The video of the Hip Hop Summit concert performance will screen tonight (April 1) at 6pm at CBC in the Barbara Frum Atrium (250 Front). It will broadcast on CBC Radio 2 at the same time.
When reporters asked Reema Major how much she knows about old school Canadian rap during a media scrum before CBC’s Hip Hop Summit concert on Tuesday, the 15-year-old admitted she wasn’t “too familiar” with many of the legends on the bill prior to landing the gig. By the end of the night, she was holding down the mic in a group freestyle battle with the likes of Kardinal Offishall, Michie Mee, Choclair, Red1 and Shad.
The event was one of several milestones the young MC has experienced over the past eight months. Following her debut at all-female festival Honey Jam last August, she went from blabbing into a hairbrush in front of her bedroom mirror to performing on the 2010 BET Awards Cypher to meeting one-on-one with Interscope Records magnate Jimmy Iovine.
Two years ago Major met her mentor is Kwajo Cinqo, one half of Canadian hip-hop duo Ghetto Concept, through a mutual friend. She recorded her debut mixtape Youngest In Charge at 13 and released it at 14. After Honey Jam, she attracted major label interest and eventually signed with Ghetto Concept’s G7 Records, which will release her albums in Canada through a deal with Universal, and Interscope for the US.
A self-described “mother for a new era”, her confident, sometimes caustic flow, professionalism and occasional day-glo style have earned the obvious comparisons to reigning female MC Nicki Minaj, though many of her rhymes have a grittier bite to them.
Born in Khartoum, Sudan, Major moved around Kenya and Uganda as a child before immigrating to Canada and settling in Mississauga a decade ago. Unable to connect with most kids her age, she spent a lot of time rhyming outside her apartment block at Hurontario and Dundas with her older cousins and Sudanese neighbours.
“I was five turning into six. My cousins used to baby sit while my mom would work all day and at nights go to school,” she says. “We’d all be surrounded that bench sitting down, one person hitting the table and everyone just spittin’. Cyphers, literally. Every summer.”
She calls her second mixtape, 15 Going On 25, “a hip-hop lesson” because she chose to rap over many of the classic Mobb Deep, Biggie and Nas beats that she’d spit to in the Mississauga days. Over Eminem’s Stan beat, for example, she describes how traumatic things she experienced – like witnessing a woman jump off a building – made her feel “more advanced than the other kids.”
“I never could correspond with kids my age. I just felt out of place a little bit,” she says. “Like at recess they’d wanna run around and I’d just wanna sit in the corner. I’d always have an older friend. If I was in first grade, she’d be in fourth.”
“Moving around a lot I was exposed to a lot of things the average child doesn’t see – multiculturalism and having to adapt to different environments,” she adds. “At that time it was normal to me. When kids said they stayed still, I was like you don’t move around? It was all I ever did for the longest time. It definitely impacts you because I feel my music is my story and my story is who I am.”
When she was 9 years old she moved with her mother to Kansas City, Missouri but frequently returned to Toronto for vacations. It was during a summer trip two years ago that she met Cinqo who persuaded her to stay and focus on hip-hop.
“He asked me not to go back home. So I’m like, is this music thing really gonna work?” she says. “I called all my friends I’m like I’m not coming back I’m gonna try it. Everyone thought I was crazy.”
Over the next few months she plans to release her third mixtape I Am Legend: The Seven Day Series and will continue working on her debut album. She just returned from Atlanta where she spent time in the studio with producers Bangladesh and The Bizness, among others. Last week’s NOW Magazine cover star Boi-1da has also sent her beats but the two have yet to set down and work on tracks.
“When I first came here I was just a kid who loved to write raps, I would write raps and raps and raps upon raps. I just loved learning formulas, how to break down bars and all that good stuff what’s a 16th and eighth, what’s a banger, how to separate a beat from a single,” she says. “There’s no time for pausing. If you want this you have to grind you have to put your all into it. If you’re not then, in a sense, it’s pointless.”
The video of the Hip Hop Summit concert performance will screen tonight (April 1) at 6pm at CBC in the Barbara Frum Atrium (250 Front). It will broadcast on CBC Radio 2 at the same time.
