heliotrope

It’s 2:30pm. I’m in line for a TIFF Market Pass. I’ve been in a line for almost an hour now. A TIFF Volunteer comes by to tell the people in line that there is a digital version of the pass accessible on the TIFF app. “If you don’t want to wait in line, you can just use that for your events and grab the official pass later.”

Immediately I reach for my phone and open the app. I’m signed in, and I see the events… but no pass. Before I can ask the volunteer about this, he’s disappeared to another section of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I try restarting the app several times, hoping the pass will just show up when thought hits me that unleashes a swarm of butterflies tumbling in my stomach.

I received an email about a week ago, telling me that the picture I submitted for my pass was rejected. I look over to my right at another line, a tenth of a fraction of the length of the one I’m in, and a sign beside it that says Pass Printing. The desk for that line has a camera taking people’s pictures. The line I’m in has no camera to take a picture. Fuck.

15 minutes later, I'm at the desk and talking to a clerk representing TIFF. “Oh I’m sorry but your registration is incomplete and we still have to print your pass.“ She gestures toward the line I was just looking at. Fuck. “I’m so sorry” she repeats. “Nah don’t worry, not your fault” and slowly make my way to the other line.

As I walk towards the other line a woman passes me and I do a double take. I thought it was Chase Infiniti, the breakout star from last year’s critically lauded One Battle After Another. I can’t be. This woman is about to join the line I just left, and Chase wouldn’t be caught dead amongst us civilians.

This new line is much shorter. I look at the time. 3:05. Okay, not bad. Maybe I can be out of here before 3:30.

30 minutes later, I’ve taken exactly 3 steps forward in this line. I’m getting tired but this hasn’t reached the point of being annoying yet. Over to my right, a third line. This one for Press. For 15 minutes, this line is a good distraction. I’m eagerly looking at the line looking for my favourite film critics to pull up.

I see a black man in line and try to study his face, mentally comparing it to Robert Daniels’ (my favourite film critic). I do think it’s him. For a split second I think to check his twitter to see if he is around. “No. That’s weird. You don’t know this guy.” I give up my little spot-the-critic game.

15 minutes later I’m starting to feel antsy. I don’t mind being on my feet, but the lack of movement is what is driving me crazy. I look towards the line I just left. THE CHASE INFINITI LOOK ALIKE IS ALREADY NEAR THE FRONT. Alright man what’s going on here? “This is pretty ridiculous!”, the gentleman behind me exclaims. I nod vigorously but my brains is still on introvert mode so this is as far as our interaction goes.

4:00pm. I’m nowhere near the front. I look over again to my original line. Chase Infiniti look alike is already talking to the same rep who sent me this way and I’m only marginally closer than I was an hour ago in my line. I do a quick count of the people in front of me. 14. Wait. Someone just left. 13.

4:11pm. 12 people now. I look over at the press line, and it hasn’t moved much either. That makes me feel just a tiny bit better. I look back at my original line and see a man with a haircut that almost makes me burst out laughing. The most obvious hair transplant in the world with a clear line separating his real black and grey hair and his transplanted hair which is jet black. And the haircut is giving Spock. I wonder what his story is.

4:23. 9 people. I can see the desk now. The camera is actually a Google Pixel phone. I look at the press line. Wait a minute. I think I recognize someone. Young gentleman with braids wearing glasses. He has on a Toronto branded sweater but I can’t quite see what it says. He looks like a local rapper who went viral on TikTok a few years ago for a song. I don’t remember the song but I google some of the lyrics to see if something pops up.

“now ill be damned... unwashed ass… tiktok song”

I type into the search box. click

There it is. It IS him. Akintoye. How strange. I wonder the story behind that. Is he a journalist also? I send a quick text to Emily.

4:31. 4. God. All this just cause I was too lazy to email someone a replacement photo. The Vietnamese gentleman in front of me does the fenty lean. That looks like a good stretch. I want to follow his lead but I decide it’ll look too weird to do now so I’ll wait till I get out of here

4:34. 2. Almost there

4:35. I’m in front. Phone in hand, writing this as a way to make the time go faster. Behind me I hear music playing. The festivities seem to have started already but I think I’ll be going home after this.

