What happens when you feel like you’ve hit the ceiling in Toronto’s music scene? Either you give up, or like Junia-T, you look for that next step to grow. So it was that the Mississauga-raised artist found himself hopping on a plane to the United Kingdom, eager to find a musical foothold outside of his hometown. Even more remarkable was the timing: his latest project, Eye See You, came out when he was overseas — quite the leap of faith, when most artists would seek comfort in celebrating the release in their hometown. We caught up with Junia-T to talk about his month-long departure to England, things happening on divine time, being rich in love, and much more. Listen to the podcast above and read the interview below.
TCUS: What have you been up to out in London?
Junia-T: I jumped off the plane, put my stuff away in the hotel, and went straight to a venue to rock a show [laughs]. First day. So I rocked the show, which was this thing called VisionBombing out here, which is basically a video mixtape series that they do – it’s run by one of the main deejays from ITCH FM, this dude named Mr. Dex. He’s been playing my music out here since “Too Smoove” dropped, so they were happy to get me out. They supported me heavy. It was a pretty good turnout, and I got to meet some key people; I got to meet Eric Lau, who’s a really dope producer out here. The next day, I did a radio show on ITCH FM with OthaSoul. I’ve been linking up with people out here – artists and stuff – which has been really, really cool.
TCUS: Tell me about how this all started in the first place. What made you decide to jump across the water for a little bit?
Junia-T: You know what? I really felt like I hit the ceiling in Toronto and Canada. I felt like there was nothing more I could do. There were no avenues. As far as what I spent the last year learning, I realized that in order to grow my career past where I brought myself, I had to leave. I’ve already gone to the States. I went to L.A. with the team in the years before and started to build some roots over there. I went to SXSW for the first time this year. I also went to L.A. on my own this year with my homie Tass[Nata], and I just realized that I’ve been wanting to go to Europe forever. I’ve been wanting to do that for the last six years, and I finally had the means to do it. Somebody invested in me to send me, so I decided to come through to a place that I feel appreciates real music, and I was right.
TCUS: So this is the first time you’ve been to the U.K.?
Junia-T: Yeah, this is a first, man, and I’m half-British.
TCUS: Tell me about the sights you’ve seen and the music that surrounded you.
Junia-T: It’s beautiful to see, man. One thing about U.K. is they’ve got a big urban culture. A lot of rappers get signed out here. Like, that’s a regular thing: to get signed. Their industry is fully functional, whereas in Toronto, there’s absolutely no way to learn the machine, because nobody’s getting signed [laughs]. There’s a lot of guys out here that have a lot of industry experience, but I guess the trade-off is not as many guys are as business-savvy as far as all the layers of the business go, because they’ve never had to do it. The label’s always done it for them. So I’m coming over there way more equipped with understanding of what has to happen and who I need to know.
TCUS: Have you been primarily in London, or have you moved around at all?
Junia-T: I’ve pretty much stayed in London. I’ve gone out to Kent, which is on the coast. My homegirl is helping me with some PR. She lives out there, so she brought me out there just to get a little change of scenery. It was dope, but to be real with you, I’m on some tunnel-vision shit, bro. I only have a month to make as much of an impact as possible, so that’s just been my focus: studio, shows, radio, and meeting with people that are the people out here to know.
TCUS: What kinds of connections have you made artists-wise or studios-wise?
Junia-T: One of my close homies, Chris P Cuts, who does the hip-hop playlist for 22tracks, he works out of a dope studio called Alaska Studios, which is an historic studio out here. So I got to build over there for a bit. This artist out here named PW Lavish – he’s also pretty established – he had me come through to his studio and produce some records over there. He and I did a record together.
There’s two guys that I’m going to be doing projects with, that [I connected with] out here [through] this dude named Omar, who’s pretty much been working my records out here since I put out “You & I.” He got it on a whole bunch of radio shows. When Slakah came out here to do his tour, every single radio show was playing my record [laughs]. It was a trip for him, because he was like, “wow, it’s everywhere.”
He hooked me up with two artists. One guy’s named Benjamin A.D; he and I are doing a whole EP together; like, we’ve got crazy records. And I linked up with this other guy named Skripture; he’s just retarded too. He’s an emcee/producer/bassist, and he’s right up my alley. Same kind of vibes, real dope. He laid a whole bunch of bass down on production for me out here, and he and I are basically going to do some Jaylib shit [laughs].
