“You’re supposed to renew the waiver and he didn’t,” says Farberman. without a waiver, which would have allowed him to apply for a work visa. Thanks to his past legal issues, including an assault conviction in 1995, Snow is currently unable to enter the U.S.
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Snow also appears in the video for “Con Calma,” but his part had to be filmed separately in Canada. “All I can say is that I’m blessed,” Snow says. The recurring licensing of “Informer” - as well as lesser-known Snow cuts in Asia - has helped sustain him. With Farberman’s help, Snow retrieved royalties for “Informer” that hadn’t been properly collected for years. He didn’t know where his money was coming from.” “He was floundering and needed some help,” says Farberman. Paul Farberman, a Los Angeles-based lawyer and attorney who became Snow’s co-manager several years ago, doesn’t disagree with his client’s status at the time. It’s been hard for my managers because I don’t want to do anything.” “I grew up hanging out in parking lots and drinking and chilling out. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to do music and just want to lie on my hammock,” he says. Five years ago he released a lone single, “Shame,” but little else followed. In the last two decades, Snow has rarely released new music (his last album was 2002’s Two Hands Clapping), and he suffered through the cancer-related death of his girlfriend (and mother of his daughter) in 2009. “I was having too much fun.” As strong as the album was, it sank, as did another follow-up for many, he was simply the Vanilla Ice of the North. “I was in Jamaica for six months, and the record company came down and I was partying and drinking,” he says. The inevitable backlash, especially given Snow was white, followed: Jim Carrey mocked Snow in the parody “Imposter” on In Living Color, and Snow’s hard living returned when he went to Jamaica to record his second album, the deep reggae dive Murder Love. He claims American radio stations stopped playing his music when they heard he wouldn’t be able to promote them in their country.
![informer snow release informer snow release](http://www.clip-vip.com/v12/tgs119c/04.jpg)
“I had the Number One song and they threw me out of the country,” he says. (“More milk and cookies” was his reward behind bars, he says.) As the song went on to become the biggest-selling reggae single of all time that summer, Snow’s jail time meant he was denied entry into the States. One of the tracks they cut, “Informer,” was released while Snow was incarcerated. He’d be down in the basement in his studio and say, ‘Do a harmony here.’ I’m like, ‘What’s a harmony?’” “So I’d go to A&P and steal chickens and beef and feed his whole family. “I was 18, 19 years old and a huge Shan fan, but he wasn’t doing too well at the time,” Snow says. There, at least, his bad-boy side came in handy. Charged with attempted murder, Snow spent eight months in a detention center before his friend confessed to the stabbing.Īfter the incident but shortly before that stint, Snow - who was given that nickname by his Jamaican-Canadian neighbors - was on vacation in New York, where he met and recorded with pioneering hip hop producer MC Shan. When construction workers mocked him after they saw him singing reggae to girls, he and a friend got into a butcher-knife fight with the workers, one of whom was cut.
![informer snow release informer snow release](https://i.cbc.ca/1.4937537.1550090958!/httpImage/image.jpg)
“He was cool.”ĭrinking and brawling was a regular part of Snow’s adolescence, and in 1989, that part of his life caught up with him. “If it wasn’t for, I wouldn’t be in music,” says Snow, who later met Trudeau’s son (and future prime minister himself) Justin at an awards show. After Jamaicans moved into his neighborhood - thanks to then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s revised immigration policies - reggae infiltrated his life for good. Growing up as Darrin O’Brien in Irish projects in Toronto, he was raised on classic rock, from Kiss to soft-rock kings America. Snow’s career has been, to put it mildly, unconventional. Will Snow now capitalize on its renewed profile? “ Capitalize?” he says, as if the word is foreign to him. “I said, ‘Let’s see if this can pass the original,’ and then I looked at the views on YouTube and was like, ‘Holy shit, no joke!’” “When I heard it, I got chills,” Snow, who will turn 50 later this year, says of the original “Con Calma” record.