Onyx ‘Slams’ the stage at Oshawa Music Hall with JD Era, Young Stitch & Zaze

The New York City hip-hop legends Onyx arrived in Canada this month to begin their cross country tour and last Wednesday night (March 11) they hit the stage at the Oshawa Music Hall. The event being presented by 9-0-Nickel Entertainment included a great line up of Canadian supporting acts including JD Era, Young Stitch and 9-0-Nickel’s own Zaze who all served as the main openers.

Unknowingly to my self and the other artists at the time of this show, the event turned out to be one of the last Onyx performances on the Canadian tour as a few days later the tour was cut short due to the COVID-19 outbreak and are set to be rescheduled at a later date. HipHopCanada is proud to bring you this review and media content to the fans across Canada that missed out the shows that were postponed.

Onyx dropped their debut album titled Bacdafucup way back in 1993 almost 27 years to the date of this event, it’s quite amazing to see Fredro Starr and Sticky Fingaz still perform with so much energy and enthusiasm after all these years. When Onyx first stepped on stage at the Oshawa Music Hall as the main event performance, they were wearing their classic Onyx angry face logo jackets for the first few songs of the set.

The South Jamaica, Queens rap duo performed most of their hip-hop hits in their catalog during the course of the performance and stopped between songs to talk and interact with the fans. A few lighter moments had Sticky Fingaz mentioning that the coronavirus would never take him out while speaking between one of songs. My favirote Onyx song of the night was “Shut em’ Down” which was performed minus DMX but was still dope and I was lucky enough to capture this one on video.

The primary supporting act of the night was the Mississauga native JD Era who was also Onyx’s tour mate through some of the Ontario show dates before the postponement. The JUNO-nominated JD Era killed his set and rocked the stage on his own without the need for a hype man and represented his clean and polished style of Canadian hip-hop. JD’s performance was a mixed bag of old/new songs and my personal favorites were off his latest project “Back From The Dead”. Check out JD Era’s latest music video for “Back from the Dead” featuring the late actor and musician, Louie “Ox” Rankin.

One of my favorite performances of the event went to Young Stitch as he went yard with his set bringing out multiple guests including Riyality, Trinity Chris and fellow Lunch Room Poet B1 the Architect. Young Stitch brought a different dynamic to the stage when bringing out each artist as the vibe switched up depending who was on stage with him at the time. It’s clear that Young Stitch has the ability to rock the stage with a more tradition rap performance but also has elite skills when it comes to freestyles and ciphers. It will be interesting to see what lies a head for him in 2020.

The first supporting act to take the stage out of the official openers and the sole 9-0-Nickel representative was the underground vet emcee Zaze. Being backed up by his regular producer Ryan Staykool White, Zaze brought out his energy infused lyrical flow while performing mostly new material during the set which brought the crowd up to the stage.

One humorous moment of the performance was when a fan passed an over sized prop blunt up to the stage and it was passed around briefly as if it was a real one. Finishing his night off with his new single “The Get Down”, it seemed to get the crowd jumping and it was my personal favorite. It was refreshing to see the high level of Canadian talent out of the Greater Toronto Area at this event leading up the Onyx performance. We will be looking forward to future events featuring these artists once things in the live music scene return to normal operation.

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Written by Kyle McNeil for HipHopCanada
Photography by Kyle McNeil for HipHopCanada