SBAZZO YT
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Sbazzo is a rappa came out of ScarBoro Canada.
Droped his first album in 98' by BadBloodRecords.
This kid got a name for himself fast battlin' alot of top artists that came out of Canada...
He won 10 weeks in the "Bassment" a hip hop club that was doing emcees battles every week back in 98'. Just when everythin' was goin good for him, he got in sum beef wit the law and left the country.
So he went to Beijing and met his group Yin Ts'ang, and droped their first chinese album "4 DA PEOPLE", wich sold mo than 70,000 copies in China alone! (WOW)
Sbazzo! The king of Beijing! got alot of chinese hip hop kids followin his footsteps and makin it big in Beijing hip hop market aswell!(Damn)
Now his got a production team makin beats for alot of artists, and also doin' alot of mixtapes and adds.
Look out for his nu album comin soon!
Beijing born and Toronto raised, Sbazzo (a.k.a.ÂíË), is the award winning, critically acclaimed, leader of the group of MCs known as, Bad Blood. In 2002, as part of the pioneering rap group Yin Tsang, he released his first full length album For The People (ΪÁËÈËÃñþÎñ). For The People was received with open arms by hip hop heads across the nation and led to appearances at The 2003 Pepsi Music Awards, where they were nominated for Best New Rock-Rap Group and the China National Radio Music Awards, where they won Best New Group of 2003. In addition to full length articles by the LA Times, the China Daily and Music Magazine (China) the group also made special appearances on CCTV-1, PBS, CTV and Stir TV (cable).
Stemming from his earlier success with Yin Tsang, Sbazzo has performed across China, Canada and the United States. His music has been featured in commercials for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, LiNing, White Rabbit, TaiShan Beverage Company, the Chinese Basketball Association. He has collaborated and performed alongside Cui Jian (Þ), Dragon Tongue Squad (ÁúÃÅÕó), Han Hong, Chris Li (ÀîÓÚº) - winner of the China Super Girl competition, Onyx, DJ Kid Koala, The Jungle Brothers and Ugly Duckling.
Sbazzo is currently in production on a number of projects including a new mixtape, the FAR DVD - showcasing his and Beijings top hip-hop artists - and a full length album. He is featured on the Section 6 mixtape double CD and his most recent mixtape, King of Beijing, is now available in stores nationwide.
Globe and Mail, Thursday, July 29, p. R1
GEOFFREY YORK meets a 22-year-old former car thief from Scarborough, Ont., who's now a fast-rising star with a hip-hop group setting China on its ear.
By GEOFFREY YORK
BEIJING -- Casper Markus is slouching against the wall of a Beijing nightclub, sizing up the stage where his hip-hop group will perform that night. "It's too small," he complains. "I could fall off. I want a big stage."
He's a sullen 22-year-old kid with a bandana around his head, a former car thief from a Scarborough, Ont., immigrant ghetto who spent eight months inside Toronto's Mimico Detention Centre for drug possession and robbery. It was a rough stretch in a notoriously violent and gang-ridden jail. He survived by writing rap lyrics, reading Malcolm X, and winning protection from a Vietnamese gang called the Twelve Buddhas.
Last summer he hit rock bottom. Fired from his English-teaching job in Beijing (he says he was "too yellow" for a school that preferred white teachers), he was flat broke. He retreated to his mother's apartment and an $8-an-hour job at a Timberland warehouse in Toronto.
A few weeks later, he got a call from some buddies in Beijing. Within days he was in a recording studio with three friends. And then, improbably, the kid from Scarborough became a Chinese star, one of the godfathers of China's fast-rising hip-hop scene.
His group, Yin Ts'ang, has already sold 70,000 copies of its debut album. The album, Serve the People, is the first by a Chinese hip-hop group, and the first to feature original rap in both English and Chinese. Its legal sales numbers are extraordinary in a country where pirating is rampant. The four-member group - two Americans, a Chinese-Canadian and a Beijing native - were recently named top group on a music show on Chinese state television.
"In a market where you can buy any CD from anywhere for a dollar at any corner shop, they've been a tremendous success," says Francis Acquarone, a concert promoter in Beijing. "They're pioneers. In the future, everyone will remember Yin Ts'ang as the first hip-hop crew that made it work. Every young Chinese kid who wants to be cool is into hip-hop now."
Following the success of their debut album, the group is already negotiating a deal for a second album, and Casper -- his buddies call him Mark, but his stage name is Sbazzo in honour of his aggressive half-crazed rap style -- is preparing tracks for a solo album. He has become a mentor to China's brightest young rappers, teaching them the swaggering gangsta-rap styles that he learned as a teenager on the mean streets of a Jamaican neighbourhood in Scarborough.
"I'm having a lot of fun," he says. "At home I couldn't live off hip-hop. Here it's a brand-new opportunity. It's getting more exciting, with a lot of new people getting into the scene."
