With the fifth edition of the FredRock Festival taking place in the New Brunswick’s capital city from Friday August 9 through Sunday August 11, Here Magazine (and yours truly) wanted to offer a preview into some of the acts performing during the festival.
First on deck is Canadian hip-hop artist Classified, performing on Friday August 9 at 9:30 p.m.
For any and all FredRock festival details, surf on over to www.fredrockfest.com.
Rather than having one monster hit and spending the rest of your career trying to match that, it seems to me as though your career has been this perfect build-up to the monster hit that is Inner Ninja.
There has definitely been continuous momentum to my career. There has never been that one big thing that has made everything explode all of a sudden but with every album, it seemed as though something bigger and better would happen. The shows would get bigger from one record to the next. To be honest, I never thought I would ever match the success of [2009’s] Oh…Canada but then Inner Ninja completely destroyed that. If Inner Ninja hit the way it did [the single has been certified for 400,000 copies sold] when I was 21 years old, my career would be over.
You’ve signed a record deal for the world outside of Canada. How is that battle going?
For the world outside of Canada, it is just like starting over. It is almost like an experiment in that I am taking the opposite approach of how I built my career here. I don’t want to tour the United States for 6 months a year over the next 15 years in order to get my name out there. Realistically though, I am a new artist and more people do not know me than do know who I am. But I also have 15 to 20 years of experience behind me so making new artist mistakes is a little less likely.
You’re fortunate in that having US success doesn’t dictate whether or not you’ll continue making music for a living. If things don’t pan out in the United States for whatever reason, you can just return to your multi-platinum career here in Canada. That’s a hell of a back-up plan to have up your sleeve.
[laughs] Yes! I have a great back-up plan should things in the United States not pan out.Article published in the August 1, 2013 edition of Here Magazine
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