the 1980s until present day. It also explores how the city helped mold hip-hop culture. The book is a collection of photos, zines, interviews, and art created during a time in Toronto when hip-hop culture was new. The book is an effort to keep the representation of hip-hop genuinely “raw,” Campbell says. Archival photographs, images of graffiti, and nostalgia about venues are all part of the conversation.

Campbell offers sharp observations about the deep influence that photojournalists and hip-hop artists have made, while also exploring the politics and changing dynamics of the hip-hop experience. The book encourages readers to contemplate the deep connection members of the hip-hop community felt to the music and one another during important moments in the Toronto hip-hop scene.

Readers will be forced to consider institutionalized Western art and the implications that come with leaving out marginalized communities. For example, artwork that is normally seen as nationalistic often deeply contrasts with the reality of what was happening in the country’s physical geography at the time. …Everything Remains Raw encourages readers to ponder and broaden our vision of what we consider to be Canadian art and culture. In the way that The Group of Seven celebrated Canada’s land, hip-hop creators used their words and art to do the same to Toronto.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I am not a seer, soothsayer, oracle, tarot card reader, nor fortune teller. I cannot read tea leaves or your palm. But I will say that these are awfully fun times for me simply because being Black is the new black. And one of my community’s greatest contributions to the 21st century, hip-hop, is currently colonizing Canada.

You don’t need to be able to wield any powers of prognostication to see that it’s a hip-hop world—and you all are just living in it. Check out how some of the leading proponents of Gen Now and Tomorrow talk, walk, dress, and subvert things. It’s pure unadulterated hip-hop. And it’s Blackish to the bone.

The Canadian pop culture output that Baby Boomers once knew and celebrated is on life support, which means that the old stock Canadian Holy Trinity of beer, hockey and rock ’n’ roll will soon be gone. Done. Kaput. Outta here.

I’m not trying to play the Prophet of Doom here, but look at the facts: The Maple Leafs haven’t won a Stanley Cup since Jesus, whilst the Toronto Raptors have become a top tier NBA franchises. Nickelback and The Tea Party might be your thing, but arguably the world’s most popular musician just happens to be a Canadian rapper named Drake. And I’m sure you like to get hammered on weekends like the next guy or gal, but Vancouver’s Prince of Pot Marc Emery’s prophesies du jour of Canada becoming the new Amsterdam have mostly come true, as marijuana is quickly on its way to becoming legalized.

Repeat after me: It’s all about bud, basketball, and hip-hop. How exactly did this cataclysmic transformation happen? You can blame it squarely on hip-hop. Black people of African descent spend much time inventing, innovating, and originating phenomena and things—that will later attract mass appropriation efforts from outside interests. And then a tanning effect occurs—and I ain’t talking about UV rays either—where Black and brown becomes what you need to get down. From Bieber to BadBadNotGood, if you eliminate the Black (music, influence, mentorship) there’s a high probability their music might sound wack.

My audiences and readership are UN all the way; they are Black, South Asian, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian and white European millennials to Gen Xers who speak a near-identical language and have shared values based on not having grown up in (not so) good old homogenous times. When most New Stock Canadians are more into graffiti than Group of Seven, it means their insides are tanning, and there’s no sunscreen that’s been invented to combat that.

And that’s a good thing: the future should be hip-hop. If what we continually project to the world as being “Canadian” continues to be devoid of colour (honestly, the token POC thing is growing really old and tired), culture, and 808 drum kicks, then consider our country “a lower case c”—as my friend Neil once opined over dinner.

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between Black and Indigenous communities when it comes to the social and political issues both face. “I don’t enter things with expectations,” says Kidd, ” but I knew that anything I would encounter would exceed what I thought just because there’s a lot of history.”

Audio engineer David Strickland was one of the Indigenous artists featured in the film. Strickland, whose clients include Drake and Jamie Foxx,  says he doesn’t like the terms “native or Indigenous hip-hop.” He’s proud of his indigenous culture, but adds that he’s not limited by it because he tries to avoid being pigeonholed. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that we have that quality of artists. We are not all a certain way—so I say, be subjective.”

