Mad Child on drugs and ‘the young nerd’s game’
There aren’t many hip-hop figures — much less Canadian ones — whose life stories would make for a particularly compelling book. Mad Child, head of the B.C. hip-hop outfit the Swollen Members, might just represent an exception. While the 36-year-old, born Shane Bunting, remains the lone individual to have built a prosperous independent Canadian hip-hop label, success is only half his story. After building the Swollen Members brand, Mad Child — performing Sept. 21 and Sept. 22 at the Rockpile — fell in with the proverbial wrong crowd and later into an OxyContin addiction. His struggles with the drug would take four years; he then spent two years recovering, a key part of which time he again spent making music. “Hip hop saved me twice in my life,” Mad Child tells the Star. “And now life is incredible again.” With his first solo album, Dope Sick, already out, and a new Swollen Members album not far behind, his comeback now seems official. The Star caught up with him recently.
Q: What do you hope the legacy of the Swollen Members will be?
A: I want to be able to look back at my life, when it’s all said and done, and look at my whole body of work, and Swollen Members’ whole body of work, and be extremely proud of what I accomplished, and what we accomplished . . . It’s too late to have a perfect record for us. We made mistakes: 2004, we put out an album that we weren’t necessarily happy with after putting out Balance,
Bad Dreams, and Monsters in the Closet — we were extremely happy with those three albums, we consider them underground classics. And then we put out Heavy for the wrong reasons . . . I want to look back on the end of it, and say, “Well, we’ve done 20 albums, and maybe we’ll be 18-2.”
Q: How did your drug problem change you as a person?
A: Well, right off the top, I lost everything I had. I lost my worth of three million dollars that I had put together from my achievements. I lost three million dollars, I lost my self-respect, it had a physical strain, it had a mental strain on me — I’m lucky that my brain still works.
Q: What was the trigger for you changing?
A: Being 55 pounds overweight. My left arm was numb, I felt like I was gonna have a heart attack, my lips were purple, I was driving on some sort of stupid trip that day looking for my daily dosage of drugs. I looked in the mirror, and knew that if I didn’t quit and make a plan to quit with my family right then and there, I was gonna die . . . And six weeks later I quit cold turkey. Ended up in the hospital the first night; then spent 11 days going through the worst agonizing torture and terror you could ever f---ing imagine . . . And you to have understand when I started doing these pills, it seemed so innocent. Back in ’06, this epidemic hadn’t spread to the point that there was an awareness about it . . . a year later when somebody told me what I was taking, and I tried to quit, the devil already had his claws into me, bro.
Q: Do you feel that Swollen Members get the credit you deserve in Canadian hip-hop?
A: Whether whoever the cool hipster hip-hop guys are in Toronto or Montreal realize it, we have a fan base that nobody could (mess) with. You guys can’t understand the loyalty of our fan base. . . .We sat stagnant for four years, and it took me two years to heal and come back, and now they’re all there waiting. And now we’ve got 15-, 16-year-old kids coming, filling out all-ages shows . . . I don’t care if I’m accepted by people who listen to Tyga, because I don’t listen to that music — it makes no difference to me. So I’m not trying to play the young nerd’s game.