Kardinal Offishall and Keri Hilson

Now Canada is not exactly renowned for producing a huge number of successful hip hop artists in fact the only ones that come to mind are Dream Warriers and Rasclaz. These acts are worth their weight in gold but are just a teeny fraction of the number that come rolling out of the United States. An artist that has made a big splash is Kardinal Offishall, a hip hop artist and producer who has been burning the dance floor with his monster song, Numba 1. The song features Keri Hilson who dueted on Timbaland's smash hit The Way I Are. Numba 1 borrows the chorus from Blondie's 80s classic, The Tide is High. Now when Atomic Kitten covered this a few years back it was scoffed by purist as being cheap and lame. With due credit this song is a hard one to carry as Debbie Harry owned it for such a long time but Keri Hilson does an amazing job here and really sells it. God does she have a great career ahead of her. Kardinal Offishall's ragga/rapping and production skills are pretty cool. However, the selling point is the video which is full of pulsating energy and full flavor and the dancing is simply to die for. Kardinal Offishall aka Jason Harrow was born in Toronto but raised to Jamaican parents hence where the reggae influences in his music hail from. His talents have caused him to be dubbed Canada's hip hop ambassador and boy is he doing them proud. Check out the lowdown from good old Wikipedia.

"Numba 1 (Tide Is High)" is the latest version of "The Tide Is High", performed by Kardinal Offishall featuring Keri Hilson. Produced by Supa Dups, the song was released in September 2008 as the second official single from Kardinal's album Not 4 Sale. It was released by iTunes on October 14, 2008. Aside from the album version, which features Rihanna, there are three other versions of "Numba 1 (Tide Is High)". The second is the original version, featuring Nicole Scherzinger. The third version features Rihanna and Nicole Scherzinger. The fourth version is the official single and features Keri Hilson. There is also a mash-up version which features Rihanna, Nicole Scherzinger and Keri Hilson. The music video premiered on October 24 at Yahoo! Music.^[18] The video is directed by Gil Green, and Akon makes a cameo appearance.^[19] The song "Nina" is featured at the end of the video."