Dope! Over an hour of choperation with the one and only Kardinal Offishall.

For decades, Toronto hip-hop fans have understood their own sound: a hybrid of east coast boom bap and west coast melodies with an aesthetic style and cadence derived from the Caribbean. Rapper and producer Kardinal Offishall wasn’t the first from the city to come up with this but he did perfect it and, in doing so, established Canada’s inaugural contribution to hip-hop’s canon of regional sounds. Kardi’s ingenuity won him awards and the respect of his American peers and it gave aspiring musicians leverage to leap over the structural limitations of the local industry, and express themselves as defiantly Canadian — no matter where their families originate. Kardinal looks back on his career in this lecture at the 2016 Red Bull Music Academy.

The Red Bull Music Academy is a global music institution committed to fostering creativity in music. We celebrate music, its culture, and the transformative minds behind it. Begun in 1998, the Academy has taken the core principles that underlie its annual workshop for selected participants and applied this curatorial approach to events, lectures, and city-wide festivals throughout the year.

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