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The Joy of Hip-hop

Veteran DJ to host MC battle series at the Beagle

QUOTE: "Hip-hop in general kept a lot of people out of jail, a lot of people out of gangs and a lot of people from going bad. You had cats DJ-ing in the parks, you had cats DJ-ing in the projects. People came to listen to the music, see people breakdance, and that kept people away from violence."

What: The Hip-Hop Smash Rap Battle

Where: Savage Beagle

When: Tuesdays, Sept. 21 & 28

In the mid-1990s snow culture discovered hip-hop.

Up until then snowsports were represented by punk, metal, hardcore and good old rock ’n’ roll. The odd obscure beat-backed track showed up as a joke in the Creatures of Habit video series prank reels, but for the most part hip-hop was invisible.

But as hip-hop grooved its way into all areas of mainstream youth culture it also became an element on the soundtracks of first snowboarding, and then ski videos. A corps of urban hipster pros took streetwear on to the slopes, sporting headscarves, gold teeth and headphones in the halfpipe.

Whadaya know? The kids followed suit.

Whistler night clubs clued in and began hosting hip-hop nights. One of them, the Savage Beagle, did their part by bringing up Vancouver-based Sean Harris, a.k.a. DJ Sean-Ski, an established DJ and producer and creator of the online urban culture hub Tabloid Productions.

Fast-forward seven years. Hip-hop-specific nights have come and gone, ironically, becoming somewhat obsolete due to the popularity of the sound. Since hip-hop is Top 40 now, what makes a night a hip-hop night?

Sean-Ski can tell you. He’s still around. At seven years and counting his Tuesday at the Beagle is Whistler’s longest running hip-hop night.

But his authority on hip-hop dates back much further than Whistler and the snowboard-hip-hop explosion.

Ask the 31-year-old Harris about coming of age in the mid-1980s in New York City. Harris hails from the Bronx, the veritable birthplace of East Coast hip-hop culture. He grew up in the area around Yankee Stadium, born to a cop and a nurse who encouraged his affinity for music so long as he kept up in school.

As far back as he can remember Harris says his free time was spent scouring New York record stores for funk, breaks and beats, bringing them home to make mix tapes with his similarly-minded friends and then heading out to engage in some good old graffiti tagging.

"I was basically born into the whole culture," he says. "I was DJ-ing when I was maybe about 10 or 11 years old."

His Polish-sounding DJ moniker dates back to this period. A fourth grade gym teacher called him "Sean-Ski" and it stuck.

He recalls DJ-ing at an outdoor block party across from Yankee Stadium at the tender age of 11.

"Back then, to DJ outside, it’s not like today," he explains. "Today, everybody and their brother is a DJ. Back then, to DJ outside you had to have some political status in your neighbourhood. I was this young kid, but in the neighbourhood I had clout because I was into what I was into."

In high school he DJ-ed weddings, baby showers and community hall parties.

As for the gangs of East Coast hip-hop lore, Harris says they were around, but the music kept him out of that world "110 per cent."

"Hip-hop in general kept a lot of people out of jail, a lot of people out of gangs and a lot of people from going bad," he adds. "You had cats DJ-ing in the parks, you had cats DJ-ing in the projects. People came to listen to the music, see people breakdance, and that kept people away from violence."

Instead of jail, Harris ended up in the library – teaching Apple IIe computer skills. Always wearing headphones and fully engrossed in his music, he drew the attention of a fellow library worker, a research tech from Boston, who asked to hear his tapes. The two became good friends.

The tech would eventually distinguish himself in the 1990s as ground-breaking MC Guru, member of the influential hip-hop crew Gang Starr and the namesake of the wildly popular Jazzmatazz hip-hop/jazz/R&B fusion recordings, on which Sean-Ski contributed as a DJ and producer.

Creatively Harris was playing all sorts of cards. He toured with Digable Planets and nouveau funk-sters Jamiroquai. He collaborated with legendary Bluenote jazz musician Donald Byrd on the trac k Time is Moving On for the renowned Red Hot and Cool AIDS benefit compilation album.

At the age of 25 he even found himself an unlikely link between street culture and high culture when he was commissioned to create and perform an experimental "Portishead-like" urban score for New York ballet production The Predator’s Ball .

Despite the creatively fruitful New York scene in the mid-1990s Harris says he felt a desire to seek out a new frontier.

