Sunday, February 9, 1997
Snow in the forecast
Canadian rapper says he has the credibility to stick aroundBy MIKE ROSS
Express Writer
Despite being dissed into that special section of hell only white rap stars seem to occupy, Snow - aka Darrin O'Brien - is relatively happy with the way his life has been going lately.
"The key word here is positive," he says during a recent phone interview, his two-year-old daughter burbling in the background. "Positive music is the music of the '90s."
Say what?
This can't be the same guy who wrote Informer, a bitter rant disguised as a Jamaican dance-hall ditty, from a jail cell. Since that first huge hit, there have been more newspaper articles about Snow's alleged crimes than his rhymes - assault, attempted murder, uttering death threats, and we haven't even touched on the traffic tickets.
Insisting that it's all behind him now, Snow named both his daughter and his latest album Justuss, because, as he explains, "I never had justice before, so this was the first justice I really had. Justice was never in my corner. All the time I got in trouble."
And none of it was his fault?
He laughs, "Oh, no, you know that ...
"Well, maybe a couple ...
"I was brought up around everybody who's just drinking and hanging out and fighting," Snow recalls of his youth spent in the Toronto housing projects. "When I was young, like 11, I used to go outside and see everybody out there drinking and fighting. It was like a community. Everybody knew each other. All the older kids would be drinking and fighting, and that's what I looked up to. And I found myself growing up and doing the exact same thing."
He admits he sometimes wishes for a different past (being Irish, he could've ended up as a member of Great Big Sea), but then he wouldn't be where he is today. Aside from the drinking and fighting, many of the kids he hung around with were Jamaican. Around the time he was 14, he recalls, Snow stopped listening to KISS and threw himself into reggae music full time.
He even went to the source for Justuss, writing and recording most of it in Jamaica. Fans will notice that in addition to his lilting reggae rap style (called "singing-J"), there's more "real" singing, more musical variety and at least two songs that focus on social issues, Freedom and Mercy Mercy Mercy - "the deep stuff," as he calls it.
He credits co-writers like Yami Bolo and Laurie Bogin for "pulling the good stuff out of me.
"I think this is the best album so far that I've done. I had more fun on this album. The first album I had fun. The second album, I was kind of like, I don't know ... it was darker, more down. I guess that's how I was feeling at the time. But now I feel good and everything's happy."
The second album he's referring to, Murder Love, was slammed by critics as much as it failed to sell at the record stores, but the 27-year-old rapper insists "it did better.
"I got the credibility, which I needed more than another hit record. Now I can walk anywhere. I can go through all the projects, and people say, `what up, Snow? Hey, I wanna be in your video!' you know. Vanilla Ice can't walk anywhere without getting dissed."
Ah, we were wondering when he would bring up the Ice-man - the guy who single-handedly set white rap all the way back to Mel Torme. Snow, naturally, was lumped in with Vanilla Ice, and both were dismissed as poseurs by both blacks and whites.
"It's just ignorance," Snow replies, "I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it because I like the music. I'm not saying, `oh, yeah, I'm black, I talk Jamaican all the time.' I was brought up with rock 'n' roll. I just like the reggae music. It's fun."
And he's positive about that.