In hip-hop, just about the best position to be in is “old enough to know what you’re talking about, yet young enough to still be dangerous.” That’s exactly the catbird seat Mindbender Supreme looks down from on “Young Vet,” hurling thunderbolts of hard-earned wisdom from his quarter-century in the biz that hit all the harder thanks to vocal affirmations from Canadian rap legend Michie Mee.
It’s a “life well lived” lesson in just under four minutes, with rapid-fire verses that take us from the devil-may-care indulgences of adolescence (“Get a license to drive... yourself insane!”) to the sage observances of maturity (“Grandpa Simpson was right!/ Generation gap’s a Family Feud/ I was a cool cat, now The New Cool is weird and scary/ Guaranteed it will happen to YOU!!”). Yet the mood is never less than triumphant, due in large part to Michie Mee’s periodic exultations of “Young veteran/ Better than any medicine/ We come again/ Can’t stop us, they let us IN!”
According to Mindbender—a.k.a. Malcolm Lovejoy—it was hearing his longtime friend Michie ad-lib the pithy oxymoron “young vet” on somebody else’s track several years ago that gave him the idea for his.
“I felt the energy so much, as she was declaring her timeless wisdom that stayed connected to her youthful energy,” he says. “It was that hip-hop ideology I love to hear, captured in such smart wordplay. So I decided to make a whole song about growing up through the life and times of adolescence and adulthood—surviving intelligently so you can be an icon, a legend and a mentor to the next generation.”
That’s a theme thoroughly in keeping with his latest album, The King of Queen Street, a double record that retraces this cultural mainstay’s exploits with a thoroughness that suggests he’s long overdue to update his billing as “Toronto’s best-kept secret.” Songs like “Mr. Front Row” (produced by Rich Kidd) depict Mindbender as a kind of scenester Forrest Gump, consistently present and accounted for at some of the key musical events in Toronto’s arts history. Yet he’s been no mere idle bystander, as even a brief rundown of the collaborators who embrace him as a peer makes plain.
There’s Michie, of course—hailed far and wide as the queen of Canadian Hip-Hop—and also producer Tough Dumpling (who helmed both “Young Vet” and the new album’s first single, “The Love That Love Produced”). “Young Vet” received an extra polish from DJ Skratch Bastid, and the remaining liner notes to The King of Queen Street read like a kind of who’s who of Ontario music royalty—including Saukrates, Mel Boogie, DJX, DJ Grouch, Ian Kamau and Shad. And that’s not even mentioning multidisciplinary luminaries like Toronto mayoral candidate Knia Singh, Neil Donaldson of Stolen From Africa and Matthew Progress of Freedom Writers.
What can we say? A guy’s going to collect a hefty stack of business cards if he works as long and as regularly as Mindbender has. In addition to the solo efforts he’s pumped out pretty consistently since 1999’s EP, In Another Universe, he spent many years advancing the hip-hop cause as half of Supreme Being Unit, a duo he formed with his (now sadly deceased) twin brother, Conspiracy. And when he hasn’t been rocking the mic as an MC, he’s found time to host In Divine Style, a Queen Street open mic that ran for five years, and also to help cultivate young musical talent through the afterschool songwriting program Parkdale Street Writers.
Meanwhile, writing as Addi Stewart, he’s carved out a thriving parallel career as a music journalist, interviewing some of rap’s top stars for publications like XXL, Pound Magazine, CBC, City on my Back, Swagg and Now.
That’s isn’t just being a renaissance man; it’s practically being a man for all epochs. Then again, you can get pretty far on just imagination, and imagination is clearly something this once-in-a-lifetime artist has in spades. Bend your mind, and the rest will follow.
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