Meet Wasiu: the Montreal rapper writing the hottest sports bars in hip hop
Wasiu has these kids moving at Allen Iverson speed.
When he's not in the studio or on stage, one of Canada’s brightest up-and-coming rappers is usually on the sidelines, decked in black jeans, Timberlands and an Adidas track jacket draped over a hoodie as he watches his team go to work.
The third, fourth and fifth graders he coaches at Montreal’s YM-YWHA community center are taught to run up and down the court in nonstop attack mode. They call themselves the Wolves, and they don’t have a Tall Kid they can just plant in the paint. Wasiu’s Wolves win games by executing coach's go-to gameplan: quick thinking and aggression.
“Push the ball,” Wasiu says over the phone, explaining his team's gameplan. “Push the pace. Press all game.”
This is the philosophy that drives Wasiu, a 25-year-old Montreal native who over the last 12 months has written some of 2016’s dopest bars about sports and society.
Since coming together in 2014, Wasiu, his DJ, Dear Lola, and manager, the mononymous GHOST, have combined to rock crowds from Toronto to South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and his NBA Finals-inspired single “No Jumper” has risen to cult jam status since hitting the rap blogosphere in June.
With his second EP, MTLiens 2, slated to drop in 2017, Wasiu spoke with FOX Sports about his rhymes, sports heroes and about being a black rapper from the wide swathe of Canada called Not Toronto.
"Quebec, man," Wasiu says, laughing. "We're the weird ones."
"Weird" tends to be in the eye of the beholder, particularly when you're looking through a multicultural kaleidoscope like the Montreal music scene, where genre-bending DJs like Kaytranada and Dear Lola have become the gold standard.
But as Wasiu's DJ, Dear Lola (real name Louis-Laurent Bastien) confirms, you can be neck-deep in Montreal's melting pot and still find him...different...from other local emcees.
"[When] I met Wasiu for the first time back in 2014, we were in a basement studio of a mutual friend," Bastien writes in an email. "And he was in there freestyling over these wild 160 BPM instrumentals...I was glad to see an emcee show such open-mindedness."
The energy flying out of this 5'9", 160-something-pound rapper was the first thing that struck Bastien, but it was Wasiu's lyricism that sold him, an EDM disc jockey, on hitching his musical wagon to an unknown Canadian hip hop artist.
"I was blown away by his songwriting," Bastien writes. "I can send him anything and he'll make it into a great song. Not many rappers have the guts to tackle [my style of music]."
With Bastien's help, Wasiu has been pulling up and letting fly from deep in northern Canada for two years now, and his biggest bucket to date dropped this summer with “No Jumper"—a track Wasiu wrote in June after inspiration struck during the NBA Finals.
A collaboration between Dear Lola and Atlanta producer Meltycanon, "No Jumper" is a zen garden of harps and video game samples that stands in stark contrast to its lyrics—bars written by Wasiu that amount to four months of basketball nirvana juxtaposed with the ongoing despair of regularly seeing news of fellow black men being killed by police.
[Warning: NSFW language]
https://soundcloud.com/w-a-s-i-u/nojumperdotcom
It's a gorgeous, highly bring-back-able track, and it probably wouldn't have come to fruition if the Warriors hadn't blown their now proverbial 3-1 lead, according to Wasiu.
“I thought it was going to be over in five games,” Wasiu says. “I just tried to get it written and recorded as fast as I could."
The result is a song where lyrics like "White man told me all I do is jump / jump those expectations with the hugest dunk” melt into basketball punchlines and OJ slams:
Raining threes you need a poncho
We can go Mano a Mano
N***a but I don’t believe in your jumper: ‘Bron or Rondo
That’s cold like AC
Y’all slow like AC in that Bronco
Race and sports infuse Wasiu’s music as they've infused his life.
Born in Montreal in 1990 to a Haitian mother and Nigerian father, James Wasiu Salami is what the Canadian government calls a "visible minority"—a term created for census purposes to describe “persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour."
