“But when he started rapping, people freaked out.” “People would think he was a cop or something,” Prince told MacLean’s magazine in ’93. He began crafting songs and performing at local dancehall basement parties with friend and DJ Marvin Prince Snow’s nimble tongue won over prejudiced audiences. Snow, now looking like a lost member of Color Me Badd, picked up the ability to chant and would mess around with an adopted patois, impressing fellow inmates in yard battles.Īcquitted of those attempted murder charges (they were reduced to aggravated assault), Snow came home after eight months behind bars. He was raised on Kiss and Rush and Bruce Lee until his Jamaican next-door neighbors in the Allenbury housing community, the Brown family, cut his Ozzy Osbourne hairdo, gave him some round-rimmed glasses, and introduced him to reggae and hip-hop. This was a wild boy, a cab driver’s son, a troublemaking Grade 9 dropout with a penchant for Jameson whiskey. Where I grew up, in my family, that was a terrible thing to do.” “When I was in custody, I wrote that little piece : ‘Informer, detective man say Daddy Snow stabbed somebody down the lane.’ I didn’t even want to be a singer-it wasn’t like I was handing out demos. “I had my father and brother in my cell,” Snow, a now 46-year-old newlywed, explains from his downtown T.O. He was simply an Irish guy who was raised in a predominantly West Indian housing project in North York, Toronto, staring down two counts of attempted murder stemming from his involvement in a knife fight, waiting his turn before the jury in his city’s maximum-security East Detention Centre. In 1989, O’Brien had not yet been introduced the world as Snow, or recorded “ Informer,” one of the highest-selling reggae tunes of all time. Dead-broke and facing serious criminal charges, inmate Darrin Kenneth O’Brien created a global smash about the snitches who did him wrong.
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