From the gut

Ottawa rapper Belly is nominated for four MuchMusic Video Awards. (CP Records)

Rapper Belly (full designation: Rebellyus) is a stout customer with a close-cropped beard, cornrows and an inverted ball cap. In videos, he struts about in a mink coat, a quarter-million dollars’ worth of precious metal around his neck and the air of supremacy that comes with it. On the mike, the Ottawa rapper boasts with the best of them. “Broads, cars, wicked deals and cheddar / I ain’t involved if it ain’t a mill or better,” he waxes in Pressure; in I’m the Man, he muses, “I went from rags to riches, gettin’ something from crumbs / Now you sons of bitches can meet a son of a gun / every couple of months I double my funds.” The message Belly would like to put out there: he’s rolling in it.

Ask him about his bling, and he’ll tell you it’s real — and all his. “It’s me being me,” he says coyly, admitting he couldn’t afford it on the proceeds of hip-hop alone. “I’ve invested in a couple of things, you know, and that’s all there is to say about it, really.” Belly’s ice is on full display in the swank video for Pressure, his collaboration with chart-topping American R&B singer Ginuwine. Set in and outside a swishy club, the clip contains languorous shots of luxury cars, bosomy babes, champagne — as well as an incongruous cameo by wrestler Hulk Hogan. It’s reportedly the most expensive hip-hop video ever made in Canada.

Up for four MuchMusic Video Awards on June 17, the clip announces Belly as a playa, but that’s not what makes him interesting. The most powerful cut on The Revolution, Belly’s double-disc debut, is History of Violence, where the 23-year-old rapper declares his heritage: “’84, I was born on a war-torn corner / Jenin, full of steam, where the bombs stormed on us / Tried to escape but they never forewarned us / we’d end up with the weight of the whole world on us.”

“When I was a kid, I had a song that got popular in Ottawa where the lyrics went, ‘I grew up in the land where kids throw rocks at tanks,’” the rapper says on the phone from Ottawa, as though to prove that his identification with the Palestinians is not a recent whim. Born Ahmad Balshe in the West Bank city of Jenin, Belly spent his early years shuttling between Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon; his family settled in Ottawa when he was seven.

Growing up in the city’s suburbs, Belly says hip-hop “was always the soundtrack to my life.” Motivated by the hard-hitting wordplay of rappers like Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, Belly recorded home-made demos that mixed “flashbacks, pictures, sounds” of his embattled childhood with the aspirational bluster of his heroes.

In 1999, he and R&B singer Massari were the first acts to sign to the Ottawa independent label Capital Prophet, where Belly has since become vice-president and head of A&R. He wrote three Top-10 hits (Be Easy, Smile for Me, Rush the Floor) for the Lebanese-born Massari, whose self-titled 2005 album achieved gold status (50,000 albums sold) in Canada. In 2003, Belly released Kool Kid, the first in a trilogy of mixtapes (entitled Death Before Dishonor); it was followed by DJ Kay Slay (2004) and DJ Big Mike (2006). Altogether, the trifecta has sold more than 65,000 copies — an impressive haul for underground releases.

(CP Records)

Those sales figures should climb substantially with The Revolution. Out June 5, the album will enjoy major-label distribution through Universal Music, with a U.S. release due in early ’08. Driven by Belly’s terse rhymes and gravelly flow, The Revolution mixes hedonism with heavier issues. In Revolutionary, Belly upbraids politicians who scapegoat hip-hop, saying, “They knock gangsta music / when [Dick] Cheney’s shooting people in the face.” In History of Violence, Belly raps about “cowboys with swords / like Ehud Olmert,” a snipe at the Israeli prime minister for his handling of last summer’s war with Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. In the video for History of Violence, Belly sports a kaffiyeh, the headscarf made famous by late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The scarf has become radical chic of late, but remains an emblem of a divisive conflict.

“I don’t want people to take that the wrong way, especially Israeli people. I know a lot of Israeli people are against the occupation, against the Lebanon war,” he says, referring to the more than 100,000 Israelis who recently marched in support of Olmert’s ouster. History of Violence is in fact a broader indictment of warfare.

“I think anybody can relate [to the song] if they’re against war. As long as people are against the Iraq war, that’s a positive sign in the world; the fact that the war is still going on is a negative sign. You can’t say that Iraq is any better than it was. It’s worse than it’s ever been, when the first intention was to help people,” he says. “Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, [U.S. vice-president] Dick Cheney, Ehud Olmert — all these world leaders have gotten a thrashing from me in my songs at one point or another,” says Belly. “There’s Arabs in there; I don’t discriminate like that. I speak for the regular person, for the people.”

Belly’s political tracks are more notable for their outrage than their insight into the modern Middle East. Even so, it’s bracing to hear these themes in a pop song; few if any Western rappers have seen fit to address it. While Belly is a passionate polemicist, he’s also a savvy businessman. Concerned that some listeners might not want to dilute a party vibe with politics, he split The Revolution into two discs, The People and The System. The former features Belly’s angrier, more engaged rhymes, while the latter is packed with club bangers.

“It’s good to be versatile, but sometimes people get into certain moods and they just want to listen to a specific type of music,” Belly says. “If they want to listen to something that’s more deep, they can put in one side [of the album] and they can just rock to it. If somebody feels like cruising, windows down, music pumping, they got The System, which is all the feel-good music, the hottest beats.”

Ever the salesman, Belly calls The Revolution “revolutionary.” Ignore the grandstanding (and repetition) for a sec — he may be right. With its taut, Dr. Dre-inspired grooves and estimable guest list of U.S. hitmakers (including rappers Scarface, Kurupt and Fabolous), The Revolution may be the brashest hip-hop record ever produced in Canada; it’s certainly the most American-sounding.

“I called it The Revolution because it’s a change from what Canadian hip-hop has been doing. Hip-hop in Canada isn’t selling records; technically, just what I sold in mixtapes is probably what most rappers sold in this country combined,” he says without compunction. “Canadian rappers don’t like to spend money — or sorry, their labels don’t like to spend money, because they don’t think it’s going to bring back money. I have people who take risks. We do things on a larger level.”

Whether that’s true or not is beside the point. Belly knows that rap has no place for modesty, Canadian or otherwise.

The Revolution is in stores June 5.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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