Summer 2024. I was coasting into a Walmart parking lot a few miles from the Canadian border when I decided that rapper/producer Mike Shabb was a genius. Unambiguously. No qualifiers. That word has been abused mightily in the past decade, as the music journalism equivalent of The Loudness Wars drowned out all but the most fawning of hyperbolic praises and thermonuclear takes. It’s bleak out there. It is also utterly superfluous, neither the source nor the spark, only commentary on the fire.
Mike Shabb is a lifelong student of the fire. Hip hop is how he learned English. The creation of something from nothing is an inherently magical act, and like all guilds, students of the fire have a credo: No Sample Snitching. If you think that’s up for discussion, you’re not having a discussion at all. These are gateless gates, and very few people can summon pure fire even in 2025. It’s a small club, mostly limited by how many talented but otherwise goofy motherfuckers are out here trying too hard, year after year after year. True mastery is effortless.
It was the 2022 EP Shadow Moses that first hipped me to the fact Mike Shabb had reached that point. Every detail fit, every track belonged. You don’t need to be cutting byzantine Benny the Butcher bars to sell me, but you do have to sound like yourself.
It wasn’t obvious yet how much Shabb had grown, this was after Bokleen World but before Live at the Tabernackle. An indeterminate state. Too much of the horse race commentary on music obsesses over talent expanding and evolving, but most of what really makes you great is a matter of subtraction.
Montreal is a parallel universe version of New York City: the colonial history and diaspora demographics shook out differently, but the gravitational pull remains the same. Montreal is uniquely itself, far more than the sum of those many parts, in a way that upmarket shopping malls like Toronto and Vancouver will never even dream. Like NYC, MTL is an immense cultural forge with worldwide reach, far bigger than the country that barely contains it.
Lately, that city-state has a conspicuously ascendant poet laureate in the front, with Nicolas Craven looming like a Large Professor in the background. I would wager that even Canada’s foremost ginger cultural ambassador is a little spooked at how fast & steep Mike Shabb’s learning curve has been lately. The Mandate of Heaven is never subtle.
So, anyway: Walmart. Part of living in the boonies is how often a solid day of chores can take several counties worth of driving to accomplish. I was two, maybe three plays through Sewaside III and only just realizing I’d been letting it loop for over a hundred meandering miles. Every detail fit, every track belonged, and it was Shabb’s longest project ever, too.
This is the sound of a dumb talented young artist reaching out in a dozen directions and being surprised to find out every experiment worked. Crucially, this is an album that only Mike Shabb could have made. That’s the “genius” part. Five Dickies.
