Canadian hip-hop

The Canadian hip hop scene was established in the 1980s. Through a variety of factors, it developed much slower than Canada's popular rock music scene, and apart from a short-lived burst of mainstream popularity from 1989 to 1991, it remained largely an underground phenomenon until the early 2000s. Canada's multicultural and multilingual fabric has given rise to various subgenres, including Indigenous, French, and Punjabi Canadian hip hop. Also notable is the influence of Caribbean rhythms in creating a sound unique to Toronto.