RYERSON’S HIP HOP PROF HAS A GRANDMASTER PLAN
Mark Campbell spins childhood love of the genre into a history lesson on Canadian culture.
Mark Campbell is sitting in a bright pink chair in the Allan Slaight Radio Institute at Ryerson, recounting his younger days as a member of an east-end hip-hop sound crew and later, a DJ on a community radio station.
As he looks around at the upscale recording studio he marvels at a little-known fact. Until recently, the university had no idea that former student Ron Nelson became the “godfather” of Toronto hip hop while sitting in a much more modest chair in a Ryerson community radio station.
“Ryerson had no idea that one of the first hip-hop shows in Canada came out of Jorgenson Hall in the basement. That was Ron Nelson’s show,” says Campbell, an adjunct professor at the RTA School of Media. “That should be part of Canada’s pride across the world.”
Campbell is also the lead developer of a new think tank in the faculty of commu- nication and design at Ryerson, where he will develop strategies and partnerships to promote Canadian culture.
Campbell, 38, began documenting Toronto’s vibrant hip-hop scene in 2009 after discovering during research for a book that little had been written about it.
He has organized live events so that artists and industry insiders can tell their stories and share memorabilia.
The historical material is being compiled online in the Northside Hip Hop Archive, a website that hosts a collection of audio, images and accounts that began in the late 1980s.
The website is funded by partners including Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts.
This month, Campbell will talk to pioneers of hip hop in four cities across Canada during an event called I Was There which launches Thursday in Montreal and wraps up on March 31 at Ryerson with a celebration of Nelson’s contributions.
Campbell has a number of collaborators working with him on the archive, including researchers, hip-hop pioneers and teachers, who are writing lesson plans in hip hop for Grade 10 teachers of English, history and art.
“I wanted young people to have the opportunity to see themselves successful in something they’re invested in,” says Campbell, noting the material can be taught by anyone outside the class as well.
There are already some Toronto high school teachers using hip hop to connect to students.
“A lot of the music is really rich in figurative language, in metaphor and simile,” says Kulsoom Anwer Shaikh, a high school English teacher at Jane and Finch. Anwer Shaikh is part of the Northside archive and is writing a curriculum that she hopes Toronto schools will adopt.
“American hip hop is so ubiquitous that students might not feel as connected to its roots in Canada,” says Shaikh, 37, “but there have been distinct Canadian contributions to hip hop and I feel like it’s something we should be thinking about.”
For Campbell, the music has been part of his life since he first discovered it watching a movie as a child.
He says the music “empowered” him because the more he learned about it, the more he understood “the creativity, the innovation and the ingenuity” of the artists and the skill they needed to DJ, produce, write and dance.
And that realization was an antidote to the stereotypes he heard about hip-hop artists, the “discourses that would say they don’t want to go to school or they don’t want to learn or they’re not interested in politics.”
He regrets that he never saw that part of his culture reflected in school.
“The idea with this curriculum is that we will have young people that will feel less alienated, have more civic pride, think about themselves as belonging to the city in a certain kind of way.” Ron Nelson was a first-year radio and television arts student in 1983 when he began his long-running show, the Fantastic Voyage Program, on Saturday afternoons at CKLN.
Then, Toronto’s burgeoning scene included local sound crews such as Maceo and DOC as well as Sunshine, perhaps the best-known crew, who performed with rappers Brother Different, Butch Lee and Michie Mee, Canada’s first rapper to get a major U.S. record deal. Toronto and Montreal were also major stops on the circuit in the ’80s for emerging U.S. artists such as Run-D.M.C., DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince (actor Will Smith), and LL Cool J.
With few record stores selling black music, Nelson, now 54, says his show was one of the only places where hip-hop fans could hear new music and where the city’s talent could get air time.
And that made it one of the few places to market hip hop.
He remembers how in the early days, a record company hired him to go to suburban malls with Maestro Fresh Wes — who appeared on Nelson’s show at age 15 — along with another MC to promote
Kings of Rap, a compilation album. The trio played music on the sidewalk.
“As people are shopping, hopefully they would be drawn towards the music that we were doing — and then buy the album,” Nelson says. “Can you imagine that? That’s the kind of marketing people had to do back then, because nobody knew how to do it.”
Nelson’s show helped launch Mee’s career as well as Wes Williams, a.k.a. Maestro Fresh Wes, whose single “Let Your Backbone Slide” was released as part of his 1989 platinum-selling album Symphony in Effect.
The radio host also became a promoter and turned his bedroom into an office so he could organize concerts. He enticed some of the best U.S. talent to travel north and battle Canadian rappers and breakdancers in events he called Monster Jams.
“Having them battle was probably the best thing for putting Canada on the map,” says Nelson, who is still a concert promoter and who has lectured for more than a decade about hip hop at York University. “Some of our best, including Michie Mee, went up against America’s best and that was probably the peak of it all.
“It was a very special time, a very special feeling.”
As he talks over the phone, he flips through the Monster Jam flyers that are part of a collection of memorabilia that he’s stored away all these years, and reads out the big names that came to Toronto in late ’80s, including American rappers Salt-N-Pepa, Big Daddy Kane and the late Heavy D, as well as Michie Mee.
“Anyone who sees these are going to go down memory lane,” says Nelson.
At the age of 6, Mark Campbell saw breakdancers in a movie on TV and told his parents that that’s what he wanted to do.
It was the mid-’80s and Wild Style, the first hip-hop film, which featured pioneers including Grandmaster Flash, had come out in1982. Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2:
Electric Boogaloo followed in 1984. Campbell doesn’t remember which film it was, but the dancing and the music stuck.
After that introduction, he says: “I really just consumed it and learned and studied it until I was old enough to participate.”
