[View with PicLens]

Photography by Gabriel Knight

I had the privilege to speak with Halifax recording artist, Classified on his last Calgary visit - ch-ch-check it out.

Kane: From listening to the new album and then reading over the lyrics of songs like Trouble, you bring up your own inner battles. How do you feel they influence your listeners?

Classified: I think it makes people more comfortable in themselves. With this album, I talk about a lot of things that usually I wouldn’t talk about because it wasn’t cool in hip hop, you know what I mean. With this one, I kind of felt like I wasn’t looking for something other than to be honest and say normal, everyday living shit that a normal guy can relate to.

Kane: When you mention drugs, hardships and being judged, what is it about making music makes you feel better about those things?

Classified: Where I was coming from – which I grew up in Enfield - is 25 minutes from Halifax. I was first doing music with two other guys before we moved to Halifax and that was where we kind of got into the scene. Even then, I always felt like I had something to prove and had to prove to these guys, who were doing it for a awhile, that I could hang and my shit was tight. Once you fight so many of those battles, it just comes to a point with anybody or anything where you’re like ‘forget everybody else – I’m not worried about what they feel like’. If you feel like you’re giving it your all, what else is there to do?

Kane: Was there an “aha!” light bulb moment in the early days? Where you changed the way you did things before getting signed?

Classified: Ah no. It was always kind of grassroots. I started out writing my own lines and when I couldn’t get any beat makers to give me beats, I learned how to make beats. Then when I couldn’t get any record labels to put out my records when they were done, I started my own record label. It went from there to setting up my own tours and just kept rolling. After you’ve done it 12 times, you learn it, man! Then Sony got involved after seeing that I had some success on my own.

Kane: You also never had a group; it was always a one-man show.

Classified: But that’s just the way it was, in Canada; no one was tripping over themselves trying to discover rappers. Coming from Enfield and then Halifax in the Maritimes, this shit wasn’t going to happen on its own. And once you realize that, it’s like: ‘alright lets go to work’… and it’s a lot of work, but I’m glad I did it.

Kane: Was there a lot of support in Halifax for hip hop?

Classified: Yeah, just like any scene in Canada. It’s a big country of communities of tight-knit people.

Kane: What specific beauty in life keeps you going?

Classified: Well I just had a baby girl.

Kane: That’s a solid reason.

Classified: Oh yeah. Well I guess now it’s my job, so I want to make sure I push this as far as I can. This all started as a hobby of just making music and hanging with my boys. Just making sure I’m working really hard and doing as many interviews. Once I decided to make this into a career, then yeah, there was a lot of grinding and maybe doing things that I didn’t want to do. But I did them if it helped get the music out…and I may have just forgotten the question and kept blabbing.

Kane: No I don’t mind, that’s the lyricist in you talking.

Kane: I was talking with a group of friends the other day about the idea of radical truth. Basically, you become a living, walking ball of honesty – regardless of how harsh things come off. You have directness to your style we’re not always used to.

Classified: There are a lot of people, like K-Os, who say a lot of things you have to listen to again and again and sort of dissect. His lyrics can be taken different ways – sometimes I wish I wrote more like that. I’m not a kid who grew up reading a bunch of books; I don’t know a bunch of crazy words; I didn’t take sociology; I’m a regular dude who loves hip hop and I’m gonna write it. It comes across so blunt because I’m gonna say things just like in this conversation when you ask me a question. I’m not gonna go: ‘well, the stars are connected to the sun…’ – I just don’t get that shit. Sometimes it sounds cool. But I’m not gonna sugarcoat it or make anything sound deeper than it really is.

Kane: But then, of your creative element, you made the new album into a choose-your-own-adventure concept. How did that idea come about?

Classified: It was an idea that cracked in my head one day. Those books, from back in the day - those were the books I read, because you could read them in two hours. It was something that was different because it was like a day-in-the-life of Classified. If you want to go to a club after one song, go to track 18; if you want to go for a bike ride, go to track 7. It just brings more of the full album back. With ringtones, singles and beats being so big right now, with this, you need to get into the full album or it won’t make sense.

Kane: Yeah, in so many hip hop records there are always skits and intros and voice clutter.

Classified: And that’s what I mean, I’ve had skits on albums but on this one, I didn’t want some stupid skit on it where people would listen to it once and be like: ‘ha ha, that kind of funny’. I wanted to make the choose-your-own-adventure aspect a side story in the entire album.

Kane: Aside from your own stuff, what makes a good listenable record for you?

Classified: If I can tell that an artist really poured their heart into it and really wanted to say some shit, I can always get into it. That’s why when Kanye’s first record called, the College Dropout, came out a few years ago, I was like: ‘shit, this guy’s doing exactly what I want to do’. He was just so direct; he said what he wanted. He just said the shit in hip hop no one else would say. I like honesty. I think the cool factor and swag is so corny now.

Kane: You’ve been working with a huge slate of Canadian-bred talent, like Joel Plaskett. How did you find that collaboration?

Classified: We always bumped into each other and I always thought he made cool music.

Kane: Thrush Hermit was so good.

Classified: Yeah, that’s when I first met him. So one day we just said, ‘let’s go into the studio one day’. So we showed up at his studio one day and he did a little piano run, he played that and we just kept moving. He was probably the most exciting guy I’ve ever seen in the studio. He would be like, ‘check out this!’ and then he’d run over and grab this echo machine from the 1960s and be like, ‘check this shit out!’ He must have shown me a hundred times, but all it would do was echo. Then he’d just keep running around, plugging things. He just had a good energy that made it exciting to be making music and it was cool to see that with a guy who has been doing it for that long.

Kane: You also had Buck 65.

Classified: When I did my first show in Halifax in ’95, it was with Stinkin’ Rich, which was Buck’s original rap name… Choclair and Maestro, I’ve worked with both those guys over the years and Chad Hatcher’s a guy on my label who’s from back home.

Kane: What will it take to break into the states or, at least, have an internationally known Canadian sound?

Classified: I think that’s what’s wrong with us. I think we need to stop thinking about breaking into the states. Why do we need to break in there when there is the whole rest of the world? Even since the Choclair days, with Let’s Ride, everyone was like: ‘this is our time’. I’m a very opinionated person, but the hip hop music I see in the States is not what I’m into, anyways.

I just have a bad vibe. I had a manager from the States about two years ago – he was only my manager for two weeks and he was always like: ‘you really gotta do this and no no take this, you really need to make your money’. There were just a lot of really money hungry things that just showed me that the horror stories were true.

I think Canadians are making great hip hop, I don’t think we need to break into the States.