Sheltered
June 14th, 2025
I was always an artist. The only thing I’ve always wanted was a simple life of creating things and sharing my creations with the world. But the world is never simple, and I've always found its complexity is crippling. As an artist, I drew comics and played the piano when I was eight years old. I made field recordings when I was ten and at 16, I made my first tracks of electronic music before my long phase of Christian hip-hop. However, I was never properly raised to deal with the complexities of this world,, which kept me from excelling at anything.
Even starting out wasn’t easy, especially in a family that never had internet outside of dial-up until 2006. I started making my own techno beats after picking up a trial copy of one of the first desktop digital audio apps called Making Waves from Radio Shack in 1997. I would draw my first album covers while listening to Eiffel 65’s Europop album saved in Winamp, all installed on my parent’s Windows 95 computer with 128 MB of RAM.
In the late 90s, I had no internet access, no way to obtain the recorded sounds I wanted for my music creations, and no idea what Napster was. So I did whatever I could to find audio and sample it in whatever songs I create. I use my old tape recorder that was strictly for field recordings. I extracted audio from CDs at the library to sample. I used various basic white-hat hacking techniques to get sounds from PC games I bought. I even put my tape-recorder in front of a TV speaker and played sound effects from whatever Super Nintendo game had a sound-test area. My late grandmother Blanche gave me her Technics KN501 keyboard and let me record anything from it via an audio line-in connection. I even had to secretly acquire material with Parental Advisory stickers to sample audio clips. And of course, being underage at the time, the most hardcore sounds I could access came from the rap section at HMV (now known as Sunrise Records).
There’s a reason I had to put so much work into creating a vast variety of employable sound from scratch. I lived in a middle class suburban neighborhood in southern Winnipeg, not Los Angeles, London (UK), Toronto, or New York City. Our family made decent money but didn’t spend it lavishly. Most of the people who lived on my street were nurses, doctors, engineers, or tradesmen. I had no connections to cartoonists or disc jockeys, and no teenager started a band that woke up the neighbors at night. My dad worked for the government as a computer engineer. My mom worked as a bio-chemist. My sister loved reading books and playing basketball. My parents were all about praying, preaching the gospel to us as kids, or reading the Bible or other religious books after coming home tired from working “the secular marketplace.” On Wednesdays, they would sometimes go to Springs Church when it was on St. Mary’s Road. They would stay for extra activities after Sunday church services while I just wanted to go home and draw. I was the eccentric one, a teenage renegade who wished he had a microphone or a DJ deck touring the country rather than going to school and reading the Bible. But being this kind of weirdo, who probably would have loved '80s and '90s zines, was not of God (or as Bobby Boucher’s mother from the Waterboy would put it “of the devil”) That would most likely explain why my music sounded awful back in the day. I was very limited by what was let into the house in the first place.
I wasn’t against Christianity per se at the time, but I was tired of being sheltered. I was tired of Western Canada’s “vanilla culture” where there isn’t much going on, everything is cheap, winter is ice cold, the land is flat, and you can watch your dog run away for a week. There wasn’t a lot of excitement just doing the whole church thing, studying theology, winning souls to the church, and the whole Bible thing. I wanted to do more than that even with my reluctant interest in theology and getting close to God. I figured I had to balance creating art with belonging in church, or I would probably leave since I felt very constrained in my creative process.
Shortly after I started producing very experimental electronic music due to anti-secular and physical constraints, members of my church youth group introduced me to a very niche form of media from Christian bookstores that changed my life. For those unfamiliar with Christian bookstores, these establishments, known primarily for religious texts, became my decade-long gateway to what I would call a holy alternative media ecosystem. Christian bookstores also carried religious movies like Fireproof, cartoons such as Veggie Tales, and video games that had strange religious themes like a “shooter-game” where a shepherd carries a slingshot to put lambs to sleep which mirrors Doom where you blow demons heads off with a big “effing” gun. But the life changing industry for me was the alternative Christian music industry.
Typically, one would think of alternative Christian music as simply music played in churches that are all about worshiping God (essentially Hillsong music), but there was a phase in the 1990s where Christianity was very keen to be “hip” or what Christians used to call “relevant” in order to keep God appealing for teens and kids within the church’s four walls. While there were Christian movies and games and T-shirts that were exclusively for teenagers, I’m going to focus on Christian music and how it became part of my story. As part of the mission to reach unsaved teenagers, Christian music labels and their signed musicians (mostly from the US) created mirror albums that were sprinkled with holy water that imitated music that was played on the radio at the time. Couldn’t listen to Vanilla Ice or MC Hammer? Check out DC Talk! Spice Girls weren’t allowed in the house? Here’s a Zoegirl LP! Parents think Korn or Metallica is from the devil? Mosh away with other Christian metal-heads who listen to Pillar, P.O.D. or Project 86!! Punk was too much? MXPX will get those kids’ attention! 2Pac, Easy-E, or Biggie swearing too much or rhyming about money, cars, drugs, and half-naked girls? Drop those BBJ rhymes over boom bap beats! This exclusive industry soon passed its prime and shifted back to its roots of promoting worship music once Christian content creators started participating in the Wild West of YouTube, Spotify, and an exclusive Christian rap site/online magazine called Rapzilla.