Campbell grew up with his parents and three siblings in Scarborough. His father is a retired machine mechanic who worked at Kraft for 35 years. His mother is retired from Sears.
Music was important in his household, he says, but his dad, who emigrated from Jamaica before reggae was big, favoured ska and soul.
As he got older he tuned into hip hop on the radio. MuchMusic was a “huge influence.” The station’s VJs, including Master T and Michael Williams, “were always ensuring that we had access to the latest hip-hop music, Canadian and American.”
By Grade 8 he was making pause tapes — literally songs recorded from the radio on tapes paused during commercials — and playing them at house parties.
His high school, Francis Libermann near McCowan and Finch Aves., had a number of hip-hop packs, says Campbell, including Monolith, which came out of Scarborough in the mid-’90s. Monolith had eight or nine members and half of them went to school at Francis Libermann, where they also performed.
Campbell and his friends formed a sound crew called Triple S. They would get together on Saturday nights in one of their basements to watch videos that showed turntable scratching, beat juggling or mixing, and practise their techniques. He bought turntables with the money he earned selling shoes in Champs in the Scarborough Town Centre, money that was earmarked for university.
“We had four people in the crew and there would be two turntables for four of us,” Campbell says. “Each weekend we would trade and travel and bring mixers to each other’s houses and practise.”
And he and his friends would make tapes to show off their mixing skills and promote their group so they could get hired.
At the time, the cassettes “were huge,” says Campbell. Mix tapes with promotional tracks and sometimes exclusive tracks — Campbell made one with an exclusive track by Monolith — were traded, shared and sold.
The tapes often moved from one city to another via a family member. Campbell remembers being in Grade 9 and receiving a Ron G mix tape from a relative.
“That was serious social capital in high school,” he says. “It had original songs and stuff you couldn’t access. You couldn’t buy this music anywhere. So mix tapes were really critical to spreading hip-hop culture.”
Meanwhile, his group would DJ wherever they could find a place to perform,
even taking the bus from Scarborough to an outdoor party at Dufferin and Finch.
Sometimes, they’d borrow one of their parents’ cars, a much easier way to transport their milk crates full of records, although the albums would often have to be lugged up or down stairs once they reached their destination.
“It was pretty nightmarish for our backs,” Campbell says.
Sometimes, his Triple S sound crew would get their name on a flyer but when they’d get to an event, the older DJs wouldn’t let them perform. Or nobody would come to the party, and the promoter would tell them he couldn’t pay them.
Campbell had a lifeline to hip hop, but he couldn’t make the same connection in high school, where he felt alienated.
A couple of teachers at Francis Libermann had low expectations of him, he says, and speculates it was because he was a young black man or an athlete. He says he was stopped on his first day of Grade 9 by a religion teacher who told him he looked like “trouble.” A male teacher wouldn’t ask to see his homework, perhaps thinking it was never done, says Campbell.
He also says his “typical” upbringing in Scarborough included being carded by police.
Campbell changed schools for Grade 13 and went to Pope John Paul II so he could prioritize his education, knowing his parents would never accept DJ’ing as a career.
But he didn’t leave music behind. In 1997, Campbell went to York University for his bachelor of education and began volunteering at CHRY, the York radio station where DJ Grouch played the hip hop that Campbell had listened to when he was getting ready for high school.
After class, Campbell would file records in the station’s library or sell food at bake sales to raise money.
He and his high school sound crew got their own show, The Soul of Hip Hop
Show, in 1998 in the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. slot. Campbell took the name DJ Grumps, an ode to DJ Grouch, and because his friends thought he was moody.
“He mentored me on the radio and sort of got me started,” Campbell says. The show was a mixture of interviews with
live guests as well as performances and recorded music.
After graduating from York in 2003, he worked as a supply teacher and filled in for long-term occasional work. Throughout the years, Campbell continued to work overnight on radio, moving with his sound crew to the midnight-to 2-a.m. slot with a show called The Bigger Than Hip Hop Show.
He says his high school DJ career gave him the skills to get into radio. And in his nearly two decades on air, he says he met almost everyone there was to meet in the Canadian industry.
“These artists are coming through and a lot of time they have no label,” Campbell says. “They have no management and they’re just doing the work because they’re artists. They’re making amazing music.”
Campbell would go on to write his dis- sertation for his PhD on the influence of hip-hop music and DJ remix culture, which he says affected products such as Nike remix shoes and films like Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the 2012 factand-fiction mashup that came from a novel of the same name.
After earning his PhD in sociology from Uof T, he was one of 25 people awarded a prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Regina, where he did a project on how digitization of hip hop made it more accessible to young women. He joined Ryerson last year and teaches two courses in the RTA program: Sonic Innovations in Black Music, and a graduate course, From Antiblackness to Intersectionality: Race and Racism in Popular Culture.
Campbell left his radio show two years ago, after the birth of his second son, because he’d made a promise to his wife, Gena Chang-Campbell, to be there for the overnight feedings.
The city still has a number of veterans hosting community radio shows, like DJ MelBoogie — Maestro’s sister — who cohosts a hip-hop show on CHRY-FM at York, and DTS, who continues to co-host the Masterplan Show at U of T’s CIUT station, where he started in 1989.
And although Campbell is off the air, he continues his work on hip hop with the archive, which he hopes will allow young people to “look back and say ‘oh, OK, there is value to us. We did contribute to this city. We are important,’” says Campbell.
“And that wasn’t the message growing up, especially if you were involved in hip hop in the ’90s in a very suburban neighbourhood,” he says.
The message then was “that you don’t belong here.”
“That was serious social capital in high school . . . You couldn’t buy this music anywhere. So mix tapes were really critical to spreading hip-hop culture.” MARK CAMPBELL ON THE POWER OF MIX TAPES