The film focuses on artists such as Drezus, Winnipeg Boyz, and T-Rhyme all reflect on the issues that surround their culture and community, from missing and murdered aboriginal woman to discussing the challenges they face trying to earn respect and popularize their music outside of the indigenous community. Strickland hopes the film helps shed some light on the artists’ talent, not just the Indigenous struggle. His advice to emerging indigenous hip-hop artists in transcending stereotypes and reaching mainstream success is simply: originality.

“Don’t just talk about the girls and the bling,” says Strickland, “that’s the problem in hip-hop, everyone is trying to cover everybody else, but back in the day we had 20 different flavours.” Kidd is also reminiscent of  mainstream hip-hop—even referring to Tupac as sort of the “Che Guevara of hip-hop” of his time. “There was a point in rap where it was cool to be militant about what you believe,” Kidd adds, “and to stand up for your culture, beliefs and rights – that focus is so far off now.” Kidd believes that those that control mainstream and commercial music aren’t interested in promoting songs with strong messages, largely because they have the power to affect change.

“If we are told that this f**kery is going on day after day,” he says, “then we’re going to want to change it.” Kidd adds that the hip-hop community has the opportunity to watch these issues like “eagles” and to “intercept the path of where our generation is headed by leading them to the right direction and using our voice for positive change.”

The film was screened for the public by the Regent Park Film Festival in April and is available on YouTube through Vice’s sister channel Noisey. 

Emma Woolley at Shameless has provided a comprehensive overview of why International Women’s Day still matters. The upshot is that while the last century has seen improvements for women—especially white, economically privileged, heterosexual, cisgendered ones—that oppression is still the norm around the world and around the corner.

Recently Wendy Glauser wrote on the This blog about the uses of “girl power” imagery in the marketing of Plan Canada’s “Because I Am A Girl” campaign. Keshet Bachan yesterday responded with an interesting post at GirlsReport, about the tensions and harmonies of radical and liberal feminisms. One of Canada’s most radical feminist actions was the 1970 Abortion Caravan, which travelled across the country demonstrating for reproductive justice and ended up shutting down parliament in a spectacular protest that played an important role in securing reproductive sovereignty for Canadian women. Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Barbara Freeman last spring about the caravan and the agressive media strategy its activists used.

I’ll also direct your attention to Katie Addleman’s cover story from our July-August 2010 issue on why voting reform is a feminist issue. It’s worth remembering that Canada ranks shockingly poorly for women’s representation in elected office — below rich European countries like Norway and Sweden, but also below troubled, impoverished states like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burundi.

Not all change comes at the ballot box, of course, through capital-P Politics. Arts and culture play a huge part in changing social mores. In November 2008 we published Alison Lee’s popular cover story on feminist pornography, and the ways in which women are reclaiming porn, both as consumers and producers (that essay appears in the 2009 edition of Best Canadian Essays, by the way). Last summer, Natalie Samson interviewed Canadian rapper Eternia about the gender dynamics of hip hop, a world in which macho swagger is the norm and female MCs struggle to break through with audiences. Finally, I’ll slip in a link to my own post about the crazy masculinity-panic that seems to periodically afflict the media, and serves to obscure hard truths about the actual gender dynamics of our society.

I highlight these examples of our reporting on issues of feminism and women’s rights because I think it’s important to say that while we’ll mark International Women’s Day, gender justice—for This as a media outlet and an organization—is not now, and will never be, a “special occasion,” relegated to one day of the year. The struggle for gender equality is one in which This has participated for 45 years, and we intend to continue—today, tomorrow, all year, every year.

Mijok Lang may not know how old he is, but he has no doubt where he comes from. He remembers, as a child, singing a familiar tribal song with friends. It was the only way, he says, that they could keep lions and other animals at bay in the jungles of Sudan and Ethiopia as they ran from would-be killers.

Mijok, now more widely known by his hip hop pseudonym Hot Dogg, is one of more than 30,000 refugee children known as the “Lost Boys,” who were victims of a civil war that overtook Sudan in 1983 and continued into the 1990s.

Today Hot Dogg—the name is a product of a cultural misunderstanding at a McDonald’s—is a hip-hop artist who has taken his harrowing journey and turned it into positive, spiritual messages expressed through the music he embraced when he first arrived in Canada in 2004.

Of his life during the civil war, he says, “That’s when I became myself; that’s when I lost my family.” Women and young girls were often raped and taken as slaves. “They have to get rid of the elders first. They took all the men. They tortured them, they killed them. When all this torture was happening, that’s the time we ran into the jungle,” he says.

