Back in the 90s the choice between hip hop and rock was viewed as a binary, and as a kid you were expected to pick one and express a sort of tribal allegiance. And yes, there were racial fault lines involved, especially among people who lived in insular communities.
If you were a self professed fan of rock, you were supposed regard anything even tangential to hip hop as inherently ridiculous garbage that required no talent to produce. I remember seeing the punk band Goldfinger in 1996 when lead singer John Feldman quieted the crowd, took on a somber tone and announced we were going to have a moment of silence for the just-slain Tupac Shakur…immediately before the band’s drummer launched into the noisiest, most chaotic solo he could muster.
The crowd loved it. There was no indication anyone stopped to think about why they were celebrating the death of another person, let alone one the violent end of a rising star who was only 25 years old when he was slain by a gunman who remains at large 30 years later
On the hip hop side, rock was either regarded as a relic, a nonentity or entirely lacking in the spark that made you feel the music.
In that environment, there was a narrow window for white performers to break through as hip hop artists, but until the emergence of Eminem it was a deal with the devil, and the cost was spending one summer on top of the world and the rest of your existence as a punchline.
Just ask Vanilla Ice. Or Marky Mark, who doesn’t exist anymore because Mark Wahlberg wisely switched to acting and would like everyone to forget he once strutted around with pants halfway down his ass. (“Back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark, this is how we used to make the party start,” Eminem rapped in one of his early tracks.)
Purveyors of reggae-hip hop were not exempt from the aforementioned dark pact, which is why the mainstream hasn’t heard anything from Snow in almost 35 years.
The 56-year-old Darrin Kenneth O’Brien was the hottest artist on the planet for a good chunk of 1992, and despite a name that conjures images of a guy singing twee Gaelic tunes, Mr. O’Brien spat reggae and dancehall with a patois that had listeners sure they were hearing a guy from Jamaica.
“People dem say mi come from Jamaica but mi born and raised in di ghetto of Toronto,” the bespectacled, white-as-you’d expect O’Brien chants on his worldwide hit, Informer:
Informer includes an intro and a short rap from MC Shan, a black rapper, for credibility purposes that were essential in the 90s. (“Well, if black dudes are cool with this pasty Canadian guy singing like a coked out Bob Marley, who am I to argue?”)
Ostensibly it’s about Snow, he of a known criminal reputation, being accused of “stabbing someone down the lane” and heroically refusing to turn informer/snitch on some unnamed greater target. The story was frequently worked into marketing materials at the time to burnish the credibility MC Shan already established: Snow isn’t just good at affecting a Jamaican accent, and he doesn’t just have the approval of respected emcees, he’s also a real criminal! He’s legit, okay?
But dig a little deeper and it turns out Snow was involved in a bar fight and was booked into police lockup or a county jail, not a state prison or its Canadian equivalent.
That changes the calculus considerably. It’s like being told someone played professional baseball, then finding out that instead of being a Yankees or Dodgers regular, he pitched 3.2 innings for the Savannah Bananas in their 2024 campaign.
Regardless, Snow’s pact granted him an earworm that blasted from boomboxes and on MTV all summer as people tried to figure out exactly what the hell the guy was saying.
Most of it’s an unimaginative blow-by-blow account of his arrest for possible minor assault stemming from the aforementioned bar argument and the allegedly enthusiastic welcome he received from the drunk drivers, petty thieves, kids caught spraying graffiti and other hardened criminals who populate the cells of Canada’s notorious local lock-ups. A group that was in Mr. O’Brien’s telling so impressed with his cajones, they welcomed him like a lord of the criminal underworld finally returned to his people. Game recognize game and all that.
To this day I don’t know what licky boom boom down means, except possibly the name of a supplementary service at a shady shiatsu salon staffed by undocumented and indentured women of nondescript Asian origin, but the rest is straightforward: Snow is tough, Snow sounds like a Jamaican guy, Snow is respected, Snow is into them irie girls, them irie girls love Snow, bombaclot.
Regardless, Snow walked so that guys like Matisyahu could run, and instead of having their careers extinguished just as quickly as they began, today’s white reggae artists often enjoy long, drawn-out declines playing to small- and medium-size crowds on the sunshine reggae circuit.
But Snow, pioneer that he was, saw his star fall within months, culminating in Jim Carrey parodying him as Imposter in an In Living Color skit. In the 90s, there was no way back from this:
A licky boom boom down!
