'Informer' by Snow gets the white rapper backlash [March 21, 1993]
Plus: The Bluebells, Ice T, and Mary J Blige
Greetings, Time Travellers! đ
Itâs March 21, 1993 again
đ° President Mary Robinson visited Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, the first time ever that an Irish head of state had met the British Monarch.đ˝ď¸ Eddie Murphyâs political comedy The Distinguished Gentleman hits cinemas.đş Red Dwarfâs Norman Lovett gets his own new sitcom, I, Lovett.
đś Number One song in the UK Top 40 is still âOh Carolinaâ. Letâs stick with novelty reggae this week and discussâŚ
This weekâs Number 2: âInformerââSnow
I have a vivid memory of hearing âInformerâ for the first time.
It was a cold, rainy morning in 1993. I was eating my cereal in bed, trying to stay warm while dreading the thought of school. The radio was tuned to Ian Dempseyâs 2FM Breakfast Show, and Ian played this track, which was catchy in a âWTF is this?â kind of way.
After it faded out, Dempsey said something like, âthatâs the new big hit from the rapper Snow, who is actually white, believe it or not.â
And I literally did this:
Possibly adding, âare you fucking kidding me?â
Because we had talked about this. Human civilization had survived Vanilla Ice and vowed as one, ânever again.â Suddenly, here was Vanilla Ice 2.0 doing some kind of hip-hop/reggae fusion. And he wasnât just white.
He was Canadian.
My reaction was far from unique. Although âInformerâ was a monster hit, the general reaction was that this guy was a clown, and the single was possibly some kind of practical joke.
Plus, the lyrics were ridiculous. What was he even singing about? âA leaky bum-bum downâ? Was he singing in French?
Yo, Snow, they came around here looking for you the other day
So, what was Snowâs whole deal?
âInformerâ actually contains a pretty accurate autobiography, although itâs buried in the third verse and coded in Jamaican patois. It goes like this:
Yes a daddy me Snow me are de article don
But the in an a-out a dance an they say where you come from-a?
People dem say ya come from Jamaica
But me born an' raised in the ghetto that I want ya to know-a
Pure black people man thatâs all I man know
Yeah me shoes are a-tear up an'a me toes just a show-a
Where me-a born in are de one Toronto
Now, the lengthy gap between the question (âWhere you come from-a?â) and the eventual answer (âTorontoâ) is very funny. But the lines in between do actually tell us what we need to know about this guy.
Snowâs real name is Darrin OâBrien, and he grew up in a rough Irish-Canadian neighbourhood in north Toronto (making him more Irish than House Of Pain, but letâs not get into that again). After his parents split, his mother raised Darrin and his siblings in a housing project riddled with gang violence. âBorn an' raised in the ghettoâ is actually pretty accurate.
This Toronto neighbourhood was also home to many Caribbean immigrants. Young Darrin formed a close bond with some of them, and they introduced him to reggae and dancehall. They also taught him how to toastâthe vocal style thatâs roughly a reggae equivalent of rapping (as discussed in the recent Shaggy newsletter).
âPure black people man thatâs all I man knowâ, is probably an exaggeration, but it is true that OâBrien spent a lot of his teenage years in Black communities. Thatâs how he met Jamaican DJ Marvin Prince, who helped his musical evolution. OâBrien and Prince started co-writing, and eventually they made âInformerâ together.
Prince gave OâBrien the stagename Snow, and also created the painfully cringey backronym, âSuper Notorious Outrageous Whiteboyâ. Thankfully, it did not catch on.
Snow was now making music, but his chief passions remained drinking and fighting. He became a familiar face in the local cop shop, and seemed likely to end up dead or in jail.
So dey put me in de back de car at de station
In 1988, Snow did find himself in jail.
A bar brawl ended in multiple stabbings, and Snow got picked up on attempted murder charges. He spent eight months in prison awaiting trial, but charges were eventually dropped. While behind bars, Snow had kept writing music, including one violent fantasy about what heâd do to whoever gave him up up to the cops.
