The M.O.T Podcast – Ep17

Bless and Lemme of The Moment of Truth Podcast sit down with Canadian reggae icon Snow. 27 years after his smash hit informer he returns to the game with over 1 billion views and a certified diamond single for his collaboration with Daddy Yankee, Con Calma.

Snow Didn’t Face ‘Culture Vulture’ Label – Says Jamaicans Gave Him Their Approval

Source: Sade Gardner, http://jamaica-gleaner.com

Canadian singer, Snow, is not a man who is easily influenced by the noise. His words and actions delineate that he does what he wants to do, when he wants to do it. Interestingly, when it comes to his love affair with reggae and dancehall music, he makes it clear that Jamaicans call the shots.

In the most sanguine tone, he relayed that if Jamaicans had ever accused him of appropriating or misrepresenting dancehall music, just like that, he would have pulled the plug on his career.

“I had to get approved from Jamaica before anybody else could really like me and I understand that,” he told The Gleaner. “If Jamaicans came to me and said, ‘Yow Snow, we don’t understand you doing the music’, I’d step back and say ‘Fine’, and just listen instead. I like listening to reggae artistes better than singing anyways, so I would have stepped back, but they didn’t, they told me to do my thing.”

Continue reading

Winter Is Here: Inside the Return of ‘Informer’ Rapper Snow

Source: David Browne, https://www.rollingstone.com

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. “That’s a jail song,” he says, still sounding surprised. “It’s not, ‘Baby, I love you.’ I wrote that song in jail about informers. But people didn’t know what I was singing.”

When no one was looking, “Informer” — with its pumping beat, spit-fire patois and “licky boom-boom down” hook — has refused to go away. 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. 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.

But 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. “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.

Continue reading