On Monday night, Hand’Solo Records released the first single of Epic and mine’s upcoming album Nassau Manor. The single is accompanied by a video shot by Epic and edited by me. The single, “Hold It Down,” is an ode to Canadian Prairie hip-hop music, which Epic has been a champion of for over 25 years.
I first heard Epic at my friend Dan’s place many years ago. Dan had picked up the mixtape Old Gifted & White at a show that I couldnt make. The mixtape featured songs from Epic, Soso, Chazmo and other artists from Saskatchewan and Alberta. It really opened my eyes to what other hip-hop artists were making across the prairies and went a long way to expanding my horizons of what rap music from our corner of the world could be. I remember thinking that I had had no previous concept of what rap from Saskatchewan should sound like, but that this was it.
Later, when I first met Epic in Saskatoon, he took copies of the album I was performing at the time and gave them out to everyone who bought his CD. This was an extremely generous thing of him to do for someone he had just met, and it got my music into the ears of the exact people who might be interested in what I was making.
Epic is one of the most unique artists I’ve ever encountered and is so true to who he is and where he’s from that I am seriously hard up to think of any rappers from Canada who are more authentic; and only a small portion are as authentic. Rap has become so mainstream, that no one bats an eye when rappers from London, Toronto and New York all sound the same. Rap has lost a lot of the regional idiosyncracies that made it so diverse. In my opinion, that is what makes someone like Epic so special. He truly couldn’t be from anywhere other than the Canadian prairies.