![]() “I was in Jamaica for six months, and the record company came down and I was partying and drinking,” he says. The inevitable backlash, especially given Snow was white, followed: Jim Carrey mocked Snow in the parody “Imposter” on In Living Color, and Snow’s hard living returned when he went to Jamaica to record his second album, the deep reggae dive Murder Love. He claims American radio stations stopped playing his music when they heard he wouldn’t be able to promote them in their country. “I had the Number One song and they threw me out of the country,” he says. (“More milk and cookies” was his reward behind bars, he says.) As the song went on to become the biggest-selling reggae single of all time that summer, Snow’s jail time meant he was denied entry into the States. One of the tracks they cut, “Informer,” was released while Snow was incarcerated. He’d be down in the basement in his studio and say, ‘Do a harmony here.’ I’m like, ‘What’s a harmony?’” “So I’d go to A&P and steal chickens and beef and feed his whole family. “I was 18, 19 years old and a huge Shan fan, but he wasn’t doing too well at the time,” Snow says. There, at least, his bad-boy side came in handy. Charged with attempted murder, Snow spent eight months in a detention center before his friend confessed to the stabbing.Īfter the incident but shortly before that stint, Snow - who was given that nickname by his Jamaican-Canadian neighbors - was on vacation in New York, where he met and recorded with pioneering hip hop producer MC Shan. ![]() When construction workers mocked him after they saw him singing reggae to girls, he and a friend got into a butcher-knife fight with the workers, one of whom was cut. “He was cool.”ĭrinking and brawling was a regular part of Snow’s adolescence, and in 1989, that part of his life caught up with him. “If it wasn’t for, I wouldn’t be in music,” says Snow, who later met Trudeau’s son (and future prime minister himself) Justin at an awards show. After Jamaicans moved into his neighborhood - thanks to then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s revised immigration policies - reggae infiltrated his life for good. Growing up as Darrin O’Brien in Irish projects in Toronto, he was raised on classic rock, from Kiss to soft-rock kings America. Snow’s career has been, to put it mildly, unconventional. Will Snow now capitalize on its renewed profile? “ Capitalize?” he says, as if the word is foreign to him. “I said, ‘Let’s see if this can pass the original,’ and then I looked at the views on YouTube and was like, ‘Holy shit, no joke!’” “When I heard it, I got chills,” Snow, who will turn 50 later this year, says of the original “Con Calma” record. “I wanted to pay tribute to the classic,” Daddy Yankee says, “and the best way to do that was to bring the man who made it.” The song has hit Number One on various charts and has been streamed and downloaded tens of millions of times last week Daddy Yankee and Katy Perry performed it together on the American Idol finale. Last year saw the release of a slew of EDM remixes of the song, and a buzzed-about Irish sitcom Derry Girls ( available on Netflix) featured “Informer” in a recent episode.īut few of those usages top the incorporation of the song into Daddy Yankee’s monster 2019 hit, “Con Calma.” A Spanish-language remake of “Informer,” the song also features what Yankee calls “a surprise factor”: newly recorded parts by Snow himself. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler danced to it in the 2015 comedy Sisters, Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon included it in one of their “History of Rap” medleys on The Tonight Show, and Drake sang a portion of it during a recent Juno Awards tribute to Canadian music. When no one was looking, “Informer” - with its pumping beat, spit-fire patois and “licky boom-boom down” hook - has refused to go away. But people didn’t know what I was singing.” “It’s not, ‘Baby, I love you.’ I wrote that song in jail about informers. “That’s a jail song,” he says, still sounding surprised. ![]() Speaking from his home in Toronto, Snow is still baffled that his reggae-hip-hop merger “Informer” topped charts and moved millions of copies over 25 years ago.
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