It's an unwieldy catch-all for Non-White Folks, of which more than 500,000 currently live in Montreal's city limits making up roughly 25 percent of its citizenry. And for multiethnic citizens like Wasiu, the visible minority tag comes with a sidecar of additional, side-eye-centric subcategories. He's "the African one" around his mother's side of the family. "The Haitian one" when he visits dad's people.
Top all this otherness off with Wasiu's status as an English-speaking rapper in a province desperately clinging to its French-speaking roots, and you begin to see the odds Wasiu's contending with in his battle to launch Montreal into hip hop's greater conscience.
"I love it and I hate it," Wasiu says. "It’s so stacked against you. Out here in a French city, I have to work six times harder to get half of what everyone else gets."
This outsider status, paired with a work ethic and a province-sized shoulder chip, is what makes Wasiu part Russell Westbrook, part Allen Iverson and somewhere between a Canadian Skepta and "Andre 3000's pissed off cousin."
Fittingly, Wasiu's first sports hero was The Answer.
“A.I. is my favorite player ever,” Wasiu says. “He was just a dude from a neighborhood, but he showed you a regular person can have super skills. I emulated him growing up. I even got the cornrows because he had him."
In hip hop, the instructive model was Three Stacks.
Wasiu began freestyling at the age of 13, taking cues from a Southern rap scene that had grown up out of the ashes of the '90s East Coast/West Coast beef. Nearly a decade later, he committed himself wholly to rap and named his first EP MTLiens—a nod to Outkast and its formative influences.
“That’s where the ‘MTLiens’ thing came about,” Wasiu says. “Being a visible minority, being an invading force from somewhere else."
And nowhere in Wasiu's life has there been a visible minority as visible as P.K. Subban.
A lifelong Habs fan, Wasiu's engagement in the Montreal Canadiens took on a new, deeper context as Subban, a fellow black Canadian, rose to star status in the NHL with his hometown team.
The Canadiens defenseman's ascent to stardom and subsequent departure from Montreal this summer via a controversial trade to the Nashville Predators became the driving force behind “P.K. Subban"—the lead single off Wasiu's upcoming MTLiens 2. It's a forceful track—a message to a city he believes never came to terms with its best hockey player not looking like most of its citizens.
“I wanted to tell people, ‘Despite whatever you think about black guys, I want you to know: your guy is black,'” Wasiu says. "This is us. We are him. We are all this.'"
Watching his Habs trade away their best player for pennies on the dollar back in June brought a new resolve to Wasiu. He's determined not to switch teams, voluntarily or otherwise—a trend in modern sports he continues to wrestle with.
“I was one of the dudes who didn't like [The Decision],” Wasiu says. “I was like ‘Aw, c’mon man.’ Then I started seeing LeBron's struggles, and how he played when the Cavs lost to Golden State. You don't have to like him, but you have to respect the man. You have to.”
On the other side of this coin is Durant, who Wasiu gets but can't co-sign.
“[Durant to Golden State] was worse than LeBron to Miami, in my opinion," Wasiu says. "It’s a smart move to get a ring. History likes that. But I like the spirit of competitiveness, and it comes down to how you view it: do you want a hollow ring?”
From here Wasiu pivots to the one athlete whose approach to the game mirrors his own approach to music—another alien here to invade the Earth.
“I’m rooting for Russ like a motherf***er,” Wasiu says. “Westbrook gonna be MVP for sure."
“It’s all Westbrook killing it right now. I love his game. I love his aggression.”
Wasiu sees lessons in guys like Westbrook and Iverson—the value of pushing yourself past the limits and harnessing aggression as locomotive steam. To him, they might represent a final form—aliens who ruffled feathers and broke barriers until they became human, relatable.
“I have a voice of a specific generation and a type of people,” Wasiu says. "I want people to say ‘He’s a regular dude doing this s**t.’”
“I want people to say ‘I listen to Wasiu because he understands me.’"
Dan is on Twitter. He wants to be understood but will settle for retweets.