As a result of this movement of trying to strangely connect with the outside world, I was introduced to John Reuben’s first album “Are We There Yet?” He’s the very first Christian rapper I ever listened to whose sound I’ve always appreciated because it sounded nothing like the boring rap I heard on the radio (and it also didn’t sound like preachy Christian rap that was all about raging against secularism). I loved how even if he would try to speak against the status quo while standing up for what he believed in, he wasn’t proselytizing as if a pastor was yelling at me to repent. John’s music made me feel like I had a confident misfit of a friend with odd ideas going on a journey to find people who would see the world the way he sees it. He would rap as if he were in a circle of struggling people, trying to give them joy and light, sorting through angst in a world they were told to fear, while trying to figure out if there was a better way to live, not just in the world, but in the church as well.
So I changed my sound from sawtooth waves and square waves to boom bap bo boom bo boom bap. I figured out how to get a sample of “the funky drummer” by James Brown along with some other drum breaks (like Impeach and the oversampled Amen) while seasoning the hard staccato percussion with “Philly stabs” from an old KRS-One clean cut CD.
Then came the issue of subjects to write songs about. I thought I knew a lot about the world and that God was speaking to me intimately. I thought that through my music, I had a message from God to share with the world, the world being my high school at the time. I asked myself if Jesus would spit rhymes like Eminem, Biggie or Gangstarr today, what would they sound like?
To get the full context of where I started as a rapper and hip-hop artist, it’s important for me to share a backstory of how difficult my high school experience was and how proud and entitled I was back then. I always had a hard time interacting with my peers because of the Christian values and norms I was raised with, and being on the autism spectrum only made this worse. I was bullied for not being able to read social signals. I would crack senseless jokes and put out the dumbest retorts that would get me beaten to a pulp by school bullies. I didn’t have many friends. My friends were eight really immature guys that loved beer, pornography, and picking up girls. The friends who were really close with me came from Thailand and Ethiopia but they liked me because no one else would, not because I was an artist or a Christian— I never shared my musical talents with them (I made them think I was a nerd who loved band class which I wasn’t). I just hung out with them, cracked stupid jokes, and observed all their questionable behavior without swearing or using any substances they consumed or injected. I hung out with them because I pitied them. They couldn’t get girlfriends. They were into weird anime TV shows like Dragon Ball Z. They liked PlayStation games like Final Fantasy 7. Even though empathizing with them was hard, they fascinated me even if pretty much everything they were into wasn’t what mom and dad would ever allow in the house. I also pitied that I couldn’t share my “Godly music” with them even though I really wanted to form a community around songwriting.
Despite my lack of awareness and understanding of other cultures, beliefs, and even culture in Manitoba itself, I grew up with the idea that I could do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I dreamed of having a record deal with Goatee Records, a Christian record company who worked with DC Talk and John Reuben. I dreamt of overcoming my lack of social skills. I dreamt of rapping a song in front of my entire high school. While I knew something was wrong with me, but I wasn’t officially diagnosed until 2002, I dreamt of overcoming my disabilities of autism, a short-term memory problems, anxiety, and dyspraxia. I even occasionally dreamt of becoming a youth pastor and connecting with kids who’s parents were never there for them. I had very short term relationships that never reached first-base, let alone even a first date. I barely consumed pop culture (and still don’t find it appealing today even after leaving church). I never slept around. I never went to parties or drank any beer. I did some Toastmasters classes and learned to communicate artistically but not effectively, but still, if God helps and protects me, could I confront a world opposed to how I was raised while surviving the onslaught of people who see the world differently? Surely I deserved this, right?
My mediocre high school life and these questions overwhelmed me, leading me to lie to myself by writing songs bragging about how God changed my life even though I was just an average student trying to get good grades and move on to college. My songs weren’t just me putting on a front. I did write a few poems about how my friends struggled to fit in, how people like the shooters in Columbine needed to be heard and understood, how God could make my high school better, and how cliques in high school would be destroyed while uniting all of us as one people; no racism, no classism, no bullying, and no hazing in the halls. If I did this today, I’d be labeled “woke” or progressive, but this is what real Christianity was to me back in the day, even if I or some of the people I went to church with were into a bit of Christian nationalism back in the day. But who would listen? Bandcamp, Spotify, or SoundCloud never existed at the time. I couldn’t sell my music to save my life. I had no idea that we had a local legend named Fresh IE recording his first album, Red Letters. I had no idea he was even open to mentoring a student like me at the time. I just wanted to make music and let people hear it. I was passionate. I was on fire. I was ready to share myself with the world and excel with only my positive self-image from church and my unique moral compass. But I never knew that both the church and the world have their own ideas when determining where “outcasts” would end up after 2025.
