An Oral History of "P&C Cribs"

Author’s note: All of these interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2022 during the interview process for my book “Gritty City: An Oral History of Winnipeg Hip-Hop Music 1980-2005.” A good number of topics had to be left out of the book due to space constraints but I will now give them life through this newsletter. Enjoy the read.

The year is 2004. Usher's "Yeah" is the number one song on the Billboard charts. The Motorola Razr has just been released. The Janet Jackson Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" happens in February of that year. The world is living in a glitzy, post-millennium era, with technology rapidly changing. With cable TV dominant in a pre-streaming era, MTV is still relevant, a cultural touchstone for young people. One of the network's hottest shows was "MTV Cribs," featuring peacocking celebrities showing off their ostentatious homes in a rapid editing style that quickly became ripe for parody. Although the subjects of "MTV Cribs" were celebrities from across the board, many of the most memorable episodes were of rappers; from Fat Joe licking the bottom of his never worn sneakers; to Ja Rule parading around shirtless, in a rented home; to 50 Cent showing off his Ferraris, again, rented for the occasion. [Only Redman truly kept it real, showing off his actual Staten Island home, featuring his cousin sleeping on the floor and his "dollar box" on the top of his fridge.]

The other side of this showy, glamourous world of mainstream rap was indie rap, at the time flourishing with labels like Def Jux, Rhymesayers, and artists like MF DOOM and J Dilla. In Canada, there was just as big of an indie rap push, with artists like k-os and Shad, and in Winnipeg/Vancouver with the Peanuts & Corn crew. Peanuts & Corn had been around for a decade by 2004, starting out as literally a basement label for Winnipeg groups Farm Fresh, Mood Ruff, and Different Shades of Black. By 1998, Mood Ruff and Different Shades had left and Farm Fresh had broken up; label co-founder mcenroe aka Roddy Rod decided to keep it going anyway.

Peanuts & Corn began to find its home amongst the indie rap of the era with Fermented Reptile's "Let's Just Call You Quits" (1999) and Park-Like Setting's "School Day 2, Garbage Day 4" (2000), with mcenroe starting to run the label as his full-time gig starting in late 2001. The label's growth continued through the early 2000s, with solo albums by mcenroe; his former Farm Fresh bandmate Pip Skid; Gruf the Druid, also of the group Frek Sho; Yy, who was also in the group Your Brother in my BackPack; and John Smith, one of the members of Park-Like Setting. Vancouver-based rapper Birdapres, whose seminal 2001 album with DJ Moves, "Alleged Legends," came out on P&C was also part of the crew; as well as resident DJ, photographer, and designer DJ Hunnicutt.

With mcenroe hustling hard to make a go of it in 2004, every rapper on the label either had a solo album or a joint project coming out in 2004 or 2005. Taking advantage of a new widely available technology, mcenroe decided all of the 2004/2005 albums could be released on CD-ROM, making them playable in a normal stereo but also downloadable onto a computer with a special digital only bonus: a video for the fans to enjoy. In a tongue and cheek reference to one of the hottest reality shows of the time, Peanuts & Corn decided to give a closer look at the lives of the indie rappers on their label, and thus "P&C Cribs" was born.

mcenroe: I always believed that if you got to know us, you’d really like us, so it’s just another way to get to know us. When people saw us live, at that time, you could get a sense of our personalities and our quirks, we’re funny and we’re human. My vision was sorta, the more we can show our unique personalities to people, they’ll love it, our fans will like it. We had enough of a fanbase, at that time, to make it worth doing stuff like that. It was a play on the "MTV Cribs," as far as us being regular, working-class people with funny quirks.

 While mcenroe was doing all of the production, recording, mixing, mastering, shipping of product for P&C out in Vancouver, most of the label's rappers were based in Winnipeg. That left the execution of "P&C Cribs" largely in the hands of DJ Hunnicutt, who acted as the on screen "host" for most of the episodes in the series.

