Jazz Cartier released his second mixtape Hotel Paranoia on February 1, 2016 through Universal Music Canada. This is a catalogue project, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it is the Toronto tape that converted a breakout year into hardware, a Polaris longlist place for the second straight year and the Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year in 2017.
The official video for “Opera,” embedded below, is carried on Jazz Cartier’s own channel. The song sits in the middle of the tape as its cinematic centre, and its place in the record is below.
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Checking In: The Tape And Its Singles
The tape followed his debut, Marauding in Paradise, released April 15, 2015, by less than ten months, and it was supported by the singles “Stick and Move” and “I Know,” both released in late 2015 ahead of the project. Contemporary reviews name the rooms inside the hotel: the a cappella opener “Talk of the Town,” where he declares himself the prince of the city and the talk of the town, then “100 Roses,” “Red Alert,” “Illuminati Love Song,” “After the Club,” the River Tiber-assisted “Tell Me,” “One Day / Feel Away,” “How We Do It,” “Black and Misguided,” “Never Too Faded,” “Opera” and the closer “Save Me From Myself,” across a 16-track stay. The concept is his own framing from the era: within his paradise there is one hotel, and this tape is a part two of the first project, the same world viewed from inside its most paranoid building.
Producer Michael Lantz, his partner since they first met in a studio when Cartier was 16, provides the palette again. Exclaim’s review of the tape hears that palette clearly, a powerful, self-described cinematic sound behind a writer whose confidence and hunger had grown since Paradise, with hooks now matching the storytelling on songs including “Stick and Move,” “Black and Misguided,” “Never Too Faded” and “Opera.” The same review notes the plays toward R and B on “Illuminati Love Song,” “After the Club” and “Tell Me,” the tape’s second gear, and it is that gear shift, trap pressure one track, sung vulnerability the next, that made the project feel bigger than its mixtape label.
The Award Run It Set Off
The Junos’ own winner page tells the run plainly: if 2015 was practice, early 2016 marked his speedy and well-earned rise, living up to the billing of Toronto’s next big hip hop hero carried over from Marauding in Paradise. The tape was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2016, his second longlist in two years, and at the 2017 Juno Awards it won Rap Recording of the Year, while Cartier was also nominated for Breakthrough Artist of the Year. His track “Dead or Alive,” from the first tape, was a shortlisted nominee for the 2016 SOCAN Songwriting Prize, which means that in the same season one project was being honoured for its songwriting while its successor was winning the rap recording prize.
The visual ambition matched the award run. The tape’s singles “Red Alert” and “100 Roses” were released as a pioneering two-in-one VR and 360 degree music video, a format experiment few Canadian rap acts were attempting in 2016, and it earned a Much Music Video Award nomination for Best Hip Hop Video in 2017. That willingness to treat a mixtape single as a technology showcase is part of the project’s identity: Hotel Paranoia was never presented as a loosie collection. It was sequenced, themed and filmed like an album, two years before he was allowed to call one that.
Why Toronto Kept The Tape
Home is the other fact in the record. Cartier, born Jahmarie Wishart Adams in Toronto on March 19, 1993, had spent a childhood moving through the United States, Barbados and Kuwait with a diplomat stepfather, attending schools across those places, before returning to Toronto and building with Lantz and the Get Home Safe circle in Kensington Market. His early track “Switch” was played at Toronto Raptors games by the team DJ 4Korners, and Kardinal Offishall introduced him at a Toronto Red Bull Sound Select show in March 2015. Hotel Paranoia is the sound of that return becoming a claim: a Toronto artist, produced by a Toronto partner, naming himself the prince of the city in the first line of the tape and then spending 16 tracks arguing the title.
The album that claim eventually produced is revisited in our return to Fleurever, and the contrast is instructive. Fleurever is broader and more polished, but the hunger, the hotel concept and the Lantz partnership were all proven here first, under mixtape rules, with a Juno at the end of the stay.
Released on February 1, 2016, Hotel Paranoia remains Jazz Cartier’s breakthrough hardware record: 16 tracks, one producer at its core, a Polaris longlist, a Juno win, and the tape that made Toronto’s next-prince talk sound like a forecast instead of a boast.
