Tory Lanez gives the people what they want

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      Tory Lanez knows you’ve got to keep the product flowing for the fans, nonstop.

      Even as the Toronto-based rapper born Daystar Peterson spent the bulk of the last 18 months teasing the arrival of his debut full-length, I Told You, he was rifling off a series of loosies like the razor-sharp, drunk-in-the-club cut “Diamonds” and his own version of Drake’s island-rhythm-influenced “Controlla”, which some argue trumped the 6 God’s original.

      Though deep into a North American tour that runs from September until December, he’s still had time to drop the golden-soul-sampling “Look No Further” single and to bring dancehall fave Sean Paul onto a remix of his album’s “Luv”.

      It’s never-ending, but perhaps taking a tip from The Omen, he notes that the steady grind is all for you.

      “It’s just about the consumer, man,” he tells the Straight over the line from his home in Toronto, where he’s been handling a morning’s worth of interviews. “It’s about the people just enjoying the music and getting the style and sound that they deserve.”

      Of course, Lanez’s latest full-length technically isn’t about the throngs that have been bumping it since its late-August release, but about the artist himself. While he’s launched a number of singles and mix tapes since first popping up in 2009, I Told You takes listeners all the way back to those fledgling moments.

      Opener “I Told You/Another One” begins with a skit where his grandmother, fed up with his disrespect and hustling ways, forces him out onto the street. The song proceeds to unfurl discordant organs and a furrow-browed boom of bass, above which Lanez talks of nights spent sleeping in parks and dealing drugs.

      He sums up the project: “It’s my real life, real stories, real things that happened. I’m just now being honest with certain things.

      “Honestly, it’s crazy,” he adds of the album’s sonic and spiritual journey. “It starts from early on, of course. It starts from a place of me being kicked out of my house, up until about this time now, pretty much. It takes you through the experiences and different things.

      “I narrate the whole album. There’s interludes, there’s skits, there’s actors. It’s just something you’ve got to listen to and sink your teeth into.”

      Other highlights of Lanez’s pre-rap-fame narrative include a tense robbery on the murky “4 AM Flex”, and suspect connections on the Auto-Tuned piano banger “Dirty Money”. It’s not all illicit, though, with the hot-sex-minded “Cold Hard Love” showing off Lanez’s falsetto singing skills over undulating four-on-the-floors and Ambien-haze synths, kind of like Toronto’s more famous Starboy, the Weeknd.

      Even though working himself up from the streets to theatre stages has given Lanez plenty to boast about, his lyrical candour points out mistakes made along the way. Comically, the summertime freebie single “August 19th” made light of a viral video that showed the rapper delivering a spastic jump shot during an indoor basketball game.

      Although the lack of form yielded plenty of online laughs, he rebounded with the self-directed quip: “Jump shot ugly but I balled, dog, in real life.” If you ask him now, his game’s only getting better, both on and off the court.

      “Greatest ball player ever,” he deadpans. “The greatest person to ever touch a basketball in the history of basketball, period. LeBron? Steph Curry? They ain’t got nothing on the kid, you heard?”

      Tory Lanez plays the Vogue Theatre on Monday (November 14) and the Commodore Ballroom on Tuesday (November 15).

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