Challenging the cultural narrative of hip hop in Canada

When Radio and Television Arts School of Media professor Mark V. Campbell started digging through the basements of local hip-hop DJs, he found an entire generation of hip-hop history captured and boxed up as vinyl recordings, original event flyers, and hand drawn vision boards of music videos.

Campbell first grew interested in creating this archive when he tried researching Canadian hip-hop history online for a chapter he was commissioned to write in a high school text book entitled Black History: Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. What he found was a complete void of information. “This is a full decade after Napster, the internet is everywhere, and I can’t find anything online,” he said. “All of the things the hip-hop community had done in the 1980s and 1990s, all of the zines that were published… they were nowhere to be found.”

The unspoken, unshared history of hip hop in Toronto was at risk of disappearing — put aside as insignificant memorabilia of a bygone era. Campbell made it his mission to document and archive it online. From that passion grew an online archive of Canadian hip-hop history, known as Northside Hip Hop (external link) , that documents the roots of the musical genre in Toronto and across the country and reflects the importance of this culture for a generation of marginalized youth.

To get more contributions for the archive project, Campbell started tapping into networks of Toronto hip-hop community members whom he had met as a radio DJ in the late 1990s.

“When I started talking to people and asking questions about it, they realized this is important,” said Campbell. “I want to reposition these folks as knowledge makers, and I want them to tell their stories.”

A lot of the Toronto hip-hop scene is rooted here at Ryerson, Campbell said. Ron Nelson, a DJ and concert promoter of the era, put Toronto on the map with his The Fantastic Voyage show on CKLN 88.1fm — the former Ryerson college radio station. The culture of hip hop grew around parties hosted by people like Nelson who brought American acts to Canada to perform. But those late-night parties and concerts, attended by an entire generation of Caribbean youth in Toronto, are not the kind of stories that make it into dinnertime conversation today.

Northside Hip Hop Archive started off in Toronto as a curated exhibit of hip-hop culture from the 1980s, titled t-dot pioneers. After receiving funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage in 2015, Northside Hip Hop Archive created “I Was There!” project, which included other cities such as Montréal, Hamilton, and Saskatoon.

“As a part of the ‘I Was There!’ project, we have archive fellows in different cities and we did several public events with them,” Campbell said. His aim is to spark pride in Canadian culture and to encourage members of Canadian hip-hop communities to see themselves as agents of knowledge production whose creativity has enhanced the fabric of this country. Historically, marginalized groups in Canada have not had their cultural contributions validated through documentation or accurate media portrayals.

Hip hop speaks to disenfranchised groups, said Campbell, as it “speaks truth to power,” creating a sense of value for racialized youth living on society’s margins. This is why hip hop’s appeal is sustained globally, including in places like Mongolia and Peru. In cities like Saskatoon, the Indigenous community has its own hip-hop scene, with many youths embracing the style that gave them the confidence to challenge their circumstances and question authority through creative expression.

Capturing all aspects of hip hop as part of Canada’s cultural mosaic is Campbell’s end goal for the Northside Hip Hop Archive. “Before Drake, people didn’t think Canadians contributed to the cultural landscape of hip-hop culture,” Campbell said. “Part of this project is to change that narrative.”