DJ Hunnicutt: I shot and edited all of the “Cribs” episodes, even the ones out in Vancouver. Those were all CD-ROM’s, all the CDs that we were releasing at that time were CD-ROM’s, so you could put that shit in your computer and watch it on your computer. That was the technology back then. I think our mindset at the time was just that indie rap was the anti. You know, the post-Puffy, post-Bad Boy stuff, late ‘90s, early 2000s was when indie rap was really the ying to pop-rap’s yang, you know what I mean. So, us being a part of the indie rap world, we were, in some people’s minds, spoken in the same breath as Def Jux and Fondle ‘Em and Rhymesayers, and labels like that. We were the Canadian equivalent of those labels because we were producing so much at that time. I think it was [mcenroe] who came up with the idea to do “P&C Cribs.” The first one was Pip, maybe it was on “Friends4Ever” [Pip Skid's "Cribs" episode comes out on 2004's "Funny Farm"] but yeah, Pip’s version was very perfect, ‘cause Pip is very much someone who doesn’t like to be on camera. And his place on Furby was not glamorous at all, so I just thought it was perfect.

 Pip Skid's apartment that is featured on "P&C Cribs" was well-used in this era, also being featured in the music videos "Alone Again" and "I Ain't Lazy" [both directed by Jay Lapeyre, who also filmed most of the "Cribs" episodes.] Located near the corner of Furby and Broadway, the run-down building with extremely cheap rent would later become something of a P&C headquarters, with all three of Pip Skid, John Smith, and Birdapres living there simultaneously. But in 2004, it was just Pip and his bizarre landlord, identified in the "Cribs" episode as 'The Specialist.'

Pip Skid: I think that apartment, it makes lots of appearances (laughs), awful place. When I first lived in that apartment (laughs), there’s a different landlord — I mean, the whole thing takes an hour to tell, it’s a crazy fucking story. When I moved back to Winnipeg [from Halifax], Hunnicutt was super nice and he found me that apartment, so I had never seen it. It was like $340 a month, so it was affordable. When I first moved in, I was playing a Cormega record and there was a bang on the door, it was like two in the afternoon, and I opened the door and it’s this guy with all these jail tattoos and he’s like rubbing his fist in his palm, and he’s like, “If I have to listen this shit, I’ll kill you.” I was like, “Yeah, word up, man, fine with me, cool,” and I turned it down. You could hear him going back into his apartment and telling his crew that he was successful (laughs). And then he put on BTO’s “Taking Care of Business” on really fucking loud, and they played it like three or four times in a row at like volume twelve (laughs). Anyway, when the new landlord came in, who’s in the stupid “Cribs” episode, he kicked those guys out.

DJ Hunnicutt: Oh, god, Pip’s landlord. He was really into us, he really was curious about us. He really liked to be down with what we were up to, you know. He was always in the mix, he always really wanted to be involved. He was a bit of a sociopath; eventually, I think, he got too weird for [Pip]. At first it was a novelty but I think he got a little too weird for [Pip] and we had to sort of close him out. But yeah, the Specialist. Bob, I think his name was. My god, what a maniac he was. He was like a Travis Bickle. You wanted him on your good side because if he was on your bad side, you wouldn’t know when he would just pull out a Rambo knife and cut you ear to ear.

Pip Skid: And this is Broadway and Furby in the early 2000s, I mean people might think it’s a little janky over there now but in comparison, it’s very gentrified. Aside from a few student lodgings, it was low income, transient housing, for the most part.

 The second "Cribs" episode to come out, released along with the seminal 2004 album "Pinky's Laundromat" was that of John Smith. Now rapping under the name Bazooka Joe 204, and often going by the nickname Smitty, at the time he was living at his parents' house, sleeping on the couch; not exactly a glamourous MTV situation. Making it all the more interesting was the fact that Smitty did not know when Hunnicutt and Jay Lapeyre would be showing up to shoot the episode: the opening consists of Hunnicutt knocking on the door, entering after no one answers, and waking Smitty asleep on the couch, who proceeds to finish an open beer left on the coffee table.

John Smith: I told Hunnicutt, I gave him a Monday to Friday window, I said, any day from Monday to Friday, you can show up. And I was just like, I’ll make sure my folks leave the door open for you.

DJ Hunnicutt: Smitty had a clear vision of what he wanted for his, “I want you to just walk in, wake me up, and I’m going to pound a beer as soon as you do.”