The lyrics to that song roughly go like this:
Hey, whoever told the police about me?
Iâm going to find you and shoot you
Someone told the cops they saw me stab a guy in an alleyway
Iâm going to find you and shoot you
But theyâre coded in Jamaican patois, so they they sound like this:
Informer, ya' no say daddy me Snow me I go blame
A licky boom boom dem
'Tective man a say, say daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane
A licky boom boom dem
âA lickyâ should probably be written as âI lick heâ, which roughly means âIâll lick himâ in the fighting sense of the word. âBoom boomâ refers to the gunshotsâSnow used to cock fingerguns at the audience when performing this song live.
So, this cute little pop song is actually a death threat. And not an idle one eitherâit was written by a guy in jail for attempted murder, and who was very pissed at whoever snitched.
Vanilla Ice claimed to be from the streets until Ice T delivering the classic put-down: âWhich street you from? Sesame Street?â But Snow actually was kind of gangsta: a working-class kid with no resources, no hope, and no options other than crime.
The real difference between him and his rap contemporaries wasâŚ
Bigger dem are they think dem have more power
Snow and Vanilla Ice had one thing in common. Both of them got absolutely murdered by Jim Carrey on In Living Color.
Vanilla Ice was finished forever after Carrey unveiled his parody, âWhite White Babyâ, which contained savage lines like:
Whenâs it gonna stop? Maybe never
I get richer with every endeavour
Iâm livinâ large and my bank is stupid
Cause I just listen to real rap and dupe it
âInformerâ was a huge hit in the U.S., spending seven weeks at Number One in the Billboard Hot 100, which meant that Jim Carrey couldnât not do another parody. He gave his fellow Irish-Canadian a vicious beat-down in a track called âImposterâ, which featured lyrics like:
Hear me on the radio, think I could not be blacker
But on my video, you see I'm really a cracker
Pretending I was a Rasta since I was in jammies
I should paint my face and start belting out, "Mammy!"
Both songs make the same accusationâthat these are white kids trying to steal Black music. Which is a reasonable concern, because itâs happened before. And any idiot could see that record companies were dying to find a white hip-hop star, for obvious reasons
Listen for me, you better listen for me now
In hindsight, everyone was a little unfair to Vanilla Ice.
Vanille Ice did a huge and fascinating interview with The Ringer back in 2020, telling the full story of how a white trash kid became drawn to hip-hop. It was vibrant and liberating, a ray of hope at the shitty end of the American dream.
When he turned out to be pretty good at it himself, people grabbed him and tried to exploit him. LiterallyâSuge Knight dangled him off a hotel balcony until he agreed to share his profits from âIce Ice Babyâ. That money became the seed capital for Death Row Records.
Snowâs story is kind of the same, except with more reggae and less being thrown off hotel balconies. You know who else has the same kind of backstory? A dead-end white kid rescued by rap music? Eminem.
Jim Carreyâs parody calls Snow a âmiddle-class white kid from Torontoâ, which says a lot about how Snow was packaged. While record labels were happy to admit that he was white, they didnât draw attention to the fact that he was poor. Like Vanilla Ice, he was marketed as a kind of aspirational rock star figure.
And thatâs really what people hated about them, I think. They just felt so fake.
Snow never had another major hit after âInformerâ, although he went on to become surprisingly popular in Jamaica. He had a Number One there in 1995 with âAnything For Youâ, featuring a bunch of reggae stars including Beanie Man and Buju Banton.
âInformerâ lives on forever, making regular appearances on Worst Songs of All Time.
I wonât say itâs a good song, but it is definitely is a very fun song. I definitely donât hate it as much as I did on that cold morning in 1993, when I spat out my cereal at the though of another white rapper.
