Before Drake, if you were to say “Canadian rapper” to almost anyone in the US the first thing out of their mouth would probably be, “Oh yeah, like SNOW. ‘Infoooor-mer!‘” While Snow definitely left a bigger mark on the 90’s than any other Canadian artist besides probably Celine Dion (I’m not looking this up. Sorry. -Ed.) his debut album wasn’t actually released until 1993, almost two years after fellow Toronto rappers the Dream Warriors released their debut album “And Now the Legacy Begins”. The video for the second single off the album, “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style”, debuted on Yo! MTV Raps in 1991, which is when I first heard them. The single samples Quincy Jones’ “Soul Bossa Nova”, which is probably better known by an entire generation as “the Austin Powers theme song.” Musically and stylistically the Dream Warriors fit in with the “conscious rap” groups of the time like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and the Native Tongues family. Like those groups the Dream Warriors were “positive rappers” as in “They don’t wear Raiders hats and they don’t rap about “hoes” and killing cops.” So, like a lot of their more polite contemporaries, they didn’t become household names in the US in a world just a few years removed from Tipper Gore, 2 Live Crew, Ice-T, NWA and the LAPD battling out on the nightly news. For someone like me, who also very much enjoyed “gangsta rap”, Dream Warriors and artists like Divine Styler and Pharcyde (who both debuted in 1992) were sort of a breath of fresh air, a palate cleanser, a nice break from what seemed to be an endless competition by other artists to sound the most authentically “street”. The hardest track on their debut, “Tune from the Missing Channel” almost sounds like what would happen if the Bomb Squad produced a track for Digable Planets. Groups like De La Soul, ATCQ, Pete Rock & CL Smooth and Gang Starr were already legendary by this point so it was nice to hear new artists carrying the torch musically. I distinctly remember seeing at least three different videos for Dream Warriors singles, the other two being “Wash Your Face In My Sink” and “Ludi” before they seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. I should have known by that point that a very positive review of their debut LP in Spin probably meant they were either going to become the next PM Dawn and appeal to a white audience that probably didn’t even really like rap, or they would disappear and I’d never hear from them again. And, they pretty much disappeared. In 1994 I saw a cassette of their second album at the same Manhattan Tower Records where I had bought their first album and I was shocked to see two new guys on the cover that I was pretty sure were not on the first album. I passed on it and figured if I saw a video for a song on Yo! and it was good, I’d pick it up. I don’t think I noticed at the time that two songs featured collaborations with DJ Premier and Guru of Gang Starr. I never saw a video and I didn’t hear the album at all until fairly recently when I looked it up on YouTube. This is also when I learned they had a third album that was only released in Canada. The core duo released a greatest hits compilation in 1999 with two newly recorded tracks that impressed Robert Christgau enough to remark in a review, “Certainly they belong in the same sentence as De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.” Looking back, I wonder if he was referring to the same stylistic choices they made in production and design and lyrical content. As much as I love “And Now the Legacy Begins”, it isn’t nearly as groundbreaking as records like “De La Soul Is Dead” or “Low End Theory”, but it’s certainly as unique in its approach to try something new musically when the Golden Age of Hip-Hop was just beginning and the path to fame for a lot of other artists was lined with bullets and misogyny. That’s not to say that lyrics about violence and sex are necessarily bad. The problem arises when newer artists seeking fame and infamy skip right over having any sort of message and attempt to gain notoriety by just being “shocking” (see also: Throbbing Gristle and 90% of “industrial” or “noise” artists that were “influenced” by them). Ironically, the white Toronto native Snow actually was an ex-con who had done time for attempted murder and was released just in time to promote his debut album which eventually went platinum in both the US and Canada. Drake famously was a child actor who starred as a wheelchair bound student on the Canadian television teen drama “Degrassi: The Next Generation”. By simply being Canadian I don’t think either of those guys were ever thought of as dangerous in any way despite their penchant for rapping about life on the street and gunplay. The Dream Warriors didn’t seem to care at all about portraying anything other than who they were: artists who loved hip-hop and found a unique way to create their own sound that ultimately was probably more influential than a song like “Informer” which spent SEVEN WEEKS at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The legacy of some of the lesser known rappers from the 80’s and 90’s that didn’t just jump onto a bandwagon, whether it was gangsta or “Afrocentric”/”conscious” rap, isn’t always that apparent on the surface. The influence of groups like the Dream Warriors was arguably more important than a hit single as it continued a movement of innovative use of jazz/soul/R&B samples and themes that were previously thought of as incompatible with the standards of hip-hop at the time. Unfortunately, I think we’re probably going to have to wait for someone in Dream Warriors to pass away before we hear the Questlove’s and Just Blaze’s of the world talk about how important they were to hip-hop, just like we did yesterday when the legendary New Haven, CT rapper and EPMD back up dancer extraordinaire Stezo passed at age 51. Damn.
