The Canadian hip hop scene was established in the 1980s. Through a variety of factors, it developed much slower than Canada's popular rock music scene, and apart from a short-lived burst of mainstream popularity from 1989 to 1991, it remained largely an underground phenomenon until the early 2000s.
Canada's multicultural and multilingual fabric has given rise to various subgenres, including Indigenous, French, and Punjabi Canadian hip hop. Also notable is the influence of Caribbean rhythms in creating a sound unique to Toronto.
In the early 1990s, Canadian hip hop artists like Maestro Fresh-Wes, Main Source, and Dream Warriors were popular in the underground hip hop scene. In 1998, the collaborative single "Northern Touch" brought hip hop back into the Canadian mainstream. Since the 2000s, Canadian hip hop saw a rise to mainstream success led by Drake, and to a lesser extent Kardinal Offishall, Tory Lanez, and Nav. Backxwash a Zambian-Canadian rapper and producer is known for a unique, heavy-metal-infused horrorcore sound.
History
Early 1980s
Canada had hip hop artists right from the early days of the scene—the first known Canadian rap single, Mr. Q's "Ladies' Delight", was released in 1979 just a few weeks after The Sugarhill Gang's historic "Rapper's Delight", and the first French rap single, Lucien Francœur's "Le Rap-à-Billy", was released in 1983. For the most part, however, the infrastructure was not there to get most artists' music to the record-buying public; even "Ladies' Delight" was overlooked by Canadian music historians for many years, instead media and reference works erroneously credited Singing Fools' "The Bum Rap", which was released three years later in 1982, as the first Canadian rap single.
In addition to "Ladies Delight", Mr. Q (Jay McGee) released a handful of other rap singles through the last several months of 1979; one, "Party Rapp", included lyrics about the 1979 Mississauga train derailment.
Toronto's CKLN-FM was an early supporter of the genre, with Ron Nelson launching Canada's first hip hop program, The Fantastic Voyage, in 1983.
Late 1980s/early 1990s: The rise of Canadian hip hop
Artists such as B-Kool, Devon, Maestro Fresh-Wes and Dream Warriors did briefly manage to break into the mainstream in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, Maestro's first single, "Let Your Backbone Slide", was the first Canadian hip-hop single to break into the national Top 40, and the first to make the Billboard charts in the United States. It remained the bestselling Canadian hip hop single of all time until 2008. Other notable rap singles of this era include Maestro's "Drop the Needle", Devon's "Mr. Metro", Dream Warriors' "My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style" and "Wash Your Face in My Sink", Ground Control's "Another Dope Jam", MCJ and Cool G's "No Sex With My Sister" and "So Listen", and Kish's "I Rhyme the World in 80 Days". Signing a distribution deal with Electric Distribution, they brought about the first Canadian rap group to record and release an authentic Hip-Hop mini-album distributed and sold internationally.
In 1988, Michie Mee became the first Canadian rapper to sign a deal with a US record label. This action did not result in significant chart success for her. She has asserted in interviews that the reggae influences on her 1991 debut album Jamaican Funk—Canadian Style were met with resistance from US label executives and radio programmers.
The Toronto/New York-based hip-hop group Main Source released their classic debut album Breaking Atoms in 1991, which featured the debut of a young Nas before his rise in popularity. Rap also began to surface in Canadian mainstream pop in the early 1990s, with rapper Frankie Fudge performing a rap break in Celine Dion's 1990 single "Unison" and female R&B duo Love and Sas rapping in their 1991 single "I Don't Need Yo' Kiss".
An important influence for the development of hip hop in Toronto was Ron Nelson and his Fantastic Voyage radio show which aired Saturday afternoons on CKLN-FM from 1983 to 1991. Fantastic Voyage was the first exposure many youths had to the hip hop genre and provided the first airplay for many Toronto artists including Maestro Fresh Wes, Michie Mee, Rumble & Strong, Get Loose Crew, Simply Majestic and the Dream Warriors. Nelson was also an early hip hop concert promoter, organizing the first major hip hop concert in Canada at Varsity Stadium in 1987 featuring Run DMC, Public Enemy and EPMD, and provided exposure for local artists at venues such as the Concert Hall, the Spectrum, and the Party Centre. In addition, Nelson helped set up events in Toronto that drew in well-known US hip hop acts, such as Big Daddy Kane and Run DMC.
The first urban-radio show in British Columbia was Sonic Shocks in 1987, hosted by Bay-Area native DJ Maximus Clean. Vancouver's first all-rap radio show, In Effect, was launched in 1989 by Niel Scobie on CITR-FM.
Early to mid-1990s: Fight for recognition
In 1990, Denham Jolly's company Milestone Radio applied to the CRTC for an urban music station in Toronto, which would have been the first such station in Canada, but that application was denied in favour of a country music station—which Toronto already had on its radio dial.
The decision was controversial, and hurt the Canadian hip hop scene considerably. Hip-hop and R&B fans in Toronto relied on Buffalo, New York's WBLK, a US station with no Canadian content responsibilities, while other Canadian cities often had no access to any urban music radio stations at all. After 1992, Michie Mee was the only Canadian rapper to make an appearance on the national pop charts until 1998—and even she didn't accomplish the feat with a hip hop song, but by partnering with the alternative rock band Raggadeath for 1995's "One Life".
Sol Guy, a hip hop promoter with Figure IV Entertainment, said in 1999 that