What: SonReal with Tassnata, Jesse Manason and Illvis Freshly
When: Friday 9 p.m.
Where: Sugar nightclub
Tickets: $16.50 at Lyle’s Place and ticketfly.com
Note: SonReal also performs tonight in Nanaimo at The Queens
Vancouver rapper SonReal will be in front of a sympathetic crowd on Friday, his Victoria date being one of the final stops on his star-making Canadian tour.
His next leg of dates, which will see him zig-zag through the U.S. for the better part of June, is less certain. In Canada, the artist born Aaron Hoffman is something of a local legend, as evidenced by his three Juno Award nominations and string of MuchMusic Video Award nominations. South of the border, however, Hoffman knows he’s facing a much tougher task.
“I’m heavily humbled, even when I have a crappy show,” Hoffman, 29, said recently. “I’m not huge yet. I’ve got a lot of work to do. But we pretty much always stay positive. No matter what. We’re happy to be doing this for a job, even though it’s never going to be easy.”
Hoffman has put in plenty of work in the U.S., so the situation isn’t exactly dire. Last year, a 53-date tour with Seattle rapper Grieves exposed him to a new audience of listeners.
Although life in the U.S. has never been easy for Canadian rappers not named Drake, Hoffman is making inroads one show at a time. Some are more difficult than others, however. After his support slot on the Grieves tour, he went out for a round of headlining shows of his own — not all of which were home runs, Hoffman admitted.
“Some spots, I would absolutely flop,” he said. “In Pittsburgh, nobody showed up. I’m talking nobody. Actually, lots of people showed up. They were there for the opener, not me. They all left when I went on stage.”
Pride is one of the foremost attributes a rapper can have, but Hoffman sees no shame in talking about his weaknesses; even the failures give him hope, he said. Case in point: When he arrived expecting the worst for a show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he left feeling “way better than I ever would have ever thought, in my wildest dreams. Having 150 people in the room yelling out the words to my songs is a win in my books.”
SonReal has few difficulties in the country of his birth. The Vernon native has carved out a favourable reputation with critics and the cognoscenti, and his rapidly increasing YouTube presence received a new injection of adrenalin thanks to his For the Town EP, which arrived April 28.
Hoffman has already released videos for three songs from the EP, which have amassed more than two million views combined on YouTube. Another four will come to light as part of Hoffman’s plan to release a video for each song on For the Town.
A few years ago, that pace would have been excessive, if not unnecessary. But there’s a new business model afoot and Hoffman is all in.
“We live in an ADD time now. People want to listen to music with their eyes. If I hear a song I really like, and when the video comes out [and] the video sucks, I won’t like the song anymore by default. It means something to me. It’s the way I ingest music now.”
Hoffman and his crew are succeeding famously on the video front, with regard to quality. The video for Preach was filmed during a six-month period, with nearly 80 locations on the shooting schedule. Everywhere We Go is a mini movie with an unrecognizable Hoffman in the lead role, while For the Town is a cutting-edge cornucopia of graphic violence, pitch-black humour and street-style choreography.
Hoffman spends as much time working on script treatments and storyboards as he does putting together his albums and mixtapes in the studio. Art is art where Hoffman is concerned. As long as he’s being true to himself, he’ll spend countless hours getting the details right.
It wasn’t always that way. Early on, when he was juggling hip-hop and construction work, he often second-guessed his decisions as an artist. Now, he’s confident in his career path. And it is all coming together at the right time, Hoffman said.
“If I was to get absolutely massive even two years ago, I would be devastated. It takes a long time to find out what you want to say and who you are as a person, and that’s something I spent a long time on. Once I found that out, other people started enjoying it, too.
“We’ve been on stage and recording and working on this for so damn long, now that it is starting to take off, we know how to deal with it. And that’s only because I took the time to know what I wanted to say and how I wanted to do it.”