4:40. Still in front. A elderly woman walks in front of me looking for someone. On her phone, the message “You Have Reached Your Time Limit on Instagram”. Ha. I have the same thing set for Twitter. This cheers me up a little.

4:43. They finally called me up to the desk. “Hi how are you?” “Good, how about you?” “Not bad haha hanging in there.” We are both lying to each other but that’s okay. “My registration is incomplete so I emailed my registration photo to y’all’s email and the lady over there asked me to join this line.” I give her my name and email. “Okay I see it. I just have to print it. It’ll just take a second.” I look behind me. The line has gotten longer and at the very end I see the Chase Infiniti lookalike just join this one. Looks like we had the same problem. Damn.

4:47. The desk clerk hands me my pass. Finally. I take one look and I can’t help but start beaming. It’s a cheap plastic card but it feels like gold. There are 4 letters written vertically on the left.

F M A

U

Then there is a picture of me Emily took Valentine’s Day, 2024 (it was the most recent picture of me with no one else in it) and under that, “Nana Boateng. Scarlett-Ivy Pictures”. Damn. Was it worth the 3+ hour line wait? Absolutely.

I just smoked a bowl. On the TV, Doechii's Tiny Desk Concert plays. 2024 has been an incredible year for women in and around hip-hop. AmaaRae got featured in GQ, Elle, and Vulture magazines; Doechii is finally getting the attention she deserved after years of pushing it; Sexxy Red is reminding everyone about the thorough-line that connects the 5 tenets of hip-hop; and GloRilla dropped so much good music, her home city of Memphis, TN forgot all about her DUI arrest and awarded her the keys to the city. Matter of fact, I could probably write a whole paragraph on how 2024 was the year of GloRilla. She had a whole song go viral with a TikTok snippet. My dear reader, DJs downloaded a 45 second snippet off of TikTok and had crowds yelling out the lyrics at live shows, ALL BEFORE THE SONG OFFICIALLY DROPPED.

I have followed the rise of all these artists but I've been most impressed by the rise of Amaarae. Artists from Ghana barely make it to where she is but even less manage to stay in the limelight for as long as she has. Combined with truly incredible lyrics and production, I don't know if there are more than 5 artists from Ghana I like more than Amaarae. I can confidently say I've been listening to her music from the very beginning and she is undoubtedly a big influence in my music.

I started making music in the early 2010s (first with my best friend Henry Richardson, then in a band in high school and now solo). These years were a golden age for hip-hop in Ghana. The popularity of Twitter and widespread access to the internet gave rise to a burgeoning underground hip-hop scene made up of older teenagers and young adults. These artists took most of their inspiration from western acts as opposed to African musicians and as such the subject matter of the music shifted from light-hearted, folksy to something darker and metaphoric. There was definitely a downside to this, as most artists chose to abandon African ways storytelling tendencies entirely in favour of something that would appeal more to the big boys in Newark.

The scene was intricately tied to Twitter. The social media site blew up relatively early in Ghana (I created my account in August 2011) and the first few hundred users garnered thousands of followers quickly by doing regular Twitter shit: dunking on people. Maybe this is a symptom of my jealousy in how popular these accounts were, but some of these guys would talk such a big game on Twitter and I'd see them in church youth service acting all bashful and shit. No energy in the house of the Lord I guess.

My favourite artists from this era were a duo who went by Cruk'dStr8. They would collaborate with a range of artists in Ghana and the States and it was some of the best music I'd heard in a long long time. First making a name for themselves by dropping singles on Friday sampling popular songs (hip-hop fans might see the influence from Kanye West's GOOD Friday drops) and putting Ghanaian rappers on them. These drops were huge, and got 1000s of listens per post (if you don't get how big a deal this is, you just weren't there) and the group would the social media site to drop hints of an upcoming album.