After what Mijok says were months of trekking through the jungles, he and his brother Thirik found themselves in Kenya, where a measure of stability finally began to enter Mijok’s life. His outgoing, humorous personality came out and, thanks to an aid agency, he ended up studying at a private school. He did well enough to receive a scholarship.

Thirik and some other Lost Boys were given the chance to move to the U.S., but Mijok missed his opportunity due to bad timing. Hearing that the Canadian and Australian governments would be visiting a camp in the north, Mijok made his way to the camp where, miraculously, he found his sister, Nyokjak Lang.

That’s where his story takes an unusual spiritual turn. He says his prayers were answered after writing a letter to God one night, asking him why he had found himself stuck in Kenya without family. Even though he never mailed the letter to anyone, a pastor on TV, he says, responded. Mijok says the pastor, the Reverend Benny Hinn, mentioned him by name on TV and told him to sit tight because he would get good news in two weeks. Two weeks later, Mijok got word that he had been accepted as a refugee to Canada.

He ended up moving to Winnipeg, where his sister had already relocated. He enrolled in high school and began a new life. To this day, Mijok desperately wants to know how old he actually is. After much soul searching over the path he should take, Mijok says God told him in a dream to become a musician and tell the stories he had experienced in his youth.

Following chance meetings with hip-hop artists Fresh IE and K’naan, Mijok has grown as a musician and has begun receiving attention for his work and the stories he shares. He released his first album, Lost in War, in 2008, and since then he has toured Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He donates proceeds from his performances to charities doing humanitarian work in Sudan.

And in a fitting bookend to his story, Mijok recently came into contact with his mother again. He hopes his next album, slated for summer 2011, will earn enough for him to visit her.

Another new entry today in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In today’s interview, associate editor Natalie Samson talked with Eternia, a Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices, including sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering to the G20 leaders’ conference, where she performed for a rapturous crowd. Eternia’s newest album, At Last, a collaboration with Canadian producer MoSS, came out on June 29, 2010.

Q&A

Natalie Samson: You were involved in the People’s Summit in Toronto last weekend. Can you let me know how you got involved with that?

Eternia: To be honest with you, it was as simple as them reaching out and asking to book me. When they initially reached out I was under the assumption that it was more of a gender equity conference and then they changed the name of it. So my assumption is that they thought to reach out to me just because they were discussing gender equity issues and I’d done a little bit of work in that area, touring schools, and then also the fact that I am a woman and I do what I do—it’s kind of a nice slant on the gender equity narrative, and that alone is kind of cool for people.

Natalie Samson: I was wondering, too, what you think your role is when you get involved in these sorts of events like the People’s Summit. It’s obviously political and an activist event.

Eternia: My show is super-high-energy and it also—if you listen to my lyrics—there is a certain slant to my music as well. But it’s super, super-high-energy, super-empowering, super-integrational, super-positive. People were listening to speakers for, I don’t know, a couple hours before I went on stage. The room was clearing out when I went on stage because people had been there for so long listening to speakers. So I think a main thing of what I do—other then being the physical manifestation of a walking anti-stereotype, which is what I like to call the music that I do—it really just gives people a chance to get up, to stand up, (they had literally been sitting the whole time) put their hands up, and literally be like “Yeah!” for something that they believe in. If you look at musicians that perform at rallies and musicians that generally do that circuit, that’s what they do; they get people riled up, they get people riled up for their cause.

To me, the definition of good music is music that makes you feel. And that relates to all different areas, including music that makes you feel angry about the current state of affairs in your country ,and music that makes you feel inspired to change things that you don’t like about your political system, or globally. I don’t view myself as a political activist in any way, shape, or form, or overly involved in a lot of these issues. I kind of feel ignorant to a lot of these things that are going on—I shouldn’t say that but its true. At the same time, the music that I make is music that inspires a whole bunch of people that are not ignorant to what’s going on, that do need change, that need a soundtrack for that. I feel like at the end, when I do perform at these kind of events, its like a soundtrack for the dialogue. That’s what it is. And it gets you feeling and it gets your blood pumping, and it gets your emotions rising, and it gets you ready to do something about it.

Natalie Samson: You kind of touched upon it a little bit earlier about your involvement with Oxfam. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the work you’ve done with Plan Canada.

