Kreesha is no stranger to the music industry having amassed a slew of accolades in her native Canada.
But she’s here in the U.S. now making her way and spoke to VIBE on her journey at this point musically and culturally. She also displays how she’s more than just her stunning looks.
Check out a snippet of the interview below and read it in full on VIBE.com
When She First Got Into Hip-Hop:
“I was the only one of my friends that listened to rap when I moved back to Canada. I remember getting my first CD, Puff Daddy and The Family, and nobody knew who he was. I was like ‘You guys don’t know who Puff Daddy is?’
“I remember I would stay up late night, ’cause in Canada we had Much Music, but we didn’t have MTV or BET. The only time they would play urban music was after midnight for an hour on the American Rap City. Then I got on Napster… I remember one of the first groups I discovered on Napster was A Tribe Called Quest, mind you, I’m probably discovering them like a decade after they came out. But I fell in love with the music. I remember discovering like “Award Tour” and all of that stuff…super late.”
Falling In Love With Dancehall and Jamaican Culture:
“When I first started consuming a lot of dancehall, it was the ‘Black Chiny’ mixtapes. I remember I would hunt down those tapes everywhere I could. I loved everybody from Ninja Man to Buju Banton. Every time I would come back to Canada my friends would be like ‘What are you listening to, that sounds like noise.'”
“For me I was very isolated when I came back to Canada. People don’t realize I lived in a place called “Edmonton” so most people think when I say I’m from Canada, they say, “Oh you live in Toronto?.” When I moved back after living in Jamaica, I ended up on the south side which was all different families of first generation immigrants. That’s where I found people who had parents just as strict as mine.”
“It’s still very divided. I have people who embrace me and who love me because yes, like, in Jamaica, one of our beliefs as a nation is out of many we are one. A lot of people don’t realize the different races we have within Jamaica just because of our heritage and our history. We have many many many Chinese Jamaicans and mixed races. I’m a Chinese Jamaican and feel proud about it. A large part of me family, they are Chinese but let me tell you, they are Jamaican, too [laughs].
