BarKARDINAL Slang: Jamaica, eh?

This is the Firstarter. Jason Harrow, 25, straight outta T-Dot, "The Cold". We spoke to a very tired Kardinal Offishal fresh off a plane from NY and straight out of a posh, 5-star hotel lobby in Montreal. "Gimme five minutes. I'm gonna take off my clothes and lie down." Aight. One more call to Kardinal, won't hurt, considering it took 48 hours for this interview to become a reality.

Last call. "Mi ready now" he said after runnin' somebody off his cell. We're quick to point out that we wanted concentrate on his 'Jamaican-ness', due to the fact that his music is indelibly influenced by dancehall. WHADDAT wanted to know if there was any real credibility to his adaptation of the Jamaican vernacular in his songs or if he was just frontin'. The day we spoke with Bounty Killer, he insisted on using Kardinal's remix of "Bakardi Slang" (on which Bounty is featured) as the background music for the video interview. Killa was so impressed by Kardinal, we decided to find him, get him, and dig in.

So, here begins the story of A Jamaican in T O.

 

 

Whaddat: You Jamaican?
Kardinal: I'm a yute born in Scarborough [a heavily populated Jamaican area in Toronto]. I can connect more to my Jamaican roots more than my Canadian. My mum, dad, uncle, cousins, aunty, everybody are from Jamaica so I don't know much about the Canadian vibe. I am Canadian by birth but definitely Jamaican by mentality.

Since the release of the freshman album in his proposed Firestarter series, "Firestarter: Volume 1", Scarborough-born Kardinal has crossed the border without touching foot outside of The Great North. This is quite an accomplishment for a Canadian recording artist. Not to mention a Canadian URBAN recording artist. Never before has a rapper from Toronto or anywhere else in Canada made it so quickly and steadfastly to the international charts. Admittedly, there was Snow, the white boy Deejay from Pickering who topped them years ago with "Informer" and old school rapper Fresh-Wes who busted up the rap charts with "Backbone Slide" in 1990. However, they provided something that was new, fresh and loaded with…well…image.

But this is the year 2001. Kardinal is only one of many thousands of young, aspiring rappers in North America and beyond. Other Canadian artists like Alanis Morisette, Celine Dion, Sarah McLaughlin and Nelly Feurtado as well as Canadian actors like Jim Carey, Mike Myers and Tom Green, have all had to pack up shop and mosey on over to the States if they ever wanted to make it to the big leagues. So, although he wasn't exactly mashin' up New York and L.A. being an independent artist in Canada, he persevered.

Enter MCA Records.

"They asked me to relocate, but I said that the vibes I get aren't the same outside a Toronto." And there he remains alongside his "family" which consists of Saukrates (now signed to Def Jam), Choclair ("Let's Ride"), Solitair (producer and guest on this album) & Tara Chase. The former two with whom he's started an independent label,
Silver House And the Girl (S.H.A.G).

Summer Pt. II Features

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