Eternia: This is the first time that I can recall that I’ve been directly booked and involved with Oxfam, although of course their reputation precedes them and I was really honoured. I believe that was based off the work I did with the 4 in 1 Initiative for change with Plan Canada. We toured high schools for many months, thousands of kids—over 10,000 kids—speaking about girls’ rights. We also did AIDS awareness, but specifically with Plan Canada it was about girls’ rights. That was just literally about bringing awareness about the situation of women and girls around the world and bringing it home to girls that are in grade 5 all the way to grade 12. We wrote content specifically for the tour that was educational but still entertaining at the same time for these girls so they could rock out with us and put their hands up, but that they’re also hearing things that make them think. So I think based off that and some of my other material that I have, for example my Amnesty International violence against women song that I dedicated to that cause, “Love,” stuff like that is probably what made Oxfam consider me for the gender equity summit.

Natalie Samson: Going back to the 4 in 1 initiativeve with Plan Canada, why did you get invovled with those initatives in the first place?

Eternia: I jumped at the chance to speak to people. It’s a situation I could relate to, number one. I’ve been through—I guess we all face—gender discrimination we just don’t know that we do, but I’ve been through specific things. Whether it be because I’m a woman in hip-hop, which is male dominated, or whether it be because I’m a woman growing up in this society in general,  I think other people can relate. I think other people have experienced that as well, especially young girls that I’m speaking to in these schools, and I think they need to hear from someone they might look up to as a role model or a mentor or a star, whatever they view us as, and hear what’s going on, and how to deal with it, and what to do, and how you can get involved.

Basically what I mean to say is that I’m a woman, and so on a personal level issues relating to women really impact me and affect me and I care. In the end it was one of those things where it was like. this is what I want to be doing—this is what I want to be doing more then regular rap concerts. I don’t want to fake the funk, I don’t want to speak about things that I don’t personally feel passionate about or relate to, and that is why the girls’ rights and the gender equity issues are so near and dear to my heart. And especially speaking about violence against women, instances of sexual assault or physical abuse in a woman’s life—you know the stat about one in three women will experience abuse in their lifetime, it’s that serious–stuff like that hits home for me and I can relate to it just for my own personal life story. I don’t know if that answers your question other than I relate to it, I feel it and I want other girls to know they’re not alone when they’re going through things.

Natalie Samson: I did want to touch on something that you mentioned, that you do face a lot of gender discrimination in your profession and in general in your life. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit more and maybe give us some examples of the barriers you’ve had to face and overcome doing the work you do.

Eternia: It’s so subtle, and that’s whats interesting: it is so prevalent and so subtle, so it’s hard to pinpoint one example. There is a lot of ego in hip-hop, I think people are hesitant to co-sign for a woman for whatever reason—generally because the statement “girls can’t rap” or “I don’t like female rappers” is not even viewed as problematic. Whereas if you were to fill in those two words with something else, like exchange rapper for guitar player and exchange female for a certain race, that would be extremely offensive. I was speaking about this last night with another interview, there is something about sexism specifically that doesn’t seem to get people up in arms or offend most people, especially in hip-hop. So its like the little things that happen all the time, little statements, little experiences, I find that often times when it comes to technical stuff, like mixing and mastering a record, my opinion’s not really taken seriously, but if I get my male manager, my male business partner, my male representative to be my mouthpiece—to open his mouth and say what I want him to say— they will listen to him. But the people that are being my mouthpiece are people that have way less experience then me. So the male who has way less experience then me is listened to over the women that’s been in the industry for 15 years.

Natalie Samson: Is that where your campaign, My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt, comes into play?

Eternia: By the way, that’s just one example of thousands. I don’t want you to think that’ the big example. “My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt”—somebody said that to me one day and something went off in my head the minute I heard that come out of his mouth. So it was really a kind of organic thing, I didn’t really sit there thinking about it. But what is awesome about the shirt is it really creates dialogue and gets people talking. So when people wear that shirt the assumptions that come out of it, like if a dude wears it it’s just funny. If a man wears my shirt other men will come up to him like, ‘what, your favourite rapper is gay, your favourite rapper is a cross-dresser.’ They still assume he’s talking about a dude, meaning they don’t even consider that he could possibly be referring to loving a female on stage.

