Pass It Up
Warning (Point Blank Diss) [Cut from St8 of Mind track]
Ghettoway (w/ JB from GCP) [Toba on hook]
St8 of Mind - Rumours feat. Toba Chung [just the hook]
GCP - Smokin (only people im sure of is Rob Lo on a verse and Toba Chung on hook)

Added (27/Mar/09, 1:52 Pm)
---------------------------------------------

Jane Sims And Randy Richmond
The London Free Press
2004-10-15

LOVED BY EVERYBODY: Olutobi Johnson, aka Toba Chung, was a rap and reggae artist who dreamed of the good life. Johnson's tombstone near his old neighbourhood in Toronto. --

"It's just my environment that makes I so violent. I'm asking for forgiveness."
Toba Chung in his song Father, Forgive Me

Olutobi Johnson had one thing to say and one thing to hide while he lay dying on the floor of a London bar from a rain of bullets.

"Tell my kids I love them. And I'm sorry."

But when he was asked who shot him, he smirked.

Olutobi: A father of two who carried a 9-mm gun.

Tobi: A drug dealer who carried a Bible.

Toba Chung: A rap and reggae artist who dreamed of the good life.

Johnson lived an unsettled life and died leaving an unsettled mystery.

Like so many of his friends, he sold drugs to finance the recording of his music in hopes of becoming a somebody, anybody.

But he was trapped in a world of poverty and violence, in a place where dreams fade as quickly as a bullet leaves a barrel.

Johnson's dreams died at The Scots Corner in London, Ontario on April 22, 2003, in a blood-soaked confrontation in the men's room at closing time.

Johnson is buried in a cemetery not far from his Flemingdon Park neighbourhood in Toronto, considered one of the most multi-cultural communities on Earth.

Musical notes decorate the corners of the cold, marble tombstone. Under his name is "Chung," part of his music moniker, part of his identity.

"One Love" -- the title of a reggae classic written by music legend Bob Marley -- is inscribed along the bottom.

A candle sits on the ledge. Silk and artificial flowers are interspersed with real plants in the small, lovingly tended brick-lined garden.

Hidden among the plants is a Spalding football, left by a friend, perhaps one who played with him on the expanse of Flemingdon Park.

"Tobi grew up loved by everybody," his grieving mother Naomi told The Free Press. "He was a good loving father and a good son. Everybody is torn up. I don't think we will ever heal."

* * *

Eight-hundred people filled the seats and stood at the back of the sanctuary of Toronto's Bethlehem United Church of Jesus Christ to say goodbye to a 26-year-old man mowed down in a gunfight.

"The church was full to the very brim," Naomi Johnson recalled.

The church, with a Pentecostal affiliation, is housed in an old factory refurbished with offices, a catering business, a banquet hall and sanctuary. An empty space is slated to be a family shelter.

The funeral crowd was full of young people. Many wore white T-shirts imprinted with Johnson's black-and-white picture. They played Johnson's music in the parking lot.

Pastor Alan Todd conducted Johnson's funeral and remembered the tributes.

"The biggest comments people made were about his music," Todd said, recalling discussions about the dead man wanting to cut a CD.

The youthfulness of the crowd isn't surprising.

Johnson grew up in Toronto's Flemingdon Park, a place with few mentors and where black men in their early 20s are considered icons, said Andrew Faiz, a documentary producer who grew up in the area and has made films about it for the National Film Board and TVOntario.

When you're a young man from Flemo as it is known, you question whether you will reach 30, let alone the age of an old man, he said.

Johnson "a charming, brilliant, funny young man," Faiz recalled, found a place for his dreams and turmoil where many of his friends did -- in music. He called himself Toba Chung, a nickname because of the Asian shape of his eyes.

"Toba Chung. You had the most beautiful voice and you will live on through your music," says a tribute on a webpage.

Neighbour Janet Reid, 45, remembers Johnson as "a good guy."

"He had a lot of manners and was very respectful," she said. "If he had faults, I never knew about them."

Shari Blackson, the mother of Robert (Bucky) Blackson, who had invited Johnson to London for his wedding the weekend before his death, held a similar view.

"Anything bad I heard about Tobi I did not get from my own experience," she said. "Once he came to my home. He always treated me with the utmost respect."

* * *

Flemingdon Park was built in the 1950s as a model for the world.

The one-square-mile beside Don Mills Road and across from the Ontario Science Centre has 25,000 people living there in 8,000 apartment and row housing units along the winding streets.

The neighbourhood started in 1958, based on Scandinavian apartment cities intended to attract artists and professionals. By the 1970s, low- income housing was added to the mix.

The area attracted and continues to attract waves of poor immigrants. Flemingdon Park has the second highest concentration of poverty in Toronto -- after Regent Park -- with 60 per cent struggling under the poverty line.

For the most part, the apartment towers are filled with new Canadians, often fleeing hostile environments for the relative peace of Canada. Within five to 15 years, they join the middle class.

The multi-generational homes are usually among public housing, often where teens are having babies and women are grandmothers by the time they're 40.

And the outlook is one of resentment and poverty.

"Flemingdon Park and neighbourhoods like it -- it's the wild, wild west," Faiz said.

* * *

Johnson, born in 1976, grew up there. He was the baby of his family.

He was smart and funny and "the fruit of the family, loved by everyone," his mother said in a brief telephone interview filled with sadness.

