“Everybody turned me down: Gap, Foot Locker,” the Toronto-born rapper and music executive tells ET Canada. “The only thing I never applied for was McDonald’s, and that’s because there’s no way I was going to work at McDonald’s. But everybody fronted on me, so you know, it was music or bust.”
Offishall, who began releasing music in the mid-’90s, made a name for himself with his bombastic, uniquely Caribbean-Torontonian sound back when there wasn’t a blueprint for success for hip hop musicians in Canada. “Of course, we had Maestro and Michie [Mee], but it seemed like those were unicorn avenues, as opposed to like, if you follow these steps you would get to a certain place,” he says.
“I needed someplace where they had enough resources, they had a similar vision and a place where I could really go and kill it and not be limited by the infrastructure of the country,” he explains. “And unfortunately, our Canadian music industry is more like a cruise ship than a speedboat, where the changes happen very slowly…. We’re decades behind all these other countries.
Among those new Def Jam artists is Zambia-born, Winnipeg-raised singer-songwriter Lavi$h, and Jamaican dancehall star Masicka. Beyond that, Offishall says he’s currently looking at artists in South Africa, the U.K. and even Latvia. “It’s a really dope time because I think the face of Def Jam will literally be one that’s global right now as opposed to, you know, just being hyper focused on the United States,” Offishall says.