Natalie Samson: People come up to me, even, and ask that question when I’m wearing that shirt.

Eternia: Really? That’s awesome! So not even men. I assumed that when girls wear it people would assume girl-girl but that’s just my assumption. So, yeah, exactly, even when you say my favourite rapper wears a skirt people still assume it has to be a man. You know what my next slogan may be? When I was doing the girls rights tour we were in middle schools, we were spitting all these stats at the kids, lots of stats and information while we’re performing and at the end we asked “what did you learn from the presentation?” and this one little boy puts up his hand, and he’s got to be like grade 6, and he’s like, “I learned that sometimes girls rap better than boys.” That was the highlight for me because it’s not what we taught him, but it’s so awesome that he would get that from the presentation. And not just on an ego level—its not just about me—but that is kind of what were talking about when we talk about gender equality and inequality. Most people don’t ever consider that. So that was pretty cool, that might be my next shirt: “Some Girls Rap Better Than Boys.”

Natalie Samson: It’s an interesting approach to the issue of gender equity and gender justice.

Eternia: It really felt fitting the first time we did the girls rights tour, George Nozuka was performing and so was I and so was Masia One. But the cool part was George Nozuka, he’s, you know, a man, he was doing very sensitive, soft, you know, if you saw me in heaven playing the guitar-type strumming which, you know—gender roles generally say the sensitiveve stuff, the mushy emotional stuff…you know where I’m going with this. Then the women were rocking out in the show were all high energy very—for lack of a better word—hyper-masculine in a way, you know: ego, bravado, strong. My voice alone is very strong. And so I just felt that it was so fitting, without us even stating it, it never had to be mentioned that we were doing a tour on issues of gender equity and issues on women and girls worldwide, and literally these are the roles, and it was a role reversal. I thought that was really cool, that men can be emotional and soft and women can be aggressive and hard. To be honest with you, I think girls seeing a women on stage rapping, without it having to be said, is like, okay this chick wants to be a skateboarder, or this girl wants to be, you know, maybe she wants to be a biophysicist, or whatever. We talk about the fact that guidance counsellors and people in schools will often gender-stereotype you and put you into this instead of that. Girls will put up their hands and share their stories, and so it’s really awesome that even if they don’t want to rap, they see a woman doing something normally defined as a male task or a male occupation, and I think it speaks to their lives directly.

Natalie Samson: Music: it’s obvious how candid it is and how rooted it is in your own personal experience. You bring up issues like abortion and violence against women and domestic abuse. How have you been able to do that–to go up on stage do after day and address these issues?

Eternia: It’s very freeing. There’s a song on the album—it’s the most personal I’ve ever done in my life—and it’s called “To the Future,” it deals with a lot of things I haven’t mentioned in previous songs, even though I’ve mentioned a lot of stuff. So, like, specifically relating to sexual assault and abortion as well, and my father being violent to my mom. So to answer your question, once it’s written and once it’s recorded, I don’t want to say I’ve kind of grown numb, but by the time I’m performing it on stage I’ve heard it a million times. So it’s one of those things where it’s like I put myself in the moment and I feel it but it’s not like the first time I wrote it.

What will often happen is I will write something personal and kind of devastating and I’ll cry when I write it and when I get in the studio I’ll be frustrated. The song I’m referring to now, I did in one take and it really knocked the wind out of me—like it really knocked the wind out of me. After I was done I was on the floor of the booth like “Yeah, not doing that one again.” But once I get on stage it’s freeing. It’s the most amazing feeling ever, and so it’s kind of like what a therapist would tell you to do. You need to work through your shit and you need to write it down and that’s what I do. So by the time I’m performing it I can see the impact that it has on other people, which is amazing and I don’t take that for granted, but for me it’s like I am a woman working at becoming, I guess you could say, healthy, adjusted, and whole. And a part of the process of becoming whole is writing this music. I’ve always been an open book so it’s one of those things where it’s like, “Yeah, this happened, yeah this happened, yeah this happened.” No shame. And guess what: you shouldn’t have shame either.

Natalie Samson: Have you ever faced any difficulty with any of your collaborators, or anybody in the business, for getting this message out because of the content? Because you’re talking about violence against women and these kinds of issues?

