Canadian hip hop

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Abstract is: The Canadian hip hop scene was established in the 1980s. Through a variety of factors, it developed much slower than Canada's popular rock music scene, and apart from a short-lived burst of mainstream popularity from 1989 to 1991, it remained largely an underground phenomenon until the early 2000s. Canada had hip hop artists right from the early days of the scene—the first known Canadian rap single, Mr. Q's "Ladies' Delight", was released in 1979 just a few weeks after The Sugarhill Gang's historic "Rapper's Delight", and the first French rap single, Lucien Francœur's "Le Rap-à-Billy", was released in 1983. For the most part, however, the infrastructure was not there to get most artists' music to the record-buying public; even "Ladies' Delight" was overlooked by Canadian music historians for many years, instead media and reference works erroneously credited Singing Fools' "The Bum Rap", which was released three years later in 1982, as the first Canadian rap single. Even if a Canadian hip hop artist could get signed to a record label, it was very difficult for them to get widespread exposure. Even if their music videos were played on MuchMusic, many artists could not get their records into stores or played on the radio. A few Canadian hip hop artists broke through to mainstream success around 1990, and a few acts such as Maestro Fresh-Wes, Main Source, and Dream Warriors gained cult-status recognition internationally from the underground hip hop scene. However, through much of the following decade Canadian hip hop acts experienced a slowdown without any significant artists breaking through to the mainstream. No Canadian hip hop songs reached the Top 100 on the Canadian pop charts between 1992 and 1998. Beginning in 1998, however, a sequence of events spurred by the anthemic collaborative single "Northern Touch" finally brought hip hop back into the mainstream of Canadian music. Canada's propensity to create quality artists who rarely achieved public recognition prompted AllMusic writer Jon Azpiri to state that Canadian hip hop is the "best-kept secret in hip-hop."

Canadian hip hop is …