Taking the drugs and thugs out of hip hop

Written by: JOHN THOMPSON

Stephen Leafloor is known as an elder where he comes from, but he’s revered for being able to spin on his back, rather than hunt caribou and seal.

Leafloor, better known as Buddha, has been a breakdancer for 29 years. At 46, he’s a member of the Canadian Floor Masters from Ottawa, who spent the last week teaching kids in Iqaluit a thing or two about hip hop.

In a community where most kids have an Eminem poster on their wall, he drew a big crowd, with almost 100 teens attending a weeklong hip hop workshop at the high school, during their week off classes.

Some were probably surprised to hear Leafloor dismiss popular acts like Fifty Cent as “not hip hop.” Maybe they’d be less surprised if they knew Leafloor is a social worker, who wrote his masters thesis on youth outreach through hip hop.

He argues that hip hop was never about being a thug and glorifying sex, drugs and violence, tracing its history back to disenfranchised black youth in the Bronx three decades ago.

“Hip hop didn’t start out of the gangs. It started from people in the Bronx saying, the world is forgetting us,” he says. “It developed as a survival mechanism.”

“I really believe hip hop is a voice for young people around the world,” he says. “It shouldn’t be what you see in the music videos.”

Instead, he has a few simple messages for kids, which he sums up as: “Respect yourself, respect your crew.”

As for the obscenities some gangsta rappers spit at women: “You don’t ever call your sister, your mother, or any other woman a bitch or a ho.”

He has a similar hard line on drug and alcohol abuse. “It’s hard to be at that level of dancing if you’re messing with that,” he says.

He also recommends that kids try listening to rappers with a positive message, like the Canadian artist K-Os.

Joining Leafloor during the workshop were young Inuit artists like Sylvia Cloutier, who says the drum dancing she does today is influenced by rap she listened to growing up in Montreal.

“You don’t need to follow the old ways to be yourself today,” she said. “Young people need to feel good about themselves. They’re taking care of their bodies when they dance, and they’re also expressing themselves.”

She was also surprised to see her own eight-year-old son begin dancing during one workshop. “I didn’t know he could do that. He’s inspired, and that’s what’s going to happen this week.”

At least one workshop participant flew in from Cambridge Bay. Quentin Crockatt, 21, says he started breakdancing about four years ago.

He’s learned how to do backward handsprings and flips, along with breakdancing’s signature six-step, where his legs and arms whirl around as he spins on the floor.

“It’s about getting fit and having fun at the same time. Staying out of trouble,” he says. “Get the youth doing something other than what they’re not supposed to be doing.”

He used to listen to gangsta rap, but says he’s grown out of it, preferring instrumental hip hop with record-scratching and break-beats instead.

“As I got older, I started to recognize some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t very good,” he said.

The same goes for Geronimo Inutiq, who grew up in Iqaluit and is now known in Montreal music circles as “DJ Mad Eskimo.”

“I’ve since moved away from it, because I realize how it affected how I thought,” he says, speaking about gangsta rap. “It made me something I wasn’t.”

Now 27, he credits hip hop for keeping him out of mischief, and explained to kids at the workshops how he makes original music by mixing old records together on two turntables.

The workshop was also a chance for Iqaluit visual artist Jonathan Cruz to show off his latest creation, a sprawling graffiti mural that begins with a drum dancer and ends with an elder.

There was no graffiti workshop, for fear energetic kids would try out their moves on the walls of local businesses. But Cruz had a chance to tell students about how art helped him pull through personal problems, resulting in an art exhibition called “Hybrid Theory” shown at Iqaluit’s museum last year.

And he has a chance to collaborate with others he’s met now. “Hopefully we’ll keep going. We’ll spread the word,” he says.

The hip hop workshop’s budget ran up to $220,000, with $100,000 of that as “in-kind” labour provided by Government of Nunavut employees. The rest was paid for by various federal programs, like national crime prevention funding, healthy living and building healthy communities.