Posts with the: billboard tag.

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Snow Performs At The Rogers Spring Music Festival

Source: www.springmusicfestival.com

SnowGuinness World Record holder, Snow will be performing as part of the Urban Hamilton Showcase during the Rogers Spring Music Festival on Thursday May 7th at Seventy Seven Night Club.

Snow was born and raised in the city projects of Toronto, Canada. While in prison he learned to speak patois from other inmates and from there as a singer he found the love for Jamaican music. He studied and sang reggae music with a passion and later made Kingston, Jamaica his second home. After being released from prison he crossed the US border to meet with producer/rapper MC Shan who introduced him to MotorJam’s/Elektra Records co founder David Kenneth Eng (also his manager) to sign a US recording contract.

With the Billboard Pop chart hit “Informer” scoring a straight seven week run at number one, and then followed by another Billboard top ten hit “Girl I’ve Been Hurt” and the DJ turntable hit “Lonely Monday Morning” made Snow an international sensation.

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Snow Bizness : Informer MC Tries To Keep It Real

Source: Jason Keller, www.nowtoronto.com

It’s been 13 years since Darrin O’Brien, aka Snow, heard Informer drifting out of the speakers of his jail-cell radio. Serving a one-year sentence for assault, Snow couldn’t believe his ears. He’d just assumed the sessions he’d done with producer MC Shan were never going see the light of day.

Obviously, it didn’t work out that way; Snow exited the pen in a limo. Informer was a reggae hit to the max. Its catchy patois chorus and rapid-fire delivery had huge crossover appeal, something that eludes most dancehall and reggae heavyweights.

To this day, the former Billboard number-one song reigns in record books as the highest-charting and biggest-selling reggae single in history. Though Snow’s made three proper studio albums since, and a few hits, nothing has come close to touching the success of his debut single. Curiously, Snow doesn’t see Informer as the highlight of his career thus far.

“The song I did with Buju [Banton] was bigger in my mind,” says O’Brien, referring to Anything For You, from 97’s Justuss (East West), which was named after his daughter. “I see that as more of an accomplishment, because it launched me and got me accepted by the reggae community.

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It`s Snow-ing Again

Source: www.jamaicaobserver.com

If he has any anxiety as to how fickle dancehall fans will react to his new album, singjay Snow was not letting on when Splash caught up with him recently. The 32 year-old was more concerned about the sub-zero conditions he was chilling in in his native Ontario than the response to Two Hands Clapping, his comeback set.

‘Man, it’s freezing up here,’ said Snow during a phone link-up. Canada’s best-known dancehall export was in Kingston in November soaking up Jamaica’s more hospitable climes and dancehall vibe, but has been back in Maple Leaf land promoting Two Hands Clapping, which is being distributed in Canada, Japan and Europe by EMI/Virgin.

It is Snow’s first album since the little heard-of Mind On The Moon which was also distributed by Virgin. More significantly, it is five years since the release of Justuss, his third and final album for the Elektra Records affiliate, East West Records; that’s a long time to be away from the dancehall where trends change as quickly as the genre’s latest fashions.

Yet, Snow is not concerned. ‘I left on my own, it wasn’t like, ‘he’s no good no more’,’ he said. ‘I’m here still, working with the right people. It’s going to be easy.’

It hasn’t been easy on the personal front for the lanky Darren O’Brien (Snow’s given name) in the past three years. He says during that period he wallowed in drunkenness and was in and out of Toronto courts answering to a variety of charges that stemmed from his alcoholism.

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Nuff Respect To The Man Called Snow

Source: Gavin Power, Rosco Magazine

He’s been called a lot of things over the years: a murderer, a drunk, an abuser, but nothing hurts Darrin O’Brien, a.k.a. Snow, more than a comparison to Vanilla Ice. Ouch.

Both had hits around the same time. Vanilla with his Ice Ice Baby, and Snow with Informer. Both are white and both were singing black. But that’s where the comparison ends. Over a coffee on Front street, Snow, who’s made a comeback with his new album Mind on the Moon, explains why Vanilla Ice has always been whack.

‘There was a lot of talk about that guy and I always felt a little sorry for him because they (the people around him) made him into that guy. And then he shot his mouth off saying that he grew up hard and all that. It was just lies.’

Darrin did grow up hard. He was raised in a housing project at Don Mills and Sheppard where everybody was getting drunk and fighting all the time. ‘My world was kind of small back then,’ he says as he fidgets with the black toque that he’s pulled down over his ears. ‘That was kind of all that I knew.’

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Evil Spirits

Source: Access All Areas and Primetime

Evil Spirits photoshootDarrin O’Brien has never worked a day in his life — kind of. The Toronto-bred singer whose rapid-fire Jamaican patois helped lodge the song ‘Informer’ on top of the Billboard Singles chart for seven weeks back in 1993 admits to having never held employment outside the music business. ‘The first job I ever had was music,’ he says, ‘and it’s a hard job.

Wrapped in cigarette smoke, O’Brien, better known to the world as Snow, is sitting in a cafe kitty-corner to MuchMusic’s Toronto studios. It’s Thanksgiving, a holiday Monday, and the streets are suitably quiet. It’s also the day before Snow’s comeback record, Mind On The Moon, arrives in stores so he’s working hard to sell me — and the rest of Canada — on his continued relevance.

So far, the odds seem to be in his favour. ‘Everybody Wants To Be Like You’, Mind On The Moon’s first single, sits at Number 2 on Soundscan’s Singles chart as of this writing, and while critics have been less than enthusiastic about Snow’s return (Matt Galloway of Toronto weekly NOW refers to Moon as a ‘scrubbed-down teen-pop nightmare’), MuchMusic and mainstream radio have embraced their prodigal son.

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