Video #1 w/ @benjaminad_ – Jensen #TO2UK
A photo posted by Junia-T (@juniatofsb) on
Junia-T: Yeah, but also, we’re thinking of going all the way in and collaborating on all the production, because the synchronicity is there, nah mean?
TCUS: One other thing that you’ve been involved in out there is Focus15. Tell me about that and how you got involved.
Junia-T: Focus15 is some real stuff. All music aside, my real reason for doing anything is just to be about change and change things for the people, because the people make the world go ’round. I’ve always been active in community work – that’s just a part of who I am – and a close friend of mine, Liam Barrington, pretty much put me onto a lot of that way of life. The first time he and I worked together was a thing called Turning the Tables, which is in conjunction with Schools Without Borders and InnerCity Visions, which is the predecessor of Remix [Project]. We went out to Cuba to build a studio for the youth out there, and ever since then, he and I have been in touch. He’s a real anarchist, man. He’s written books and is doing his thing.
E15 is a bunch of single mothers that were being evicted out of this housing complex out here, just so they could sell it to richer people. The funny thing is, there are so many housing complexes out here that are friggin’ empty, bro. Like hundreds and hundreds of units that are empty. So these mothers all banded together to start this thing called E15, and they pretty much took over some of those units by force and straight occupied them, because they’re fully working and everything. They stopped a lot of people from getting evicted out of their homes, helped families keep their homes, and it’s just people fighting for people, and they’re seeing results.
What they were doing is every Saturday by Stratford mall, they would just stand outside, put up a table, have all these flyers, and talk on a megaphone, [all] just to get people engaged in what’s happening. The funny part was, a lot of the people that they would stop and talk to were going through the exact same thing. Like, it’s not just the poor areas of London that are being gentrified; it’s the whole of London. Even the studio that I went to, Alaska Studios, it’s been there for years; it’s a staple for Jamaican music in London, and they’re kicking them out for the sake of real estate.
Big shouts to @JuniaTofSB for rhyming @ the @FocusE15 stall! And @Skills_Net for bringing the whole crew fr/ Brixton! pic.twitter.com/gWq49YGTb1
— Liam Barrington-Bush (@hackofalltrades) November 22, 2014
All I did is lend my time as a performer, because instead of hearing a megaphone for like two hours, you’re hearing some nice, pleasant, relaxed, chill-out music, and people would stop. I wasn’t even busking, but people were coming out and giving me money and shit [laughs]. I made like $60 just rapping. That, to me, is me giving back. I didn’t even want to promote my record, and I told them not to speak about my album. It’s not about me; it’s about creating an atmosphere that allowed people to be more engaging with the information they’re sharing, and that’s what I did two weeks in a row.
TCUS: You mentioned that trip to Cuba with I.C. Visions. Tell me a little bit more about the history of I.C. Visions and what that trip was like.
Junia-T: Going to Cuba was big. I went out there with Big Pops, my homegirl Ice, Gavin [Sheppard]… we pretty much went out there to build a studio similar to I.C. Visions, because we recognized the power it would have when you could just give a hub to a community. What ended up happening, though, which was interesting, the association we partnered up with that allowed us to get our cultural visas pretty much weren’t going to give it to the hip-hop community. They were going to just hold onto it and record nothing but classical music and shit. We found this out halfway through, before we even started to bring the equipment over, and then we met this kid named Ali, and at the time, he was 16, and he was producing for 70 percent of Central Havana’s rap scene. One kid. So we pretty much gave all the equipment to him.
He was living in the hood, and if you know much about Cuban houses, some houses just don’t have a ceiling in a big portion of the house – it’s just a big, open courtyard in the middle of the house – and that’s where he put the studio. You could scale the side of the house if you wanted, [but] they protected that shit – the whole community protected that shit, and now this kid’s gone off to do great things. [But yeah], we physically brought all that equipment to the hood. Mans are walking around with studio monitors and computers – shit people had never seen before – and didn’t even feel scared at all. It’s just a totally different vibe in Cuba. They just understood what it was. We weren’t doing anything other than giving back to the culture we love, and it’s come back tenfold.
TCUS: It’s been almost two years since we last caught up. What have you been up to since then?
Junia-T: Pretty much producing my ass off, man. That’s been the primary focus, and just getting back to family life, trying to be a better dad. I’m making a lot of music. In that time, [Crooklin and I] decided to do the solo thing. I spent a lot of that time understanding what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it, and just learning. I wasn’t trying to rush anything, so pretty much from then to now was just me learning how to do what I want to do, for lack of better words.
