When I released my B-Boy Destruction 12″ single in 1988, I was caught up in radio broadcasting and concert promotion, and never had thoughts of taking my rapping skills and career to another level. The truth was though, that since the 1979 release of Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, I was obsessed with the new found art of rapping. Early rap artists like Kurtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 became my heroes and inspiration but nobody in Canada saw rap music as a tempting and shining red apple ripe for the picking. Besides, my rapping skills were average, and I lacked that typical base tone in my voice that was consistent with successful rappers, so I never thought I had a chance. 

In 1979 I was a dee-jay, my crew was called Fantastic Voyage, and were just good enough to play local Ontario high schools and junior high schools, weddings, and house and banquet hall parties. Because rap was so new at this time, we were unique because we introduced Black music to all of these places because of our true love for it, we played disco, funk, Motown, Soul and R&B for all audiences, and in the process, we also introduced live rapping. This was one of the most exciting times in my early life as a dee-jay, because although there were dee-jays and emcees, there were hardly any Canadian rapping at this time. But by 1980 and with Rapper’s Delight, Another One Bites The Dust(Queen) and Good Times (Chic) were enjoying dominant radio airplay in Canada and North America.  

In this time, Canadian rappers were heard, but rarely seen, nobody had a real name for themselves, and the term Hip-hop had not been born yet. But by 1982, I was rapping live on small stages and in basements and school stages for these audiences at this time. I was doing it for fun, because the art of rapping was new and exciting, to the point where regular Toronto people of all colours and creeds had completely memorized 8-minute extended versions of Rappers Delight and Funk You Up (Sequence), all getting regular rotation on Toronto’s 1050 CHUM, 680 CFTR, and all top-40 stations across Canada and North America.  

I had chosen the path of a dee-jay yes, but when the Toronto people first tasted rap they wanted more of it, and it was even fascinating for them to see it. Junior High schools and basement parties made great showcasing opportunities, so often during gigs featuring our Fantastic Voyage Sound Crew, I would often pick up the mic and rap, my dee-jay Ian Khan spinning Good Times or. Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll (Vaughan Mason) as my instrumental sound tracks. Back in these days, people usually stop dancing, then stand around in a big circle with their friends and partners and watch the performance, then applause afterwards. I wasn’t the best sounding rapper, but rappers were scarce in Toronto’s early 80’s, so people appreciated seeing an piece of this new art they had only listened to or heard about.

It would just be a matter or time before the next level, in 1980s I was asked to go into record a bootleg rap record over the instrumental of The Breaks (Kurtis Blow). The studio turned out to be a living room cassette recorder and mic, but the producer, Jeff Martini, was also a top disco dee-jay who had one of the best weekend nightclub gigs in far-away Mississauga. He had seen the transformation of disco birthing rap, and I was the only person he knew that had any skills whatsoever. Hence the birth of my first single, Breakdown (Ronny O). About 100 copies were pressed and the record made no impact, I sounded squeaky. Yet, to my credit, this record is one of the first Canadian vinyl record that can be traced and found that features any Canadian rapping.

 In 1988 I was thriving as Toronto’s and Canada’s leading and most dedicated hip-hop promoter while hosting the Fantastic Voyage Program CKLN 88.1 FM. When hip-hop gang infestation became an issue, I became a victim of it and decided to turn a negative into a positive by releasing a message song called B-Boy Destruction. Again, my aim was to try to send a message to the people to stop the violence, but I never envisioned being an artist, happy with my full time role as a promoter and broadcaster. After spending time recording the track at Beat Factory studios in Pickering, I then started my own Apache recording studio and became an engineer-producer and commercial studio in the basement of my North York home. I would eventually invite Beat Factory to relocate from Pickering and share this new central basement space, more accessible to Canada’s crop of upcoming urban talent. I would spend years engineering, recording and producing some of Canada’s best upcoming urban talent, many of whom were Toronto’s first wave of rappers and reggae chatters.

Fast forward into the future, the pandemic comes, the world pauses. I have time to think selfishly and have the peace of mind to reset and do anything I want to do. I was given a new music software package called FL Studio by the distributor who joked that I’d never master it. I took that as a challenge and rediscovered how much I missed the recording studio and engineering lifestyle. This was my life. Then the thought came to me, why not make an album. I consulted with friends and producers who all offered to help me fulfill this journey as crazy as it seemed, nobody would care about a 59 year old rapper I was told, and some even said I should write a book instead.l

All I can say is something happened, I never knew I had it in me to create one album, but in February of 2023, I would release not just one album, but a 5-album series called 40 Years Too Late, 54 songs in all. No Canadian rap artist had ever done this before. People stop rapping at 60, what the hell was I thinking.  Each album would be it’s own entity, 

1. Rap

2. Gangster

3. Reggae

4. House

5. Politics