Bizzy raps from the heart - Album Review JAY BIZZY - The Ghost of Jacob Marley [URBNET Records] posted by: Jesse Dangerously Jake Flemming is an easy target for misunderstanding. Known to local rap fans as Jay Bizzy, he wears his reddish-blond hair in cornrows. Neither his mode of dress nor the hip-hop brogue of his natural speech would seem out of place in the Bronx. His second album, The Ghost of Jacob Marley, is being distributed nationally by UrbNet. The album's first single and video, East Coast Warriors, is in rotation on Much Music. He's not insignificant to Canadian hip hop. Bizzy is easy to misunderstand because one might not expect any of those things to be true of a man from Shelburne County. Small-town Canada is supposed to produce small-town Canadians, not formidable rappers. When Bizzy started rapping in his small town, Vanilla Ice was an open wound in the pop culture psyche and there was no such thing as Eminem. Even House of Pain couldn't escape the stigma of white rap's novelty. It wasn't hip hop's black fans and artists who wouldn't accept white fans and artists. Rather, there was a sentiment among whites that for a white person to engage in hip hop was to imitate behaviour that was more suitable to a black person. The clear concern was that it was debasing; it just wouldn't do for white folk to act black. The term "white trash" having been coined previously, the term "wigger" arrived to make the same accusation even more pointedly. Jay Bizzy grew up surrounded by a peer group who shared that judgment. "I got made fun of for listening to hip hop," he tells me, "even by my 'friends.' I felt like no one understood me." My experience in Halifax was similar, and so was that of any white rap fan who finished high school before Eminem's reassuringly alabaster countenance made rap music safe for pop radio again. While it falls light years short of the disenfranchisement faced by visible minorities in this culture, it isn't a pleasant experience. It's one of those things that can serve to alienate a given youth from his or her peers. For that reason, a particular song on Bizzy's new album tends to meet potent resonance from listeners. When Stereotype is performed live, the refrain moves virtually every member of the audience to chime in for at least the easy part of it: F--k you! You don't even know me! You can't hold me down anymore, you can't control me! F--k you, 'cause I'm a say what I like. Yo, gimme the mike - I'll blow the speakers off my stereotype! "It felt so good to get that track off of my chest," says Bizzy. "Performing it is therapy for me." Leading an empathetic audience in chorus assuages his longstanding frustrations, and Bizzy finds that people can't dismiss his dreams so easily anymore. "Today, it's not like that at all. In fact, it's rare that somebody would get in my face and talk some ignorant shit like that. And it's funny when I run into some of these people that used to make fun of me back in the day," he says. "We usually remember things quite differently." I don't intend, in the middle of Black History Month, to proclaim the triumph of a white artist succeeding in a historically black idiom. There's no victory or loss in that story, just another example of the benign and inexorable dilution of any identifiable art movement as it bleeds into the mainstream. I'm just telling you about a strong-willed artist who hasn't let anyone tell him what his heroes ought to look like, who hasn't let anyone dictate the paths he should follow in determining his approach to his art or his life. Jake Flemming is pouring his heart and soul into contributing seriously to what he loves, and he doesn't get the E for Effort. He gets the A for Actually being Amazing. When you hear his work, that much is difficult to misunderstand. Jesse Dangerously is a local rapper who raps, locally. He hosts The Pavement Show on CKDU 88.1 FM on Fridays from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. He's on the web at www.dangerously.ca!