TCUS: How has fatherhood changed your life, in both the way you approach music and your outlook on things?
Junia-T: It’s changed everything. It’s given me context to everything I do, you know? They say that parenthood always changes you. It doesn’t change everybody, and it doesn’t change you in a split second either. It’s just about when certain things start to matter to you, it changes how you make decisions and why you make decisions. It’s made me selfless. I’m a selfish person by nature [laughs], and I think about my daughter and wife before I make a choice. My family’s a part of every decision I make now.
A Tribe Called Blessed. #Family
A photo posted by Junia-T (@juniatofsb) on
Junia-T: Oh man! That was the album that changed all of my lyrical content. That changed me single-handedly. When you’re a young artist, and you’re just rapping, following what you hear, you don’t really understand the reality of the environments these people are describing, you know what I mean? My favourite rappers were Boot Camp Clik and Heltah Skeltah… real rugged stuff. They still had lyrical merit, but I wasn’t really connecting with the reality of the environments and the stories that were being told. Until you hear an album like Black Star, it really made me realize that yeah, I can rap about my regular life and still have something to say.
I was really big on being the emcee’s emcee and having bars, you know? And I realized that having bars was just having something real to say. That mattered to me, and that’s what that album did to me. One of the main songs on the album that really opened my eyes was “K.O.S. (Determination).” That song’s [got] bars for days, and they’re not even two-line setups. They’re just one line, straightforward knowledge. They resonated with me, and that’s who I am now.
Knowledge of Self… Determination #Blackstar
— Junia-T | #EyeSeeYou (@JuniaTofSB) May 15, 2014
TCUS: Do you lean one way towards being a Mos guy or a Kweli guy? What’s your preference?
Junia-T: I’d say I’m a balance of both. I appreciate and try to perform [with] lyrical depth like Kweli, but at the same time, I try to be as musical as Mos at all times. I’m a musician first, before I can be categorized into a style of musician, and I feel that’s what that tandem was.
TCUS: You grew up in a musical household. Your father was a drummer. What kind of an impact did that have on you, in terms of picking up music?
Junia-T: That was the main ingredient, bro. Having that around, I grew up in a household where there were A-list artists coming through to rock with my dad. Deborah Cox was the singer for his main band, and Orin Isaacs was one of the main players. What they were playing as a band is what influenced my style and my tastes, musically. They were playing a lot of S.O.S. Band, a lot of Slave, a lot of Tom Brown… so that shit’s the foundation of my music. I later followed my dad as a musician and played drums for like five years on my own – I played drums for my church – so I feel my production sounds the way it does because I have a real rich musical understanding. It doesn’t start in my teen years; I’ve been listening to music since I was a kid. I even sang in a choir, dawg [laughs]. My understanding of music is real. I didn’t just jump on this rap train for social acknowledgement. I have to do music to feel okay [laughs].
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TCUS: So you were growing up in Mississauga. At the time, Master T and Da Mix was big for Toronto hip-hop and all of Canada, really. How influential was that for you?
Junia-T: That was where the dream of being an emcee kind of started. I started to realize that my tastes for expressing myself musically gravitated towards emceeing and rapping, and I started to see these different variations of music I grew up on. It resonated with me, and it just made it seem not so far away, when you had Master T headlining it and highlighting Toronto guys doing their thing. I was bumping a lot of Project Bounce and [CIUT’s] Masterplan radio, and all that shit, so just to know that the culture was here gave me hope, like, okay, I can actually do this from here.
TCUS: Rich Kidd told me before about how he came up admiring you as a freestyle battler. Tell me about battling at the South Common bus terminal.
Junia-T: Oh man. That’s really like the beginnings of Junia-T on a grand scale, when I realized that I had something. Mans would travel from all ends of Sauga to come battle me, because they heard I had the crown, nah mean? I’d eat mad mans’ food. That’s really what it is. I took out some of the older mans too. Plus, I was new to that block when I moved through, because I came from Woodlands and moved to South Common. Once I went to Clarkson, then I met this rap community, and they would all congregate at the mall, so I was like, aight, I’m coming for everybody’s head [laughs].