Eternia: The only thing I would say is my first album got criticized for being too personal. One of the most running critiques of It’s Called Life was, “Great album, great album, too personal.” So it’s almost like people don’t want you to go that deep, almost like it made them uncomfortable. But I can say for the most part people really relate and appreciate having someone else speak their story. What I often hear is, “You took my life and put it in your song.” Sometimes it gets really overwhelming when you’re making people aware of an issue and there are so many elements to it—it’s complicated and it’s not simple. The music that I do is very personal to me, so when I start doing it in relation to a lot of issues I kind of just feel like I’m one narrative. The only difference between me and the people I’m rapping to—for example at the Oxfam event—is that they gave me a microphone. But everyone could technically have a very moving compelling personal story that would call you to action. And that’s what it’s about: it’s change. Let’s not be satisfied with the status quo.

Eternia. T-shirt reads: "My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt"

In this edition of Listen to This, Associate Editor Natalie Samson talks with Eternia, the Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work aim to challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices such as sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering to the G20 leaders’ conference, where she performed for a rapturous crowd. Be sure to stay for the end of the podcast, where you can hear a song off of Eternia’s 2005 album, It’s Called Life. Be sure to keep an eye out for Eternia’s newest album, At Last. The album is a collaboration with Canadian producer MoSS and it’s set to release on June 29, 2010.

Included in the podcast is this 2005 Eternia track, Love, which was used to promote Amnesty International’s “Stop Violence Against Women” campaign.

Quebec City "hip hop historian" Webster. Photo courtesy Webster/Abuzive Muzik.

Quebec city’s recent 400th anniversary celebration was quite a spectacle — Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, treasures from the Louvre, and even the occasional nod to diversity like the multicultural rap show, Hip hop tout en couleurs (Hip hop in all Colours). For the most part, though, the Quebec black experience went unacknowledged. For “Webster” Aly Ndiaye that’s a sad reality, not a surprise. According to the local rapper, blacks in the provincial capital are socially invisible.

At age 28, Webster (as in the dictionary) is an underground celebrity and dean of the QC rap scene. He’s not just one of the city’s oldest rappers, he’s a grassroots hip hop historian. After studying history at Laval University he now works a day job as tour guide and historic interpreter with Parks Canada. The son of two teachers, he spends his spare time visiting local schools and communities talking to kids about Quebec’s black heritage.

Tall, wire-thin, and intense, this bilingual rapper realizes he could make a bigger splash in a bigger pond. QC has a reputation among immigrants as “a place you come, but don’t unpack your bags.” According to Webster, unemployment, police harassment and covert racism are some of the reasons people leave when they become teenagers. But unlike many before him, Webster doesn’t plan to move to Montreal or Toronto. “My generation is the first of second-generation blacks…to stay here and fight right here,” he says.

The biracial son of a Senegalese father and Québécoise mother, Webster is a self-styled “SénéQuéb” who creates songs in the service of social justice as much as artistic expression. In an effort to provoke thought (and perhaps a bit of controversy), Webster dubs his music “terrorhythms.” On his first solo album Sagesse Immobile (Immobile Wisdom) he croons to an R&B beat: “L-land baby, where I was born ‘n’ raised.” “L-Land” refers to Limoilou, a QC district largely populated by the immigrant poor. Webster’s answer to Quebec City’s 400th is “Quebec History X,” a rap that invokes the forgotten histories of figures like Matthew da Costa, a multilingual African who came to New France as Samuel de Champlain’s interpreter.

LISTEN: “Quebec History X” from Webster’s Sagesse Immobile

Webster’s decision to switch from rapping in English to French four years ago was a conscious choice, as much political as personal. “I’m among the first generation that witnessed the birth of Quebec hip hop,” says Webster. “In the mid-90’s there was a big French hip hop craze. Some used to rap with French accents but when I started rapping in ’95, I started in English. English isn’t my first language; I didn’t have the same scope. In French I have more vocabulary and know how to work the language.”

As QC winds down its anniversary festivities, Webster begins celebrating the first anniversary of Immobile Wisdom’s release. He’s taking terrorhythms to the road, touring extensively from Quebec City to Montreal and points in between. His mission, he insists, is not finger-wagging and guilt-tripping white Quebec: “Guilt is not the point. I do it to spread my message and reach young people in the streets and in the schools. It’s to show black people’s contribution in the building of this city and country.”