Grizzy Wynter has been in the Vancouver hip hop scene for almost a decade…and like many other artists who have worked so hard to establish themselves in an often overlooked and undervalued sector of the music industry in western Canada, COVID exacerbated everything he had been building for so long. 

But what people don’t realize is the resiliency it takes to have a voice within yourself that nothing can silence – not even a global pandemic.

For artists like him and other local MCs who hustle harder than most know, the shut down of the music scene over the past two years in Vancouver not only meant the lack of opportunity to perform and make a living off of your art but also created a deep void of inspiration and moral for many artists in the city feeling completely disconnected from any semblance of artistic community.

“It felt like the things that keep a lot of artists sane…performing…seeing each other perform…was taken away from us. Many musicians battle depression and exhaustion everyday and this just made it worse. If you’re in the music or the arts it felt like death honestly” he told me candidly.

Grizzy, who lost a loved one during the pandemic and wrote music during that time, wasn’t able to perform or properly promote his music due to restrictions. He told me, “Of all the times I needed to perform and heal that energy onstage I was so frustrating that I couldn’t perform anything.” 

However since the lifting of mandates in Vancouver in the last month and a half, there’s a new vibrancy in the local hip hop scene as artists like Grizzy are able to do what they love once more.

“It felt like coming home again”, he said when I asked him about his return to the stage a few weeks ago at a hip hop cypher where performed in East Van. “I’m so happy to have this part of my life back”, a sentiment shared by myself and many other local artists who have recently returned to the stage for the first time since COVID… it truly does feel like we can finally come home again.