Elsewhere in the charts
Number 5 (New Entry): âYoung At HeartââThe Bluebells
âYoung At Heartâ is technically a cover version of an old Bananarama track, although The Bluebells changed so much that theyâre essentially two different songs.
This became an issue in later years. Robert Hodgens of The Bluebells used to go out with Siobhan Fahey, and he co-wrote the original track, which made things easy from a copyright perspective when The Bluebells recorded their version.
However, in 2002, the band were dragged to court by session musician Robert Valentino who created that distinctive violin riff. He won, because theyâre two different songs with different melogies.
Anyway, the original video features a cameo from the delightful Claire Grogan (second Red Dwarf star to appear in this issue). The song was reissued in 1993 after appearing in a Volkswagen ad, and became a much bigger hit than either of the two previous versions.
Number 19 (New Entry): âPressure UsââSunscreem
Suscreem were weirdly popular in the States, and this begin their second Number One in the Billboard charts, following âLove U Moreâ. Nothing against them, but⌠why them?
Big EMF vibes off this track, especially on the verse which sounds a lot like âUnbelievableâ.
Number 24 (â from 34): âMore More MoreââBananarama
Hey look, Banarama are in the charts twice this week! âMore More Moreâ is a cover version of the old disco track, produced by Stock, Aiken and Waterman, another formerly great trio now in decline after losing a key team member.
Itâs not great.
Number 27 (New Entry): âIt Was A Good DayââIce Cube
Almost embarrassing that Snow is so high in the charts above this one, but hey, itâs not like this is some criminally overlooked obscurity. âIt Was A Good Dayâ is one of hip-hopâs foundational texts, a melancholy, G-funk Ulysses about hood lifeâs precarious nature.
An internet detective did some sleuthing some time ago and figured out when Ice Cubeâs good day happened: January 20, 1992, which was a Monday. This is ironic as the song would eventually inspire the Friday movies.
Number 32 (New Entry): âChok ThereââApache Indian
This is also much better than Snow, and it is a much better take on hip-hop/reggae fusion. Probably the best single from the very strong album, No Reservations.
Album of the Week
Whatâs The 411?âMary J Blige
Nothing illustrates the early 90s UK/US musical divide better than the chart performance of two game-chaning classics: Dreâs The Chronic and Mary J Bligeâs Whatâs The 411?
The Chronic revolutionized hip-hop, invented G-Funk, and did not chart in the UK until a 2000 reissue. Mary J Bligeâs rap-infused RânâB debut fared slightly better, scaling the dizzy heights of Number 53 in the March 1993 album charts before vanishing again.
Of the two records, you could argue thatWhatâs The 411? had the greater impact. The sound here is so archetypal that it has basically defined all pop music for the last 30 years.
People often say that Mary J Blige (and her producer here, Sean âPuffyâ Combs) was the first person to mix soul vocals with hip-hop beats. That might come as a shock to hip-hopâs first diva, Chaka Khan, who is actually represented here with a cover version of âSweet Thingâ:
But while Mary J Blige might not have invented the genre from scratch, there is an undeniable alchemy happening on Whatâs The 411? The beats, the lyrics, the vocals, and the production all come together to create songs like âYou Remind Meâ and âChanges Iâve Been Going Throughâ, ingenious blueprints for pop music in a post hip-hop era. This, right now, is the sound of the future.
And although Puffy and the rest of the team deserve a lot of credit, it all hinges on Blige. Mary J was only 22 but her voice belongs to someone much older, someone whoâs been in and out of love so many times that sheâs entirely run out of fucks to give.
So, Whatâs The 411? is undoubtedly a landmark moment in musical history. Itâs also a very, very good record in its own right.
A gamechanging debut from a generational talent.
More stuff!
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The real victim in all that is MC Shan who was at least mildly respected until he played Snow's sidekick. Oof.
Now that you mention it, Sunscreem was strangely popular over here. I loved O3, but was also in my "take 2 of everything" phase, so...
Also: Shows should bring back in-house dancers.