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Coffee with: From hip hop came hope for Steve Ismail

Local rapper lived through the Gulf War as an infant, and being homeless as a teen. He’s now working on his first original rap album.
Steve Ismail
Steve Ismail lived through the Gulf War as an infant, and being homeless as a teen. He’s now working on his first original rap album. Photo by Matthew Hoekstra/Special to the News

In elementary school, friends started calling Steve Ismail “Eyes”— his facial feature that drew looks from ethnic Chinese classmates in Richmond.

It’s a nickname that stuck to the Iraqi-born kid, who’s now a 25-year-old rapper better known as Steve I’s. In hip hop, Ismail found hope, he told the Richmond News in an interview, allowing him to move on from a troubled past and focus on music. With a new music video on YouTube, a mix tape complete and a debut album on the way, the lyrical rapper is now turning heads for something other than his gaze.

Ismail was born to an Assyrian family in Baghdad, Iraq during the Gulf War. The family managed to flee to Turkey, and eventually to Canada.

They started life in Richmond with little — mats instead of chairs, welfare instead of jobs. In high school, Ismail started hanging out with drug dealers, and his life, he says, “quickly spiralled downwards.” His parents kicked him out, so did his school. In his early teens, he stayed at youth houses and even homeless shelters.

Eventually, he returned to class — at first Station Stretch, Richmond School District’s alternate education program — and later J.N. Burnett. By then, he was focused on music. He decided he didn’t want to follow the path of friends who ended up in jail — or worse.

“By the time I was 16, I was trying to change my life,” he said from the patio of a Terra Nova coffee shop. “I didn’t want to ruin my chances of someday being able to tour in America.”

Although his family enjoys music, his love of hip hop didn’t come from them. His parents listen to Iraqi music — a style he finds hard to explain.

“How can I explain it? I do not like it. It sounds like a microphone is 10 feet away from the guy, and there’s 10 different instruments... I never really liked that. That’s why my parents don’t really understand rap. There isn’t even a word for rap in our language.”

His interest in rap arrived at a young age. Cutting through the noise of boy bands and pop groups were rappers like Eminem.

“It just blew me away,” he remembers. “I knew I didn’t just want to be a fan of it, I wanted to be a part of it.”

He didn’t know where to start. He had only played a little piano, and English isn’t his first language. Ismail started carrying a notepad, writing rhymes, writing songs. He listened to other artists to shape a style packed with rhymes, wordplays and metaphors.

His first video, packed with nearly 100 bars of straight rapping, shows off his lyrical style.

“The kids nowadays, I want them to listen to this, cause it kind of will teach them what (hip hop) used to be,” he said. “You really had to be lyrical. You had to know how to write the rhymes down. You hear some of the music now, it’s like a jingle or something. It’s not real hip hop.”

His first original album is due early 2016. He’ll then be eyeing shows and getting a foot in an industry he knows is tough.

“Talent doesn’t mean you’re going to make it. I would say it’s five per cent talent and 95 per cent opportunity meets opportunist. A lot has to do with luck — you meet the right person at the right time. That’s the way it works.”

Ismail knows his style and story are unique, but he wants his hip hop identity to go deeper than an Assyrian rapper born in Baghdad.

“I don’t want people to think of me just as an Iraqi rapper. I’m not trying to have a label like that. I’m just a dope emcee.”