How come the music she loved wasn’t popular here?
When Elmira’s Amara Pope-Sanfilippo was a little girl, she used to sit on the floor of her bedroom listening to the infectious cadence of R&B music on her iPod. Her parents were from the Caribbean, where cross-cultural folk songs with African and Indian influence held cultural sway, but that wasn’t the case on radio stations in Scarborough, where she was born.
Then, as she reached adolescence in the early 1990s, the musical landscape began to evolve. R&B had been popular in Toronto since the 1960s due to an influx of Caribbean immigrants, and the calypso influence would eventually give rise to a meteoric shift with superstars such as Drake, The Weeknd, Jessie Reyez and even Justin Bieber fully embracing the art form.