"Everybody knew him. Everybody watched him grow," she said in her lilting Jamaican accent.

Johnson grew up fast. He was what one person called "a girl charmer . . . he had the girls fighting for him."

By 15 he was father to a son. By 19, he had a daughter.

"He was such a good daddy," his mother said.

What seemed to set Johnson apart was his generosity and devotion to his two children.

Shari Blackson said Johnson was "generous to a fault." and would "think nothing of giving them money and think nothing of putting people up in his home."

"He took care of his family. He loved his children."

A 22-year-old woman who didn't want to be identified said Johnson "would give you the shoes off his feet then walk you home.

"That is a man lost that this world needs," the woman said, her eyes welling up.

By the time Johnson was a teenager, Flemo was shorthand for drugs and guns.

Police arrested dozens and dozens of crack dealers in Flemingdon Park in the 1990s -- so many they can't come close to remembering everyone who got in trouble.

With the drugs came violence. Almost every year Johnson lived in Flemingdon Park, a young man was killed. Several died by gunfire.

Surrounded by crime and the stigma of poverty, the dream is making big money in music and finding a way out -- like superstar P. Diddy or homegrown Torontonian Maestro Fresh Wes.

Added (27/Mar/09, 1:52 Pm)
---------------------------------------------
* * *

In Flemo, Johnson was part of Guilty Crime Productions (GCP), a homegrown recording company and music collective bent on hip-hop domination or, at least, a middle-class life.

GCP is also a rallying cry, a set of call letters for the Flemingdon group, much the same as it is for other inner city wannabe record producers who set up shop in their neighbourhoods.

They compete for the sliver of attention given to homegrown artists, often sparking rivalries in their desire for television spots, dance hall competitions and places to sell their music.

They live under a tight code of honour, dependent on friendship and loyalty. They trust few -- and are especially suspicious of the police.

What they covet is the "bling-bling," the stuff that makes them feel important -- the labels, the expensive running shoes, the clothes.

What they lack are jobs, careers and basic life skills to provide for themselves.

Some, like Johnson, go to private music schools, which promise rewarding careers but only set them up for disappointment.

The answer for them is fast money through drugs. And many of them carry guns.

Faiz said the underworld of drug dealing brings maybe $1,000 to $2,000 a month. All of it goes back into producing CDs and paying recording engineers.

By all reports, Johnson was right on the doorstep of making it in music.

His young female friend said Johnson had "an incredible voice." And record companies were interested.

His music -- reggae, hip-hop, R and B -- was the soundtrack of his neighbourhood. He made videos in the expansive park.

"He was devoted to it," she said, recalling Johnson writing his music and lyrics and trying them out on his friends.

But there was obviously another side to Johnson his friends won't talk about.

Her son never had enough money to make do, his mother remembered.

"He didn't have anything. I used to give him money. I fixed up his place for him."

He was known to carry a gun. And at the time of his death, Johnson was facing drug trafficking charges in Waterloo Region.

In September 2002, he was arrested after police searched a Cambridge apartment. They found 6.8 grams of cocaine and four grams of cannabis resin.

It's a darker side similar to many who grow up in Flemo.

"If you meet these guys, you couldn't meet lovelier young men. They're charming, they're funny, they have a great sense of humour. They have a great love of life," Faiz said.

But "theirs is a hard world, -- a hard world affects their music."

* * *

Mixed with their want for a better future is what Faiz called "this odd spiritual world."

Johnson's music is tinged with it. In Father Forgive Me, Johnson sings in a beautiful, haunting voice. It's understood his father is what his one friend called "a higher power."

He was baptized and for a time he went to church, his mother said.

Her dream was for him to return to church. The Saturday before he made his final trip to London, Johnson visited her.

"Please come back to church," she told him.

"I am trying to, mom. I will soon go back."

His mother started to cry in telling the story.

"That's the last time I could see my son alive. It is so hard. He was grown up in the church. He had a Bible with him all the time."

The Bible was in his pocket the night he died.

He had been in London for a friend's wedding. Robert Blackson had met Johnson in Toronto. It was only Johnson's third time in the city.

And his first meeting with Michael Allen, the man ultimately charged with Johnson's murder, was a tense, brief encounter, with Allen complaining Johnson stepped on his expensive Prada shoes.

The Monday night of Johnson's death, Blackson's mother, Shari, recalls her son and Johnson debating religion before heading to Scots Corner for last call.

"They were at my kitchen table reading the book of Yahweh," she said.

* * *

At the Flemingdon Park Resource Centre, the young men come a couple of times a week to play pickup basketball and hang out.

To a constant thudding backbeat of a bouncing basketball, they run the court hard and argue about fouls.

On this particular night, Johnson's cousin, who says he's almost the same age as him, wears the funeral shirt that shows Johnson singing.

Clearly Johnson's tragic, violent death has shaken the community.

"It makes you think of the world in a different light. For him not to walk through those doors," said his young female friend, pointing to the front doors of the centre.

Johnson died about the same time as Faiz was completing a documentary for CBC Radio.

He was in Flemingdon and talking to a young man who was in Toba Chung's last recording session. They met up with another young man, who said he "went to see Toba yesterday."

A group of friends had gone to the grave site for drinks, tokes and songs.

Only the physical body is dead to them, Faiz said.

Toba Chung is not.