Toronto is a name with many faces, depending on which district becomes responsible for your impression of the city. As disjointed as our cultural identity may be, at least our music scene is en route to becoming as recognizable as those in major music locales like the progressive, lo-fi electronica trademark of Los Angeles.
It occurs by a chain of succession. To make it in the industry, you have to take what’s been proven successful and rewrite it into something uncanny. You’ll draw people in on a sense of familiarity — but remember to implement a slight distinctiveness to brand yourself as an individual artist. Once it sells, artists on the rise will likewise try to reproduce the successful elements of your work, perpetuating the cycle of creating their own “new classics.”
What gives a city or a district its trademark sound is when a single artist rises to critical acclaim, giving a concentrated number of artists in one specific locale a reason to begin producing a similar sound — with minor individual variations, of course. This consistency gives the style of production its own “cult genre.” Drake, one of Toronto’s most renowned recording artists, experienced incredible success when he contested the aggressive, lyrically-driven model of ‘90s old school with his introspective, R&B-infused hip-hop over artistically engineered beats.
Though Drake is not exclusively featured in Toronto’s repertoire of successful artists, being one of the first internationally recognized names of our generation, he does play a significant role in founding the overtones of Toronto’s distinct brand of music.
Simply put, he reinvented the conventions of hip-hop, softening them up a little, which leaves us trying to make shoes out of the footprints he’s left behind for the city. With how substantially singing choruses and rapping the verses distinguished him within the industry, it has become second nature for artists in Toronto to implement Drake’s poetic over-sharing complemented and 40’s re-purposing of soulful samples in their own work.
Abel Tesfaye, performing under the pseudonym The Weeknd, is a Scarborough native. His lyrical crooning over women is thematically comparative to Drake, only with a darker ambience that moves out of Drake’s champagne and stage lights, and into the sinister atmosphere of the dimly lit after-party. His trilogy of mix tapes, House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence, embraced Drake’s unrepentant, navel-gazing lyricism, but with the proven success of sung choruses to flourish the aggression conventional to the hip-hop genre, Abel, like Drake knew to market his powerful falsetto.
The same falsetto is thematically different when paired with the woozy, lush compositions by the producers, Doc McKinney and illAngelo. Where Drake’s signature over-indulgence had more romantic connotation and context, The Weeknd harbours his overtly sexual atmosphere on predatory.
Again, the industry received a hip-hop/R&B artist from Toronto who put as much emphasis on the artistic direction of his aural elements, as well as the vocal and lyrical aspects of his sound. In recognizing the key contributors to Drake’s success and implementing the tactics into his own work, the chain of succession allows those listening outside of Toronto to discern what the 416 sounds like.
And Party Next Door, a 20 year old who hails from Mississauga, perpetuates it, especially in signing to Drake’s OVO Sound label. He compounds the crepuscular ambience of The Weeknd and the egoistic bravado of Drake’s hype lyricism into a cohesive sum of his predecessors’ parts. His self-titled debut mix tape, released by OVO Sound renders him as the third major successor in the tier of Toronto’s urban talent.
Toronto has been under the radar for years as a cultural hub, but with musical talent to put it on the map, the coming years may see a vast change to Toronto’s reputation. The talent that surfaces from a city plays an incredibly important role in the way the city’s brand is received internationally. Local recording artists with distinct and consistent soundscapes have the ability not only to command the attention of the industry, but inspire a pursuit for the locals from their hometown.
