The Birdman once flew with innocent abandon around these skies.
The man now known around the globe as one of the most powerful figures in the blockbuster rap/hip-hop industry used to live in Prince George.
It was during his early, troubled childhood that New Orleans-born Bryan Williams came to live in northern B.C. The rapper and record company mogul made the admission during a live interview with Angie Martinez on New York radio station Power 105.1, simulcast on the internet.
"Who are you?," asked Martinez in genuine disbelief that the man she knew so well for his music held such an interesting personal back story.
"Does Drake know that?," Martinez asked, since the megastar act (Birdman is the executive producer for the likes of Drake, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj and many others) is Canadian.
"No. He don't know that. We'll talk," Birdman replied.
The mogul explained that his father and mother each died when he was a small child, so he was raised by pinballing between siblings, a stepmother, but nobody who took official charge of him.
"The block raised me; the streets raised me," Birdman told Martinez.
He also said he was in the process of producing an autobiographical film of his time before the fame.
"I went back to as much as we could trace. I lived in Canada for a few years. My sister took me," he said. "So we stayed in Canada for like two, three years," before going back to the States at the age of about eight or nine into the care of a boys' home because I didn't have a legal guardian."
A couple of years later, his stepmother came for him, but by then he was a seasoned veteran of the streets, and involved in the dirty elements of American urban poverty. At age 16, he was arrested for street crime and went to jail.
It was his incarceration that turned his life around, he said. Indeed he claims to have signed a record deal worth about $30 million at the age of 18, and the evidence supports that. Now, at the age of 47, he was listed by Forbes Magazine as the fifth richest personality in the rap/hip-hop industry with an estimated worth of about $150 million.
However, that immense money is the dominant theme in his music, and the shallow - even ugly - trappings of thug money are the images that densely populate his videos. He might have a rich spreadsheet, but Birdman is also richly criticized for glamourizing the most degraded forms of social decay.
Attempts to reach Birdman and Martinez were not successful. Prince George residents now have the ability to scroll back through their memory banks to try remembering if they ever knew a young child from Louisiana who passed through local schools and neighbourhoods back in about 1975-'78, or wait for the biopic to answer any questions about how Prince George might have had an effect on the music industry titan now known simply as Birdman.