I was battling all those guys, and Rich was the youngin’ coming up. He was close friends with the youngest on my team, who’s no longer with us on the vibe, but yeah man, he was inspired by us killin’ it. Rich was actually like my sidekick for a long time [laughs]. Once he got serious with rap and all that stuff, he was on house arrest, and he did two joints on his house arrest mixtape at my studio at my crib, and I was like, yo, this kid’s nice. When I started to get more shows, I was like, “yo, come out,” and I’d have him back me up on the shows. You can probably even see some footage on YouTube of him backing me up and shit like that. He’s been my brother from time, you know what I mean?
TCUS: Let’s go through some history. What can you tell me about Silver Fox and 3-5 Playa?
Junia-T: That’s my creed brethren. That’s my first family in the game. 3-5 Playa is the family that Smash Brovaz comes from. [It’s] basically a crew that started in my complex when I moved to South Common. The complex is called 3500 Glen Erin Dr., so we pretty much made it 3-5, and we called it Playa, because we considered ourselves playas of the game, you know what I mean? We’re officially in the game. We work. It’s a grind. So that’s like 2000.
I recruited Crook after we dropped our first mixtape. I came by Erindale School, just hustling my tapes as I was, seen the guy on the bridge, and he just looked at the frigging CD with awe and was like, “yo, give me ten of these, bro. I’ll have the money for you tomorrow.” I’m like, “yeah, right.” He’s like, “yeah, bro.” I gave him the CDs, came back the next day, he handed me my money, and I was like, “for real? Come join the mandem” [laughs]. He joined the squad.
Silver Fox is basically our deejay crew within the fam. They used to do a radio show on SensiMedia.net for like six years. I just like to keep it original fam, man. Those are my dudes forever.
A photo posted by Junia-T (@juniatofsb) on
Junia-T: [Laughs] That’s technically our first show ever in Mississauga. Big Pops even performed that day. Pops performed, Crook performed with his bro, and I performed dolo with my team. That was just kind of the beginnings of us all realizing there’s more of us in the city that are actually serious about doing music.
TCUS: Is that a common thing, to have artists perform at the Lodge?
Junia-T: Yeah, because Mississauga has no stages you can book out to do a show. There’s a friggin’ monopoly out here by Rob Taggart, so if you’re not a part of the Rob Taggart Talent Agency, you can’t book a stage for yourself. Even though I’ve thrown shows with 500+ people, and I’ve got videos and signed papers to prove it, they won’t give me a stage.
TCUS: Let’s talk about this project, Eye See You. This came out at the start of November. Tell me about the genesis of this project and how it all started.
Junia-T: You know what? It started two years ago, pretty much when I started to work on just Junia. I started that year just producing out of Dream House Studios; for three months, me and Guzo were going in heavy. I was on my Quincy Jones production [tip], bringing in mad musicians and shit. It was just me working, making a whole bunch of music and trying to do things on my own.
Time passed, and recently, I had a conversation with [Rich Kidd’s manager] Addy [Papa] around the time I was dropping “Too Smoove.” I was gearing up to drop “Everyday,” and he was like, “yo, don’t just drop these singles,” because what they learned from the Rich Kidd campaign was that when they were putting out all those singles and getting all those good placements for the single releases, like Vibe, MTV, and all those things, all those songs weren’t leading up to a project, so [they] just disappeared in time. People didn’t hold onto it. So he was like, “even though you’re going to put out a collage of music, you might as well just put it out to become a project, and people will hold onto that music more.”
I took his advice and slept on it until I found the right title, and then it hit me one morning, and Eye See You was born. I pretty much had the music that I was already going to put together for it – like, mad songs – but the title helped me curate the vibe. It was weeks, upon weeks, upon weeks getting the right arrangement, and also finishing a lot of that music too, once I decided what I wanted to put on it. It wasn’t so calculated; it was really, really natural how it came to be, so I went with the flow of things, and it manifested accordingly.
TCUS: What was it like for you to have that project come out at a time when you were across the world?
Junia-T: It was weird at first, because I’m a control freak. I do everything myself, literally. I’m sending out my press releases to all these blogs; I’m organizing my rollout; I’m getting my artwork done; I mixed and mastered my whole album; I booked myself… as far as doing the communications between here and the places I’m travelling to, that’s me. I guess it was kind of nerve-wracking, because I wanted to make sure I had somebody in town to hold shit down for me. But it’s also made me realize that sometimes, you’ve just gotta let things go and let it organically spread on its own.
