Hip-hop group Winnipeg's Most reunites for 1st concert in a decade
Group says reunion show will pay tribute to Jamie Prefontaine, who died in 2015
Indigenous hip-hop group Winnipeg's Most is performing in the city this week for the first time in 12 years, as a tribute to founding member Jamie Prefontaine, a.k.a. Brooklyn.
The group, which consisted of Billy Pierson (Jon-C) from Sagkeeng First Nation; Tyler Rogers (Charlie Fettah) who is Métis; and Prefontaine, launched in 2010.
"We made a record in my dining room, didn't hear it for three months and then got it back and the rest kind of just was history," said Rogers.
"We just snowballed from there."
The group won three Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards (now the Indigenous Music Awards) in 2010 including for best new artist, and six more in 2011.
"We were speaking for not only ourselves but for a lot of young people," said Rogers.
"The Indigenous population, especially in Canada, just elevated us to an incredible height that I don't think any of us could even see."
Prefontaine died in 2015. They say only now do they feel strong enough to pay him a tribute.
Pierson and Rogers sat down with CBC News to talk about the reunion show March 28 at the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
CBC: What's going on? What's changed?
Rogers: I mean, most importantly, one of the founding members, Jamie Prefontaine, Brooklyn, is no longer with us. That's gotta be probably the biggest, obviously. And I think just life, man. Life moves. Life keeps coming no matter what, whether you're in a rap group or not. But yeah, that's pretty much the biggest change other than just growing and maturing as humans and artists and finding our different fields. I branched out into live music, Jon branched out into graphic design and recording and engineering and all that stuff.
CBC: What was it like being one of Winnipeg's first hip-hop super groups?
Pierson: We made a rap album so we expected it to go around the circle and we didn't expect the circle to get so big. And when it did and everything just started coming, one after the other, we were down for it all because we just, again, we wanted to rap.
Rogers: There weren't a whole lot of tools in our toolbox to vocalize and work through the things that we were dealing with. We found that inadvertently through music. Looking back on the records and what we were saying and how they made people feel, it became abundantly clear to us that people found our stories resonated really closely with their own.
CBC: Your music has been controversial, what do you say to critics?
Pierson: At the end of the day, I just say "keep hating" because we did what we did. We we spoke how we spoke and our message was real. Was it for all? No. Did some take to it or most take to it? Yeah. So those were the people that, if we impacted them, those are the people that really mattered.
Rogers: Music and art in general is intellectual property. It's not really tangible, so it's weird when people try to criticize that. As long as my fans and my people and I most importantly am content and happy and and feel good about the art that we're putting out, then that's all that mattered.
CBC: How did your music impact your life?
Rogers: It was a thing that would keep me busy and then when it started actually creating profits and I was able to pay my bills with it, I had to do less and less other things to live. It's given us an outlet to find a different way, a different path and it opens a lot of doors.
Pierson: Music definitely helped change my life because it slowly pulled me out of the self destruction. Even after the bigger projects that we did, it still continued to pull me out because I still engaged with other artists by helping them.
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With files from Jim Agapito