Snow’s “Informer” spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1993, a run no other Canadian reggae record has matched. The Toronto singer recorded it after New York rapper MC Shan heard his demo in Queens and produced the session.
Snow is Darrin O’Brien, born October 30, 1969, and raised in the Allenbury Gardens housing project in North York. The sound that made him famous was the sound of his own neighbourhood, where Jamaican neighbours played reggae and dancehall loud enough for a kid to memorize every record through the wall.
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Snow Informer starts in Allenbury Gardens
As SOCAN Magazine’s Canadian Classics profile tells it, Snow learned the music by obsession before he ever saw a studio:
“I would just rewind the tapes constantly, playing the songs over and over.”
MC Shan, a founding figure of Queensbridge hip hop, heard Snow on a trip to Toronto and brought him into the studio in New York. Shan produced “Informer” and raps a verse on it himself. The single was released in August 1992 by EastWest America as the lead track from the debut album 12 Inches of Snow, which followed in 1993.
Seven weeks at No. 1, and a record that still stands
“Informer” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 on March 13, 1993, and held the top spot for seven consecutive weeks, spending 25 weeks on the chart in total. It also went to No. 1 in 11 other countries and No. 2 in the United Kingdom, and it topped the chart in Canada on The Record’s singles ranking. The single has sold more than eight million copies, and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame recognizes it as the biggest selling reggae single in history, a Guinness World Records mark that has stood for three decades.
The album matched the single. 12 Inches of Snow went platinum in the United States and triple platinum in Canada, and Snow won the Juno Award for Best Reggae Recording in 1994.
The afterlife of a Toronto reggae record
The song was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023, at a ceremony at Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto. Its second life arrived even earlier: in 2019, Daddy Yankee rebuilt “Informer” as “Con Calma” and brought Snow in to feature on it, introducing the hook to a streaming generation that had not been born when the original topped the charts.
Plenty of one-hit stories fade into trivia. This one is different, because the record underneath the novelty framing is genuinely singular: a white kid from a North York housing project, singing in rapid fire patois he learned from his neighbours, produced by a Queensbridge pioneer, holding off the entire American music industry for seven weeks. Toronto’s reggae history runs deep, and “Informer” is still its biggest global footprint.