I also felt that it was kind of like a statement, like, yeah Toronto. I’ve been there; I do my thing; for those that have been supporting me, you’ll support me over here, but it’s time for me to go and show whoever I’m meeting out here how serious I am about my grind. A lot of people were impressed by that fact. I picked up my CDs the day I flew out, at 11 am. I bought my ticket before my flight left, put 70 CDs in my friggin’ suitcase, hoping they wouldn’t stop me at the border when I got in [laughs]. My family shipped me out another 140. I’m just here griding, bro. I just needed to do it for myself, really.
TCUS: One of the things that strikes me about this project is the opening sample of Bob Marley: “What do you mean, rich? I don’t have that type of richness. My richness is life, forever.” Tell me about the significance of that to you.
Junia-T: That’s actually what I live by. I’ve never been a rich person. I’ve always had enough to survive; money’s always shown up when I needed it. Even me being on this trip is a product of that, you know? But if there’s anything I can always claim to be rich in, and that has always proven itself to me, it’s that I’ve always been rich in love. Being rich in love is something that you can’t just acquire physically. Someone can’t just hand you a bunch of love and you’ll have that. It’s how you’ve spent your life; it’s how you’ve treated people.
Eye Only have the energy to spread love. Miss me with that otha stuff… #EyeSeeYou
— Junia-T | #EyeSeeYou (@JuniaTofSB) November 27, 2014
I’ve always felt that I was rich in love, and in a time where rap is at an all-time high of vanity, people feeling like to be rich in things is going to bring you happiness, [it stands out]. I’ve been broke all my life, b, and people tell me I smile all the f—king time, so I guess I’m doing something right. I needed to find a strong person that said that, and I just found that [Marley quote] miraculously. It encompassed it all. I wanted people to know out the gate, this is not about your usual rap shit. This is about love and things that matter in life, and that’s all the album’s about [laughs].
TCUS: Speaking of love, you have a line in “How Can I” that goes: “Seems love don’t visit where I’m living at.” Tell me about that line.
Junia-T: I wrote that record shortly after my grandmother died. Crazy things happen when people die and they’ve got a lot of earthly possessions. Some people’s true colours come out, or some people develop new colours, and I started to see ugly sides of a lot of people in my family that I consider to be the anchor, and it just really bothered me. [At] the household [where] I was living in Sauga, before I moved in with my wife, the energy was dark. My grandmother’s house was always radiant and really bright and warm, and after she left, it felt like love was not coming there at all. So I wrote that at a dark time for me, but that was a little bit of a release, and that was really, really honest as far as what I’m talking about in the first verse. It’s all about me living at the house.
The second verse is all about my daughter’s mom, because I wrote “You & I” about her and she didn’t give a damn. It kinda f—ked me up, you know what I’m saying? Because that was me being honest. I didn’t write the song because I wanted to have a girl track on my roster; I wrote that song out of how I felt.
TCUS: What will last with you about your grandmother? What type of an influence did she have on you?
Junia-T: She was my first believer in my family, before my mom, before my dad, before anybody. She was the first one. When I was going to Trebas, a close friend of mine was selling his whole studio setup, because he was becoming a dad. He was selling it for $3,500. I’m big on numbers, so I’m like, 3500? It’s a sign. I told that to my [grandmother], like, “Grams, this guy’s selling his studio for $3,500. It’s everything I need to get started.” She didn’t even blink. I don’t even know where she got the money. She just handed it to me, like, “go do what you gotta do.” She’s just really been holding it down. She’s all over the album. A lot of the songs, I make little references to her here and there, because I know she’s been the one rooting for me to get this far, and I can’t quit because of how much she believes in me.
TCUS: This project that you’ve dropped is sort of gearing up towards a larger release, which will be Divine Time. Tell me about that.
Junia-T: It’s going to be a process. I needed to put this one out, because I wanted people to realize, you can’t put me in a box. Just because I’m a rapper that produces, don’t expect a rap album that I produce. Ever. I produce in the traditional sense. I produce like Quincy Jones; I don’t produce like Premo, you know what I mean? I commission musicians. We vibe in the studio. We write music like Stevie Wonder would in the seventies. But I also possess those other skill sets, so when I put out Eye See You, that’s why there’s some funk music, some nineties R&B, and some slower soul.
But my Divine Time project that I’m leading towards, I want that to be Junia-T speaking about his life in entirety. I feel like that title encompasses my life as a whole. Everything has always happened on divine time, never my time, you know what I mean? And there’s going to be a project in between, which is going to be an instrumental project called Pour, No Mix – that’s all instrumentals that I sampled seventies porn [to create].