John Smith: That was life. That house (laughs), that house was an improvement, prior to that my family lived in a two bedroom, one floor townhouse on Keewatin, six people in that tiny spot. So, the house that you see me in, that was an upgrade for me. It was entirely accurate, me and my brothers knew that at some point that week [Hunnicutt] would be showing up, we didn’t know which day it was. Then once he got there, that was also all improvised, it wasn’t like, okay then I’ll iron and then I’ll shave, it was like, we’re just going to through a day of before I go open the shop, you know.

 Smitty's episode mostly consists of him getting ready for a day at work [at the time he was running the hip-hop record store the Vinylist on Portage Avenue], but he also spends some time kicking it with his younger brothers, Murray, who produced a lot of beats for Smitty back in the day; and Lonnie aka Lonnie Ce, who at the time was only a teenager but would later become one of the city's better known DJs.

Lonnie Ce: Yeah, I remember that day. I remember Hunnicutt showed up, and I'm not sure who was filming, they just came up to our mom's house. Me and Mur were sleeping in our rooms upstairs and Joe was passed out on the couch. He gave them a little tour, I remember him showing off the couch that we had in our back yard in a snowy pit (laughs). Then they came upstairs and Murray played him some beats on our little desktop computer; Mur was making beats at the time and I was getting into making beats at the time. I remember we all had our hats on and Hunnicutt made a comment and asked if we slept in our hats because we all rolled out of our slumbers with fucking fitted caps on (laughs). Lon Chair, which was the first rap name which I got from Pip Skid back in the day, he started calling me Lon Chair. That was my first rap name when I first got my Myspace popping with a bunch of beats on it.

John Smith: We were going with Lon Darts, Lon Chair; I think for a while we were trying to get him to call himself Orange Crush, (laughs), but he wasn’t having it.

 After putting out the mcenroe and Birdapres episodes, both filmed in Vancouver, the next Winnipeg-centric installment was DJ Hunnicutt's, released on the Farm Fresh reunion album "Time is Running Out." Taking more of a high concept approach to the material, Hunnicutt decided to change up what he felt had become a staid format.

DJ Hunnicutt: I guess at that point I had produced a few different ones. And I was like, well I want to do something different. I was just sort of bored with the format. The whole concept of a film crew coming to someone’s house and the person running away was actually inspired by an episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati.” There was a character on that show called Herb Tarlek, who was the salesperson of the radio station, he was responsible for selling ads. He was a real sleazy guy, he wore loud suits, just an unlikable sleaze-ball character. And for whatever reason, there was a camera crew to sort of film a day in the life of him and his family, and he forgot that it was happening, or he was embarrassed, so he loaded up his car and peeled off just as the camera crew was coming. I think I was just sort of inspired by that, just trying to do something a bit different and then just show off all of my favourite spots in the city. I just wanted to do something different after doing so many episodes of, “here’s this knick-knack.” I just didn’t really care about doing the same thing everybody else had done at that point, showing my one bedroom apartment.

 Inspired in part by an even then long cancelled TV show, the other part of Hunnicutt's episode was a satirical reference to a section of the hip-hop documentary "Scratch," in which DJ Shadow shows off the basement where he sourced many of the records for his classic album "Entroducing."

mcenroe: I guess he looked at it like, “I need to change it up,” and to me, it was like, you just want to tell everybody’s story. I remember getting [Hunnicutt’s] and being like, okay, you don’t really get to get his story as much, ‘cause he’s trying to play a joke with the narrative, or something. I was like, well, whatever, okay. He just outthinks himself, right (laughs).