My best friend, Henry, and I would listen to these drops religiously and I (admittedly) would bite from them here and there for our own little rap group in primary school: Royal Rappers. A lot of people are embarrassed by their rap stories in middle school, but not I. That shit was awesome. We started with just banging on desks with 5 or 6 people around and we ended with a performance in front of the whole school. Our first song, We Need A Beat, was so popular that it spawned another rap group in our class and they hit back with a diss, Beat Without A Bass. We were lucky the rapping was trash because their chorus was way better and title of the song alone almost cleared us... but this is a story for another time.

On February 2nd, 2013, Cruk'dStr8 dropped the album, Heliotrope. God. What a project. I didn't realize as an artist, you were allowed to do what they did on that album. Themes of travelling through Dante's inferno to find a missing piece of yourself, combined with production that was years ahead of what anyone else was attempting to do, and the bars. THE BARS. I am tempted to put some of my favourite lines here but I don't think it matters now. If you're curious here is a Genius link to all the album. I downloaded a copy of Heliotrope from DatPiff and I've had it on every hard drive I owned until last year, when I accidentally deleted my personal copy. Very few moments in my life have affected me on a personal level. Even to this day I get very sad thinking about it.

My dear reader, you might wonder why I don't just go to Spotify or Apple Music. Unfortunately Heliotrope, by Cruk'dStr8 is now lost media. The album has been scrubbed off the internet and now the only way to even know it existed at some point is Cruk'dStr8's Twitter page. I found a Hulkshare link (from a reply on that twitter page) but only 1 of the songs on there is actually playable (Dead Fantasy | Kizzy Kane). So the copy I deleted might have been the last copy. Like me, you might be wondering why the group would do this despite their success.

Well after Heliotrope, the group would go dark. Nothing to be heard from the core duo, but affiliated acts like Shabazz, Quesi B, and BrainyBeatz would keep going. By 2016 however, Cruk'dStr8 and affiliated acts would all stop making music. But in November 2017 I saw something strange. A new act from Ghana had dropped an incredible album and it was turning heads. I listened to it a few times and while the music was incredible I couldn't shake the feeling that I've heard this before. Now I have taken care to withhold the names of the core duo of Cruk'dStr8 , because maybe someone smarter than me would make the connection immediately. Their names were ERA and RAE.

Passionfruit Summers is the debut album from Ghanaian-American singer, songwriter Amaarae. If you knew about Cruk'dStr8 and Heliotrope, the sound is all there. Sonically it's extremely polished and the production quality was incredible. I couldn't believe it. One of my favourite Ghanaian musicians dropped a commercial tape, and its highly acclaimed! This album came with a new sounds and techniques that were slowly bubbling in the underground hip-hop and hip-life scene in Nigeria, a genre now known as alté. This was similar to what Cruk'dStr8 were doing a few years back but with a clear distinction and better execution. You see while Cruk'dStr8's sound was African inspired but clearly built on top off American hip-hop tendencies, alté music is built on top of hip-life tendencies with American style sprinkled here and there.

At this point I still had my copy of Heliotrope but I did a quick search online and that's when I realized it was all gone. As a matter of fact, Cruk'dStr8 is not mentioned anywhere by Amaarae as where she got her start. It's almost as if she doesn't want to be associated with that anymore. Few years ago, Moliy Music (co-writer and performer of Sad Girlz Luv Money) took to Twitter to accuse Amaarae of not sharing proceeds with her. This didn't seem to go anywhere and was forgotten about quickly, but I couldn't help but think of Cruk'dStr8 and ERA.

I've been keeping up with Amaarae partially because I want to see her rise to fame in first person but also I really want her to say something about Cruk'dStr8. Why delete the old music? What happened to ERA? What happened to Cruk'dStr8? I'm still not done looking for this tape. My plan is to reach out to former Cruk'dStr8 affiliates and hope they can send me a copy and/or explain what happened between 2014 and 2017.

Anyway here is a version of FunkyFlavaDopeShit posted on Quesi B's SoundCloud page: https://soundcloud.com/otis_7/crukdstr8-funkyflavadopeshit