Life according to Snow: “I don’t have to be nothing I don’t want to be.”
And who is Snow? A white, Irish, Canadian-born, 23-year-old dance hall rapper who’s responsible for Informer, the No. 1 single on the Billboard charts for the past three weeks.
Being white in a black-dominated rap world is no problem, he says. “Nobody’s dissed me yet.”
Yes, Vanilla Ice comes to mind. Snow knows that.
“I haven’t talked to him,” he says. “He did his thing … People just killed him.”
Does Snow (real name: Darrin O’Brien) worry about the same fate?
“If they do, that’s what’s going to come. I’ll keep putting out good music so they can’t kill me.”
Informer’s popularity speaks for itself. It doesn’t seem to matter that the lyrics are incomprehensible because of Snow’s rapid-fire Jamaican patois – in what is reggae’s answer to rap. (The video, he points out, has the words typed out across the bottom.)