"When you’re in a situation where you’re in one place for a while you don’t really grow as a person," he explains. "New York consists of five boroughs, so you have people that don’t even venture outside their borough. You got people that live in Brooklyn that probably don’t even go to Manhattan to shop. You only know your surroundings. If you venture out it opens your mind."

Intending to try out the West Coast he was headed for Los Angeles where he had friends and family. He didn’t even know of Vancouver until he passed through while on tour as Guru’s Jazzmatazz DJ, a role he held for two years starting in 1993.

The city made a big impression. The fact that he wouldn’t be surrounded with so many acquaintances meant more time for creative projects, he reasoned. So in 1995 New York DJ Sean-Ski relocated to Vancouver.

It didn’t take long before he launched his calling card – online hip-hop culture hub Tabloid Productions. The name, he says is his way of taking something traditionally thought to be negative and sensational and opportunistic and turning the tables, so to speak, to make it into something positive.

He quickly became a fixture of the VanCity hip-hop scene, producing with the homegrown Battle Axe Records crew and landing DJ residencies in Vancouver and Whistler.

Shortly before the turn of the new millennium he received his dual citizenship. Despite the problems he sees with the Vancouver hip-hop community, for now, he intends to stick around.

The biggest problem, he says, is the escalating violence. His own personal breaking point was last Jan. 3 when 23-year-old Rachel Davis was fatally shot while trying to break up a fight in front of the Purple Onion night club in Vancouver’s Gastown, where he had a residency. Wanting no part of any scene that would take down an innocent like Davis, he dropped the night and currently will only DJ in Vancouver for special events.

Drawing on his background in the Bronx, Harris says he can’t make sense of the gang-envy he’s witnessed in Vancouver.

"From where I was raised you have people in that situation because they have no choice, no tools, no resources, not even a decent meal on their dinner table," he says.

"That said, you have cats here in Vancouver that come from well-to-do homes, a good base, and these kids are doing the opposite, which is mind-boggling to me. You live in a four to five bedroom house with three bathrooms, with a back yard. What’s wrong with this picture? I don’t get that. I know guys in the Bronx who would die to live with streams and meadows in their backyard, or to look out their bedroom window and see the mountains."

His take is that insecurity and immaturity are the forces leading kids to emulate over-the-top characters celebrated in commercial hip-hop videos and other forms of media.

"People get caught up in being characters and they try to portray those images," he says. "Boys, they idolize images. A man is gonna be himself. But you got a lot of cats who are boys, and they want to be Scarface. They want to be the Godfather."

The other issue Harris has with the Vancouver scene after being in it for a decade is that its insular, "clique-y" nature seems to hinder progression and innovation.

"It hasn’t really jumped off in the way it can jump off," he says. "It has a lot of potential but I think people’s mind states are in the wrong place. Once you break away from that you have a meeting of the minds. People are not really into taking it to the next level. I think people are afraid to take it to the next level."

The local hip-hop scene in Whistler doesn’t possess the same hang-ups about image, he notes. It’s what has kept him happy to DJ here over the past seven years, and why he’s particularly excited about his upcoming MC battle series taking place over the next two Tuesday nights at his Whistler headquarters in the Savage Beagle basement.

The series will proceed as an actual battle, with mic-wielding wordsmiths trading rhymes over Sean-Ski’s beats to earn the acclaim of the crowd.

The series has assembled phenomenal prizes: first place gets a trip to Las Vegas, second place, an Apple iPod.

It’s a bit of a gamble. There have been other MC battle series in Whistler – albeit none recently put on by someone that once hung out at famous NYC battleground the Lyricist Lounge. If it goes well, Sean-Ski sees even bigger and better things ahead.

"We’ll see what type of interest we get," he ventures. "A lot of people are ready to talk the talk but we’ll see who will walk the walk. If it goes the way I want it to go, we’ll keep it going.

"Hopefully the prizes will get better," he adds.

Better than a trip to Vegas? Better than an iPod?

"For me, the ultimate prize would be a contract," he enthuses. "If you can win a battle and then get a contract, a record deal? C’mon, that’s the ultimate for an MC. That’s what you wanna do, right? If we can make that happen, then I’m happy. Because that means that we made somebody’s dream come true.

"If I can make somebody smile at the end of the night," he adds, "my job is done."

For more information on DJ Sean-Ski’s Hip-Hop Smash Rap Battle series call the Savage Beagle at 604-938-3337.