Toronto Urban Music Festival 2009

As Toronto gets ready to start the weekend, Starting From Scratch is live on the radio for his rush hour Traffic Flow Mix Show. Only about 10 minutes into his set listeners, thinking that they are about to hear Common’s “The Corner”, are surprised to hear the voice of Kardinal Offishall over Common’s beat (not too surprised though, as it is Scratch on the radio). This mixtape joint, however, has a sense of urgency to it. Kardi is questioning the turn that the city seems to be taking, referring to the public transit shooting that left a young girl blind. He then calls for unity across the GTA, citing the success story of Atlanta (Hip Hop’s latest hot spot) as a reason for all of us ‘crabs in a bucket’, to use our momentum to tip the bucket over.

While this sentiment and hope is common across the community, from Ajax to Mississauga, his public service announcement of sorts, instead of being heeded, foreshadowed a summer of escalating violence and division.

Of the track, Kardi explains, “As an artist, I use my voice to express certain things. At 3 a.m. I was like, this kind of thing has to be said”.

Part of putting out the song was a conscious belief that it could affect some degree of change. “A lot of people are like, ‘buoy, I thought it was just me that was thinking that’, but now that you have a whole bunch of people that are thinking the same thing, maybe five and 10 people are like, ‘oh, you feel the same way? We should link up and do this!’.”

With the Mayor, the Premier, and the Prime Minister meeting with MPs, community organizations, and churches, desperate to find a solution to the growing number of shooting deaths in the city, Kardi has his thoughts on the issue.

“There’s a lot of things that can be done, but it’s not gonna be just one thing that is going to solve whatever problems is going on in the city”, adding that, “there’s not one thing that people can do, but the thing that people must understand is that you must do something”.

Aside from speaking on topics like this on cuts such as “Mr. Officer” and “Sunday” off of the upcoming album, Fire and Glory, Kardi feels that he is doing his part. He plainly states, “if you wanna prove something to people, sometimes you gotta lead by example”. Kardi then elaborates on his point adding that, “For me, I am very proud to try my hardest to get success so kids can see a man that was just a simple youth from Toronto is able to have some crazy success, and have his mind focused on a huge picture, which is the world — cause I take the world for my turf”.

While he takes the world as his turf, there is no question that he takes Toronto as his home. For this, he has been celebrated by some and criticized by others; yet, in both cases very few see the heart behind his actions.

Kardi points out that, “I love where I stay at — Oakwood and Vaughn — they hold me down and everything, but I consciously big-up the T-Dot on purpose”. In order to prove his point, he strays a bit from the topic: “Imagine if everything is good in my hood; all of a sudden there’s no more drugs, no more violence”. After a brief pause, he continues, “there’s a million other hoods in this city that need the same attention, the same recognition. It’s not just about my hood, it’s about the whole city, cause there’s youth in hoods all over that need the light to shine on them. We all have a common goal is to get to a better situation, and that’s, more times, why I big-up the T-Dot”.

Within what is a noble mission, his hope is flavoured with a bitter taste of realism that is felt when Kardi speaks on the roots of our city’s lesser known alias: “We are called the ‘Screwface Capital’ of the world for a reason, cause we have a tendency to really try and hold each other down”. Even though he has suggested we, as an industry, learn from a city like Atlanta, Kardi doesn’t see it happening in the near future: “You see how Ying Yang Twins did an album called the United States of Atlanta? We could never do that, or at least not anytime soon. It’s like guys feel like groupies if they show love”.

In a moment revealing another reason for the ‘Screwface Capital’ alias (we can be facety at times), he adds, “I don’t know if the industry is ready for all of that unity — which is cool cause I don’t really care too much about the industry as much as I do the community… I’m cool with some industry people, but not cause they’re industry people”.

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