Shad released Flying Colours on October 15, 2013 through Black Box Recordings. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it is the album where the London, Ontario rapper, born Shadrach Kabango, let his whole palette show at once, live instruments, guest singers, comedy and conscience, and the Canadian music establishment answered with a Polaris Music Prize shortlist the following summer.
It was his fourth studio album, following 2005 debut When This Is Over, 2007 The Old Prince and 2010 TSOL, the Juno-winning record revisited in our return to TSOL. The official video for “Fam Jam (Fe Sum Immigrins),” embedded below, is the album in one scene: Shad dressed as a senior citizen, dancing at a family reunion, rapping about immigration with a grin on his face.
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Twelve Tracks, Fifty-One Minutes, Many Hands
The album runs 12 tracks in 51 minutes and 44 seconds, as its reference listing shows: “Intro: Lost” featuring Lisa Lobsinger, Kamau and k-os, “Yall Know Me” featuring Ebrahim, “Fam Jam (Fe Sum Immigrins),” “He Say She Say,” “Dreams,” “Interlude: Grace,” “Stylin” featuring Saukrates, “Progress (Part 1: American Pie, Part 2: The Future Is Here),” “Remember to Remember” featuring Lights, “Love Means” featuring Eternia, “Thank You” and “Epilogue: Long Jawn.” The producers are Ric Notes, Shad, Skratch Bastid, I. K. Koiter, Tone Mason, Michael Tompkins, That Brotha Lokey and Rel McCoy, and the liner notes list trumpets, saxophones, cello, viola and violin alongside the drum programming, a live band record built inside a rap album.
The guests are not decoration. k-os, who had already shared a stage with Shad in the wider Toronto story, opens the record on “Intro: Lost.” Saukrates, the Toronto foundation name, trades verses on “Stylin.” Lights, then at her pop peak, sings the hook of “Remember to Remember,” and Eternia, one of the sharpest voices in Canadian rap, closes the guest list on “Love Means.” Every feature pulls the album toward a different room, and Shad walks through all of them without changing his voice.
Fam Jam And The Immigrant Joke That Lands
“Fam Jam (Fe Sum Immigrins)” is the album’s calling card, and the video explains why. Produced by Skratch Bastid and directed by Che Kothari, it was released ahead of the album in August 2013, and it finds Shad in old-age makeup at a family reunion, cutting loose at a dance party and rapping in front of a giant painted maple leaf. The song’s subject is immigration, his own family roots in Kenya and Rwanda, and the joke is that the immigrant story is told as a party, not a lecture.
That balance runs through the whole record. “Progress” stretches past seven minutes across two parts, “American Pie” and “The Future Is Here,” and tries to hold the past and the future in the same song. “Remember to Remember” pairs a pop hook with a verse about memory and forgetting. “Love Means” asks what the word actually costs. The comedy and the conscience are the same writer, and the record is funnier and more serious because they share the tracklist.
Polaris Shortlist And The Verdict Of The Reviews
The album was a shortlisted nominee for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize, Shad’s third Polaris shortlist in a row after The Old Prince and TSOL, and it peaked at number 36 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. The reviews at the time were warm and specific. Exclaim! scored it 7 out of 10 and called it “a wake-up call to anyone sleeping on Canadian rappers and Shad’s coming for the crown next time,” while NOW praised the versatile production and lyrical delivery and concluded that “the result is a record that fully reveals all of Shad’s musical colours.” Exclaim! later named it the 49th best Canadian album of the 2010s.
Heard now, Flying Colours holds up as the hinge of Shad’s catalogue. It sits between the Juno win of TSOL and the five-year wait for his next full-length, the concept album A Short Story About a War in October 2018, and it is the last time for a while that he sounded this loose on record, a rapper with a live band, a pop hook, a family joke and a seven-minute essay, all flying under one title that turned out to be exactly right. Released on October 15, 2013, it remains the clearest proof in Canadian hip hop that a rapper from London, Ontario could make a record this wide, this warm and this exact, and have the whole country shortlist it.
