Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Album: Symphony in Effect
Year: 1989
Artist: Maestro Fresh Wes (Wesley “Wes” Williams) is a Toronto-born, North York and Scarborough-raised rapper who has written and recorded nine studio albums, beginning with his debut Symphony in Effect. Maestro is often called the godfather of Canadian hip hop.
You know how it begins.
“This is a throwdown / It’s a showdown/ Hell no I can’t slow down.”
The acapella intro of Maestro Fresh Wes’s “Let Your Backbone Slide” is imprinted on my brain. I’ve always known it. When I was a kid, I’d constantly bring it up out of context. (I wasn’t even a year old when the song came out — that’s how infectious it is.)
Toronto music critic Del Cowie says “Let Your Backbone Slide” has that special “through osmosis” way about it: you hear the song once, and parts of it are absorbed into you forever. He remembers seeing the rapper perform on Electric Circus — the former CityTV on-air nightclub that became a Canadian institution.
In the early days of hip hop in Ontario, artists like Maestro were classified as dance or pop — there was no real mainstream recognition of rap yet. “Let Your Backbone Slide” would change that. The song was the first Canadian hip-hop single to appear in the Top 40; soon after, it crossed over to the American Billboard charts. It was the first to go gold.
Cowie notes that, while Maestro is often cited as the godfather of the genre, his work wasn’t created in a vacuum — and that Maestro would likely say that himself. “I think there's no doubt he shifted hip-hop culture in this city, in this country,” Cowie says. “But there are incremental things that happened along the way, as in all cultural movements. [“Let Your Backbone Slide”] didn't come out of the ether, right? There were other things that were going on that helped.”
One was the growth of hip-hop community radio: Cowie says Maestro got his first break appearing on Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) programs, including the first exclusively dedicated to hip hop, Fantastic Voyage, which was hosted by DJ Ron Nelson. And then there was Michie Mee, also from Toronto, who was the first Canadian rapper to sign a record deal with a major U.S. label. Jamaican-born Mee found success in a male-dominated industry and brought dancehall elements to the genre.
Maestro doesn’t say he’s Canadian in “Let Your Backbone Slide,” although he makes reference to his home later in his career — in “416/905,” for example. The closest he gets is with the lyric “Rap scholar, soul like a Dominican /But like I said before, ‘I'm not American.’”
And he did draw from the hip-hop epicentre of that moment: New York.
(CP/Jason Franson)
“Everyone is looking at New York for their cultural cues when it comes to hip hop at this point,” Cowie says. “It doesn't mean that other places aren't producing hip hop, but New York is clearly running it in terms of what the trends are — whether it's sartorially, lyrically, musically, or culturally.”
But the video for “Let Your Backbone Slide” — which received heavy rotation on MuchMusic and, south of the border, on MTV and BET — makes his location clear. We see Maestro on a Toronto street with fans vying for his autograph as a TTC bus cruises behind him. We’re pulled into a crowded Toronto club with Maestro (who’s wearing what would become his signature outfit of the time: a tuxedo. Gone were the gold chains, sneakers, and tracksuits that dominated the early days of hip hop on the east coast).
The song, Cowie says, is “very of the moment in terms of what that does from a localized perspective. It says to people, ‘Hey, we can compete with what the U.S. is doing. We can straddle all of those influences, make them local, and still be viable as a pop artist here.’”
The reverberations of the record success of “Let Your Backbone Slide” are still being felt. Try as I might, I can’t avoid talking about Drake. But that’s the thing about music: there’s always someone who came before — and before that. The two once shared a dressing room while Drake was a burgeoning star on Degrassi and Maestro was translating his fame to the screen on Instant Star. To hear Drake tell it in an interview with Nardwuar, when one show stopped shooting and the other started, staff would swap the name on the door. “Another legend, man,” Drake said. “Another guy from our city who broke down a wall and had a song that went further than anyone at the time.”
Maestro made his mark on this province, this country, this industry by forcing the mainstream recognition of hip hop. Take as an example the Junos, Canada’s foremost music awards. “The year the song comes out, it's [nominated] in the dance category because there is no hip-hop category,” Cowie says. “The following year, they have to create the hip-hop category because of the success of the song and because of my genre’s success in general.”
Rap is now celebrating its 50th year. It’s among the most popular genres and likely one of the most profitable. But it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always this way and that it took a lot of work from a lot of people to get here. It took community-focused shows, radio play, Electric Circus for Canadian artists to achieve record sales numbers here and in the U.S. — and to create a global juggernaut like Drake.
So why should “Let Your Backbone Slide” be crowned winner of the Ontariovision Song Contest? It helped establish Toronto as a hip-hop destination and propel the growth of the genre in Canada. And, as Cowie says, even after all this time, it holds up. "There are lyrics, narrow references, that are actually quite interesting from a cultural point of view."
And if it is a showdown, maybe no one else can compare to Mr. Maestro Fresh Wes.