By the end of the night, more than 900 hip-hop heads will have crowded into Club Mix to see Yin Ts'ang and another Chinese-Canadian star, the scratch DJ Kid Koala, a turntable maestro from Montreal who is touring China as part of a concert series called Arctic Groove sponsored by the Canadian embassy in Beijing.
The story of Casper Markus is proof of the possibilities. As a teen, the son of parents who had emigrated from Beijing, he was the only Chinese rapper in his neighbourhood. Duelling on the streets with Jamaican and Trinidadian kids, he was a "battle MC" who rapped about gangs, drugs and guns.
He dropped out of school in Grade 10 and ended up in the Mimico youth detention centre for possessing marijuana and stealing a Dodge Caravan. "I was a crazy kid, a dumb kid," he says.
His mother, desperate to straighten him out, sent him back to Beijing to study at a local university. He quickly hooked up with members of the nascent Yin Ts'ang (the name means "underground" in Chinese).
After his four-month hiatus in Canada last year, he returned to Beijing when the band signed a record deal. Their first album, released in December, was an instant hit, and soon they were performing for crowds of up to 20,000 people.
Mark found himself doing commercials for companies selling candy, soft drinks, Adidas and Nike sports shoes, and the Chinese basketball league. The money was good, but his lyrics were heavily edited. "I felt like a slave," he says.
On the debut album, the lyrics were toned down to the point of blandness. Their biggest hit was Welcome to Beijing - a light-hearted rap about the tourist highlights of the Chinese capital, from the Great Wall to the Forbidden City. "It's kind of lame," he admits. "It's not really hip-hop, but wherever we go, people want to hear it."
"I'm a street rapper, I rap about the ghetto, the street, what's real," Mark says. "Hip-hop is a people-to-people thing, two rappers in a park. But here in China, hip-hop came in as a commercial thing. It's a fashion -- they're imitating American gangsta rappers. They're just trying to be cool."
While he often raps in Chinese, he finds the language still creates its own problems. Mocking a rival, or injecting an obscenity, somehow doesn't work as effectively in Chinese. And censorship is pervasive. "In Chinese, you have to keep it smooth. You can't swear, you can't talk about the government, drugs, girls, the stuff happening on the streets. It takes away a lot of the fun. It makes me nervous -- I'm afraid a bad word will come out. I have to hold back."
On his solo album, he hopes to push the limits. He has written a song called I Represent that talks about the ghetto, the people who emigrated, and even the destruction of traditional courtyard homes in Beijing. "I don't think that's too much to say," he insists. "I'm still hungry. I still want more."
YIN TS'ANG
Yin Tsang was founded in late 2000 when MC Webber (PRC) and Foenix XIV (USA) met and discovered they had a mutual interest in promoting hip-hop culture. Over the next year YT inundated Beijings established party spots with live freestyle sessions bringing the hip-hop movements music & culture to an eager audience. In early 2001, they took their freestyles to paper and started writing songs over commercial beats. Due to a lack of formal production training and a severe shortage of qualified urban producers in Beijing the team went to work learning how to create beats. Later that same year Yin Tsang recruited a Chinese-Canadian rapper from Toronto, Sbazzo, and an Irish-American rapper from Chicago, Heff and in late 2003, Scream Records released their first CD, Yin Tsang, For the People, featuring the hit single Welcome to Beijing.
The release of the CD established the Yin Tsang Crew as leaders of the hip-hop movement in mainland China. MC Webber succeeded in his quest to be the best MC in China by winning the National Iron Mic Freestyle Competition in Shanghai three years in a row. This brought both fame and street credit and led to MCing alongside San Franciscos Ugly Duckling and rap legends The Jungle Brothers. In addition to doing collaborations and concerts with Hong Kongs famous LMF crew and DJ Tommy, Toronto native, MC Vandal and Beijings Dragon Tongue Squad, MC Webber continues to be the most recognized MC in China. Foenix XIV continued to DJ in Beijings biggest and hottest clubs (Vics, Mix, Solutions, Orange, Tango), until he opened Lush, voted #1 new live venue among students in the university district of Beijing, in early 2004 and landed major roles in two television series, Admirers Fate and Dazzled. Sbazzo, with his unique flow and rhyme style, wroteBand/artist history
Yall know da deal
stop frontin'
We held down beijing hiphop fo a long time nowHave you performed in front of an audience?Everywhere
U name a spot n if the money is rite
Ill be there
Your musical influences
I get influences from those that make real muzik..
nomatta wut kind..Anything else?
BADBLOOD!!!Contact
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Comments (45)
T dot
yo sbazzo been tooo long homie get at me !!!!!! pronto hows china oh man you know what it is still doing music im out here fam!!!
What up sbazzo
yo sbazzo get at me fam
can i get it??
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