Kardinal Offishall Loves His iPod

10/03/08 12:38pm

by Cheryl Thompson (CHARTattack)

Kardinal Offishall is one of the most outspoken artists about the direction music has taken over the past few years. Whether you love him or hate him, agree or disagree with him, he speaks his mind.

ChartAttack recently met up with Offishall in Toronto and, while the discussion started about his new Not 4 Sale album, it ended up being a debate on iPods versus CDs. Offishall also explained why the T-dot remains his number one city.

ChartAttack: You got some big names on Not 4 Sale, like Akon, Rihanna, Estelle and T-Pain. Are these people you've worked with before?
Kardinal Offishall: With the exception of The-Dream, these are all people that I've been cool with over the years. For people who don't know, I've known Rihanna since she was 15 — way before she signed a deal — and I did a couple songs for her demo that helped her get signed with Jay-Z.

With T-Pain, I knew him right when he first came out. When I first linked with Akon to do his Konvicted stuff, he was just launching T-Pain. I met him early on and we've always been cool.

Estelle, that's family. I mean, I've known her for many years in her earlier days in the U.K. and, you know, she's like a sister to me.

J*Davey, we had been on tour, we were in Norway or something like that. We did a show together and she, you know, was a fan since the [Quest For Fire: Firestarter, Vol. 1] album and when I seen her perform, I became an instant fan, so that's why we linked up.

What are you listening to right now?
I keep telling people as time goes on, these questions kind of become irrelevant. The iPod has slashed everything because people always talk about what's in your car right now, and you could say "10,000 songs."

You know what, I don't have an iPod.
Really?

Don't get me wrong — I love music, but how much music can one person possibly listen to until it doesn't mean anything anymore?
Wow. That's going to turn into a whole other conversation. Music always means something. I could listen to all my favourite artists a million times over and it's not going to make me love it any less. In fact, it makes me love it more, and if I'm somewhere and I just randomly happen to be in the mood for James Brown, I press "James Brown." If I'm somewhere and something just happened to me, someone just made me vex, I need something to calm me down. I can at any given time listen to Jill Scott to help me, to cool me down. If I'm somewhere and I feel like I want to listen to '80s house music and start reminiscing and dancing like an ass if I'm on the road, I press a button. That's what an iPod is. An iPod is instant gratification for music.

It's like people don't really care about albums anymore. They just want to make their playlist and that's it.
And you know, don't get me wrong, I'm not in disagreement with you because I'm an album-head also. But it's one of those things like I was saying where it's a transitional period in music, where we're definitely making the shift from album-focus to song-focus and I don't agree with it per se, but especially in the position that I'm in, I don't really have a choice.

I'm sure there's people who used to love their eight-track player, but you just got to evolve. I mean, you don't have to, but me, I have to roll with it. I'm saying this is what I do 24-7, but I agree with you and trust me, if I didn't have to, I wouldn't because I was mad when they started getting rid of vinyl and then how they're trying to phase out CDs. Trust me when I tell you it made me angry, but the thing is, it's one of those things where instead of learning how to get rid of the thunderstorm, you have to learn to dance in the rain.

You've never stopped giving mad love to Toronto in your music and vibe. What do you love about this city?
The culture. It makes you strong and it's not just the good stuff, but the bad stuff. Growing up here, you get a good mix of everything, and I think it just makes you stronger as a person. I mean, obviously, being in a place where they will boo you and throw stuff at you makes you a wicked performer, but besides that, just socially, there's so many different aspects to Toronto. Like, you get a very good perspective of how the world is out there because here you have many different races, so it's not like some Americans who never dealt with a Sri Lankan before or never had an interaction with a Vietnamese person, you know what I mean.