Written by Sean Ward | Photography by Philip Litevsky

It has taken almost two decades to bring Big Daddy Kane to Toronto. But Substance Group made it happen on March 26, 2009.  And if you weren’t there, you will likely have your hip hop head card revoked.  The talk outside amongst the crowd after it was done was pretty unanimous: This might have been the best show we’ve ever seen.

This wasn’t a concert.  This was a gospel revival, and the Word was Hip Hop.  Toronto is notorious as a hard crowd to rock, but Big Daddy Kane commanded this audience like he was molding Play-Doh.  This audience was the true hip hop audience, serious scholars and aficionados of the artform, and we all knew how important and urgent a moment this was: we were watching one of the greatest practitioners in the history of the artform – potentially the GREATEST EVER – demonstrate his mastery.  This was like an art lover getting the opportunity to watch Da Vinci paint.

The guy comes out and he’s dressed in his flyest pimp threads.  No opening act, just out he comes dressed to the nines, shaking hands with the front row.  Then he launches into his set and his technique is so razor sharp that you can barely believe you’re seeing it live.  His presentation is so deftly crafted that the audience has been reverted to wide-eyed children in awe of the thing. He is so gifted a showman that everyone there shoots their hand in the air or screams at a deafening level at the merest suggestion.  By the time he’s performing choreographed dance routines, you are so out of your head that he show could be flying around outer space and it would make perfect sense.  And then perhaps the most brilliant move of all: he left the stage and ended the show while the energy was still high and the crowd was still hungry.  Hip hop acts often forget the importance of leaving them wanting more.

If Kane had been tempted to rely on a hype man to cover up or fill in some of the more difficult phrasings, we never knew.  Kane is utterly committed to being the best, and he has no hesitation in showing you, over and over, how and why he’s earned that stature.  Nor how much fun it is!  For all of the shouting and chanting and enthusiasm, no one was having more fun than Kane himself who savored every syllable of every word like it was really expensive chocolate.  For a hip hop fan from way back there is no sensation to compare to the feeling of watching Kane, after swaying and wiggling his hips about the stage for the ladies, casually lean over the audience with his foot on the speaker and let the lyrics flow.  And then switch it up to double time.  And then double-time it again.  By then I thought people were going to faint.

I know KRS-One likes to call himself The Teacher, but I couldn’t escape the idea that big Daddy Kane was a professor and class was in session.  Everything you need to be a successful MC was being handed to you.  You could have sold this show as a seminar and called it How to Hip Hop.  If KRS proclaims “I Am Hip Hop” and represents the truest essence of hip hop’s conscious and political side, Big Daddy Kane personifies the other side, the side that has a lot more to do with the everyman’s daily life.  The side where Jay-Z, Puffy, and most current artists find their success.  The side where life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.

The hip hop generation is still coming of age but at least they’re not stumbling and learning as they go any more.  If Big Daddy Kane is going to go up there, 40+ years old, still making money, still the flyest dressed man in the room, still pulling off those moves, and still having that much fun, then we can rest easy knowing that we have a role model like Kane to look up to.