All in #DivineTime
— Junia-T | #EyeSeeYou (@JuniaTofSB) April 24, 2013
TCUS: Going back to talking about things happening on divine time and falling into place, give me some more examples, if you look back on your life, of things unfolding on divine time.
Junia-T: Check it out. So the very, very first Smash Brovaz video, “Whatchu Need, Whatchu Want,” was a product of me experiencing divine time. We were going to shoot that video with one of Crook’s boys from school. The guy came over to the crib, set up some kind of cheesy green screen in the garage, shot this footage, and I was just like, yo, whatever. At the time, I was still working with Turning the Tables, which had a partnership with Schools Without Borders. Schools Without Borders had access to these broadcast-quality cameras, because this was before DSLR. So I was like, I’m gonna rent one of these cameras for a weekend, and I’m just gonna get random B-roll footage that we can chop in between this video.
I go to this Necro concert during Canadian Music Week at the Opera House. My homegirl’s the bartender at Opera House, and she lives above Opera House, so any concert that’s happening, I get to just walk in that b—h. I walk in, and I walk right to the backstage. The dude at the door’s like, “I can’t let you in.” I’m like, “you see the f—kin’ size of my camera, bro? You think I’m supposed to be in the front of the stage?” So he lets me backstage [laughs].
I walk backstage now, and the first two people I see are Eternia and DJ Law. Then I see Brent, who runs Just Entertainment and coordinated the whole show, and he’s like, “ah Junes! You got backstage! Do whatever you want.” So now I’m filming this crowd, trying to pump this crowd to chop into my video, and this guy to my left looks into my monitor, and it’s mad red. There’s no red light onstage, but my monitor’s showing a lot of red, and he’s like, “yo bro, how come your monitor’s red?” I just tell the guy the truth. I’m like, “look, I’m a rapper. I don’t even shoot video, but I’m trying to shoot some B-roll footage to chop in this video,” because I think this guy’s gonna f—k it up. He’s like, “oh man! You’re that serious, bro? Alright, I’m gonna shoot a video for you.”
At the time, ask anybody, I change my number like a drug dealer. This guy hunted me down for a whole f—kin’ year, bro. He got a hold of me six days before he wanted to shoot the video, through Facebook. He ended up shooting our video for free on the red. Divine time.
That’s just one story. I’ve got many stories. Even last night was a divine time story. Last night, I was supposed to go to Boiler Room with Lily Mercer, who’s a really big personality out here in the hip-hop scene. She hits me up like, “yo, I couldn’t get a plus-one for you to come, and since I’m not going to be able to roll with you, I’m gonna stay home.” I’m like, alright, cool. So ELMNT and I are sitting here like, “f—k, we’re not gonna be able to go.” We roll up another spliff, and I get this text message. My boy’s like, “yo, Mr. Dex has a plus-two for Boiler Room and has no-one to give it to [laughs]. So we go to the friggin’ Boiler Room with Joey Bada$$.
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I tell this guy, “I’m gonna meet someone from Boiler Room, for sure.” We go to the front, and apparently they must have closed off the door, but the girl at the front door thought I looked like some dude before, and she’s like, “no, he’s staff. Let him in.” [The bouncer] lets me in, she comes inside, and I thank her for letting me in and give her a CD. I’m like, “I want to meet someone from Boiler Room.” My homie is there talking to this dude, and he’s like, “yo, you gotta meet Aero. Aero, this is Junia-T.” She comes by, and she was like, “oh, I was going to introduce you to this guy, but this is the main guy from Boiler Room.” I’m already talking to the n—a. See what I’m saying? Divine time.
TCUS: Thinking of moments like that, what has been the most surreal moment that music has led to in your life?
Junia-T: The irony of the first real Smash Brovaz show in Mississauga. We never got booked for any show, and shortly after we dropped Think It’s A Game?, we got so much good acclaim that we got booked to perform at Celebration Square opening up for Classified. We were onstage performing for 6,000 people for our first show in Mississauga [laughs]. We jump offstage, and there’s herds of kids running over to buy albums and get signatures. That was the craziest one, by far.
TCUS: That’s it from me. Any final thoughts?
Junia-T: Big ups to everybody that’s been holding down Junia-T and supporting real music, and then supporting The Come Up Show. You guys are making sure that people get to find out about quality music and give them options, and not just feel stuck with the f—kin’ radio shit, because radio everywhere f—kin’ sucks, bro. Big ups to you guys, man.
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