by SCOTT C

This month, Toronto’s premier MC Kardinal Offishall released Fire and Glory, a long-awaited LP that only began to take shape after Kardi’s deal with MCA dissolved with the label’s demise. Unfazed, the island-tongued one-man show has once again blessed anyone listening with an album that brings his two greatest loves together in one place. This is hip hop and reggae rolled up into perhaps the most original hybrid that I’ve heard to date. The Mirror spoke to the humble and gracious Kardinal over the phone from Toronto.

Mirror: I know that you’ve been producing beats for a long time. This is not a new thing, but how did you decide to shoulder the brunt of the production yourself on this LP?

Kardinal Offishall: With the exception of the few outside joints, it wasn’t one of those things where I decided I was going to produce the lion’s share of the album. It was just a thing where I wanted to make a very complete and cohesive album that didn’t sound like a bunch of tracks just thrown together. In all honesty, I tried to have an unbiased approach to it and just pick the songs which I thought worked well together, and it turned out that most of them were songs that I had produced.

M: How many of those songs were supposed to have been on the MCA project that eventually went sour?

KO: Only three of them. “Whatchalike,” “All the Way” and “Mr. Officer” were supposed to be on the other LP before MCA folded and all that good stuff. For me, though, I just loved those songs so much that I decided that they had to be on my next full-length, whatever it was, y’know? I love those joints.

M: I know that the MCA project was done and done, so was it a matter of divorcing yourself from that material in a way?

KO: Kind of. The thing is, I don’t really look at my music as the MCA music or the whoever music, my music is really just me. I think it was more a situation where, as time went on, my mind was in a different place. Not that it was a different vibe, but things were different. I wanted it to reflect what I was feeling at the time. I wanted it to be current and not things I was feeling three years ago, y’know?

The Canadian climate

M: Is there anything that sets us apart as Canadians from anyone else making hip hop in the world? You’re the first person I think of when the term “Canadian original” gets thrown around.

KO: The element that sets us apart is kind of a sad thing too, and that’s that 95 per cent of us do this because we love it, not because we’re gonna get some big paycheque at the end of the day. When you’re making music for music’s sake, it’s definitely going to shape your music in a certain way. If you know that you stand to become super rich, then that can have a definite impact on your music as well. Unfortunately, our infrastructure is not set up so that any of us will be well off monetarily, but there are one or two that manage to bust through. No matter if the whole country knows about us or not, we are still starving artists, and that’s because of the country that we’re in. There’s not as much opportunity. What I definitely think, for those people who still do it for the love, is, it’s like your mom’s cooking at home, made with love. It’s different from that fast food that you get out on the street.

M: You’re in heavy rotation on Toronto radio. Do you think that urban radio has helped or hurt the music-industry climate in Toronto?

KO: Both. It’s helped because it shows big corporations that hip hop is a viable music and culture, and that it’s legitimate pop music. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that it can stand beside Celine Dion, or Ron Sexsmith or anybody else. It is something to be reckoned with. The bad part is that, because of Cancon, you kind of have to play things that shouldn’t be played. We didn’t have FLOW 93.5 when I was coming up. If your shit was getting played on the air, the only reason was because it was hot, and that’s the way it should be.

With 50 Cent at the Bell Centre on Monday,
Dec. 19, 8 p.m., $59.50

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