Snow, ‘Informer’: The white rapper backlash

Snow
‘Informer’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
#2 on March 21, 1993

1. Me Snow

I have a vivid memory of hearing ‘Informer’ for the first time.

It was a cold, rainy morning in 1993. I was eating my cereal in bed, trying to stay warm while dreading the thought of school. The radio was tuned to Ian Dempsey’s 2FM Breakfast Show, and Ian played this track, which was catchy in a “WTF is this?” kind of way.

After it faded out, Dempsey said something like, “that’s the new big hit from the rapper Snow, who is actually white, believe it or not.”

And I literally did this:

Possibly adding, “are you fucking kidding me?”

Because we had talked about this. Human civilization had survived Vanilla Ice and vowed as one, “never again.” Suddenly, here was Vanilla Ice 2.0 doing some kind of hip-hop/reggae fusion. And he wasn’t just white.

He was Canadian.

My reaction was far from unique. Although ‘Informer’ was a monster hit, the general reaction was that this guy was a clown, and the single was possibly some kind of practical joke.

Plus, the lyrics were ridiculous. What was he even singing about? “A leaky bum-bum down”? Was he singing in French?

2. Yo, Snow, they came around here looking for you the other day

So, what was Snow’s whole deal?

‘Informer’ actually contains a pretty accurate autobiography, although it’s buried in the third verse and coded in Jamaican patois. It goes like this:

Yes a daddy me Snow me are de article don
But the in an a-out a dance an they say where you come from-a?
People dem say ya come from Jamaica
But me born an’ raised in the ghetto that I want ya to know-a
Pure black people man that’s all I man know
Yeah me shoes are a-tear up an’a me toes just a show-a
Where me-a born in are de one Toronto

Now, the lengthy gap between the question (“Where you come from-a?”) and the eventual answer (“Toronto”) is very funny. But the lines in between do actually tell us what we need to know about this guy.

Snow’s real name is Darrin O’Brien, and he grew up in a rough Irish-Canadian neighbourhood in north Toronto (making him more Irish than House Of Pain, but let’s not get into that again). After his parents split, his mother raised Darrin and his siblings in a housing project riddled with gang violence. “Born an’ raised in the ghetto” is actually pretty accurate.

This Toronto neighbourhood was also home to many Caribbean immigrants. Young Darrin formed a close bond with some of them, and they introduced him to reggae and dancehall. They also taught him how to toast—the vocal style that’s roughly a reggae equivalent of rapping (as discussed in the recent Shaggy newsletter).

“Pure black people man that’s all I man know”, is probably an exaggeration, but it is true that O’Brien spent a lot of his teenage years in Black communities. That’s how he met Jamaican DJ Marvin Prince, who helped his musical evolution. O’Brien and Prince started co-writing, and eventually they made ‘Informer’ together.

Prince gave O’Brien the stagename Snow, and also created the painfully cringey backronym, “Super Notorious Outrageous Whiteboy”. Thankfully, it did not catch on.

Snow was now making music, but his chief passions remained drinking and fighting. He became a familiar face in the local cop shop, and seemed likely to end up dead or in jail.

3. So dey put me in de back de car at de station

In 1988, Snow did find himself in jail.

A bar brawl ended in multiple stabbings, and Snow got picked up on attempted murder charges. He spent eight months in prison awaiting trial, but charges were eventually dropped. While behind bars, Snow had kept writing music, including one violent fantasy about what he’d do to whoever gave him up up to the cops.

The lyrics to that song roughly go like this:

Hey, whoever told the police about me?
I’m going to find you and shoot you
Someone told the cops they saw me stab a guy in an alleyway
I’m going to find you and shoot you

But they’re coded in Jamaican patois, so they they sound like this:

Informer, ya’ no say daddy me Snow me I go blame
A licky boom boom dem
‘Tective man a say, say daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane
A licky boom boom dem

“A licky” should probably be written as “I lick he”, which roughly means “I’ll lick him” in the fighting sense of the word. “Boom boom” refers to the gunshots—Snow used to cock fingerguns at the audience when performing this song live.

So, this cute little pop song is actually a death threat. And not an idle one either—it was written by a guy in jail for attempted murder, and who was very pissed at whoever snitched.

Vanilla Ice claimed to be from the streets until Ice T delivering the classic put-down: “Which street you from? Sesame Street?” But Snow actually was kind of gangsta: a working-class kid with no resources, no hope, and no options other than crime.

The real difference between him and his rap contemporaries was…

4. Bigger dem are they think dem have more power

Snow and Vanilla Ice had one thing in common. Both of them got absolutely murdered by Jim Carrey on In Living Color.

Vanilla Ice was finished forever after Carrey unveiled his parody, ‘White White Baby’, which contained savage lines like:

When’s it gonna stop? Maybe never
I get richer with every endeavour
I’m livin’ large and my bank is stupid
Cause I just listen to real rap and dupe it

‘Informer’ was a huge hit in the U.S., spending seven weeks at Number One in the Billboard Hot 100, which meant that Jim Carrey couldn’t not do another parody. He gave his fellow Irish-Canadian a vicious beat-down in a track called ‘Imposter’, which featured lyrics like:

Hear me on the radio, think I could not be blacker
But on my video, you see I’m really a cracker
Pretending I was a Rasta since I was in jammies
I should paint my face and start belting out, “Mammy!”

Both songs make the same accusation—that these are white kids trying to steal Black music. Which is a reasonable concern, because it’s happened before. And any idiot could see that record companies were dying to find a white hip-hop star, for obvious reasons

5. Listen for me, you better listen for me now

In hindsight, everyone was a little unfair to Vanilla Ice.

Vanille Ice did a huge and fascinating interview with The Ringer back in 2020, telling the full story of how a white trash kid became drawn to hip-hop. It was vibrant and liberating, a ray of hope at the shitty end of the American dream.

When he turned out to be pretty good at it himself, people grabbed him and tried to exploit him. Literally—Suge Knight dangled him off a hotel balcony until he agreed to share his profits from ‘Ice Ice Baby’. That money became the seed capital for Death Row Records.

Snow’s story is kind of the same, except with more reggae and less being thrown off hotel balconies. You know who else has the same kind of backstory? A dead-end white kid rescued by rap music? Eminem.

Jim Carrey’s parody calls Snow a ‘middle-class white kid from Toronto’, which says a lot about how Snow was packaged. While record labels were happy to admit that he was white, they didn’t draw attention to the fact that he was poor. Like Vanilla Ice, he was marketed as a kind of aspirational rock star figure.

And that’s really what people hated about them, I think. They just felt so fake.

Snow never had another major hit after ‘Informer’, although he went on to become surprisingly popular in Jamaica. He had a Number One there in 1995 with ‘Anything For You’, featuring a bunch of reggae stars including Beanie Man and Buju Banton.

‘Informer’ lives on forever, making regular appearances on Worst Songs of All Time.

I won’t say it’s a good song, but it is definitely is a very fun song. I definitely don’t hate it as much as I did on that cold morning in 1993, when I spat out my cereal at the though of another white rapper.

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