DJ Hunnicutt: The stuff in the basement [of the Sound Exchange] was me sort of parodying the DJ Shadow scene in “Scratch.” Jeff Bishop [owner of the Sound Exchange, now deceased], he’s a pretty infamous character. He was very much a Comic Book Guy [from "The Simpsons"] character, you know, doling out justice from behind his counter. Very much that, “you are in my domain, and what I say goes.” If you’re on his good side, he’ll be very nice to you. But if you do him wrong, anything that appears to be wrong, that he gleams as wrong, then you’re banned from the store. It was a very touch-and-go relationship with him. If you were in his good graces, he’ll just send you down into the basement and you can come up four hours later with a stack. He’ll look at them, and he says, “Okay, how much do you want to pay for these?” And you’d take a guess, and then he would say, “Well, I was thinking more like this.” And then you’d agree on something in the middle and that would be that. But yeah, just bonkers records down there. Whenever I could, I'd bring someone in, like Skratch Bastid or someone like that. You’d have to spend a little bit of time glad-handing with Bishop. He likes to shoot the shit, you just can’t be like, “Hey, we’re here, can we go downstairs?” You couldn’t just do that, you had to play the game a bit, and shoot the shit with Jeff for a while, talk about pop culture stuff. Listen to his opinions on things, and then he would let me go.

 The next “Cribs” episode that came out, attached to the album "Hopeless" was for Gruf the Druid. Featuring Gruf making a vegan dinner for the crew, it included a moment that editor/creator DJ Hunnicutt would like to take back.

DJ Hunnicutt: I regret making Gruf look so bad in his. I regret getting him drunk. I mean, everything was great the way it was, but I wish I hadn’t shown him drop his ninja stick, whatever it was. I kinda wish I’d shown him get really drunk but then still being able to do that thing perfectly. That was my regret, that I’d shown him, just by getting drunk over the course of the episode that he was still able to do his martial arts really well. That was my only regret of all of those.

Gruf: To be honest, I didn't like it later, so I haven't watched it for years (laughs). But I liked doing it and I'm down with the concept, everyone was doing one, I just didn't like watching myself, I guess. But it was cool, cool to hang out and give a piece of everybody's life as it actually is, except you're getting drunk so you're being a bit silly. I think I was cooking up some wraps and made dinner and we all ate and got a little stupid (laughs). I don't remember too much but I really liked that apartment I lived in, it was a sweet deal, 375 for a pretty big one bedroom apartment right downtown on Kennedy north of Portage, basically Central Park. 

 Chronologically, the final episode to be released was Yy's, which was made available on the 2005 CD for Park-Like Setting's album "Craftsmen." Using an already existing situation, with Yy about to move, the episode slightly fudges reality (not unlike "MTV Cribs") to make the narrative more appealing.

Yy: I loved the idea of the whole "Cribs" at the time; I think I was probably the last one to do it. There was always an angle, it wasn’t just a straight up, this is Redman’s house, or whatever. I was maybe a little reluctant because I felt like I translated rapping-wise on camera but definitely was a bit more awkward just in front of the camera, talking and stuff, at the time. I was living with [The Gumshoe Strut] and Karl, the three of us lived on Sherbrook on the same block as the West End Cultural Centre. It was a really weird mix, that was the spot where we would have all the homies over and stuff, but half the time I would have my daughter. We just set it up as, I’m moving anyways in two weeks, how about we set the first half up so I’ve got my daughter sleeping in the one room and then there’s just more and more people every time I go into the common space; Ness [Nestor Wynrush] is getting crazy and everyone’s getting drunk and I just had enough of everyone. Which is also somewhat rooted in truth, you have good friends, you move in together and you have a stupid squabble about dishes and things like that.

*Author's note: the apartment Yy moves into, seen at the end of the episode, is actually the very same apartment I lived in after first moving out from my parents' house in 2008.

“P&C Cribs” came at a narrow window of time where CD-ROMs were cheap enough to accommodate videos on them, and computer software was capable of handling low resolution video relatively easily, but before there was any universal video sharing web site. “Craftsmen,” chronologically the last album to feature a “P&C Cribs” episode, is released in November 2005; nine months earlier, in February 2005, the first video was uploaded to YouTube. Less than a year after “Craftsmen” comes out, mcenroe launches his own YouTube channel, with Pip Skid’s episode of “P&C Cribs” being the channel’s first uploaded video on September 27, 2006. From there, video production equipment would become cheaper; video tape itself would become obsolete within a few years. The internet became ubiquitous, cell phone cameras made content creation a daily activity for most musicians and record labels. But for a brief moment in time, Peanuts & Corn Records was cresting a technological wave, releasing content for its fans in the most advanced way possible for the era. And no one even had to lick their shoe.