Looking back, my parents raised me in two strains of Christianity: Christian Dutch Reform (which is different from the regular Reformed tradition) and Pentecostalism. Somehow, they found a way to reconcile the two kinds of belief systems so that there was a Christianity I could work with that still held onto signs, wonders, and miracles, but also connected to the commoner outside of church without coming across as a freak. But there’s just one problem: they sheltered my sister and me while we decided what our faiths would look like as adults. While it can be cool to be a contrarian that’s “in the world but not of the world,” (John 17:14-16) being sheltered has opened me up to experiences of trauma and psychological damage that will be explored in later chapters of this book.
Being sheltered by my parents from watching movies above PG-13, only listening to Christian music, and having all my books, drawings, and writing screened for things non-Christian has always caused me to struggle connecting with different kinds of peers since we had to conform to Christian values. Restricting how I saw the world (or in my case, not giving me resources to figure out how my world worked socially at the time) twisted my awareness of other cultures and beliefs in one of the most amazing decades to grow up in. Instead of taking in the trends of the 90s, I navigated awkward social situations while unintentionally causing trouble at times when I should have at least shown empathy. For a religion that puts faith over fear, I was terrified of knowledge, perspectives, and situations that made me uncomfortable. These reactions never led to meaningful relationships for me. Secular discourse made me angry when forced to participate in constructive dialogue that would have been helpful in my maturity and critical thinking. I now realize, though I never understood then, that pop culture isn’t an innocuous force or that going through adolescence watching TV, reading books, hearing jokes, listening to all kinds of music while wearing an invisible force field that bounces uncomfortable ideas away is harmful to long-term mental health. While I understood that stories are educational, I never realized that many Christians fear using current events as teaching tools for life lessons.
Consequently, I completely missed out and only recently learned valuable perspectives because of the isolation I experienced for more than 30 years of my life. This could be seen in my high school transcript which implied that my reading comprehension was at a fourth-grade level. I barely passed any of my classes unless they were arts related.
At Good News Fellowship Church, I played piano and synthesizer in the youth group band. This experience provided me with community and helped build my self-image. The church provided sanctuary for my soul, while high school felt like swimming in dangerous waters filled with confusion and guilt. I faced life's complexities that challenged my strict religious upbringing, overwhelming my mind with moral conflicts and emotional turmoil. Only one of my friends truly saw how hard it was for me to reconcile my faith and limited musical ability with real-world experiences determining what my peers liked in high school musically and even he had no idea what to do to “help me.” My entire family had no idea that a combination of being sheltered and autism distorted my exposure to diverse ideas which resulted in unhealthy processing of life struggles, dependence on my parents’ protection for social occasions such as eating with friends at KFC, and extreme difficulty with independent decision-making such as what kind of job to pursue during high school. I even felt like I had to have my parents around while practicing with my church band because we mixed in some secular music. Even back then, I knew this wasn’t normal and I needed some serious help.
When it came to my faith itself, my understanding of Christianity as a whole was still pretty rough. I knew the Bible well. In fact, when there were quizzes in Sunday school and when we discussed theology in youth group, I was one of the top students. But I still felt like some puzzle pieces were missing. I was told that we needed to win our friends to the faith, but we also had to watch out for scary people with radical ideas, especially ideas that involved two men living together, or Islam being practiced in certain parts of the city, or the radical ideas of the NDP overtaking our provincial Conservative government. I was told that we had to love all our neighbours, but to also call out their personal sin (not just sin that openly hurts people). I was told that I deserved to court someone but I have to be with someone who was just as “on-fire” for God as I was. I had a boatload of questions, even though I still felt like I knew what God wanted me to say and preach to my potential audience as an aspiring, shy youth pastor and Christian rapper.
Even back then, even when I felt like the church taught me how to use my musical talents to move a mountain, it still felt like many other things were holding me back from touching a molehill. I wish my Christian leaders told me that I was essentially misappropriating an art that belonged to black culture to win white people, which, given what they know now, could be frowned upon in the Christian Reformed tradition I grew up in. I should have known that unless I lived in and adopted the ways of non-whites in Vancouver, Montreal, or at the very least Queens, New York, where enough people knew I was part-Filipino, I had no street credentials for my songwriting. I should have known that I had very little chance of getting into the official Christian music scene, even when I did try to give my demos to Christian artists like John Reuben at Youth for Christ conference events. I should have known that being shy in real life while a performer on stage with a metaphorical mask doesn’t actually make a person truly authentic at all, especially if they’re into the now dying genre of boom bap rap. What I should have accepted was that if I took this route as a musician, rarely anybody, Christian or non-Christian would ever truly take me seriously.
As a side note, musically speaking, from the early 90s until today, I've always been a massive closeted house, jungle, rave, and trance music fan even though I listen to many kinds of music over the years. Even with my ugly hatred of mainstream hip hop and R&B through the years (which I now appreciate a bit more), jungle, tech house, Deadmau5, Aphex Twin, and Daft Punk were my go-tos since the early 2000s. Having very few peers who enjoy this music as much as I do made me feel lonely, both inside and outside of the church my entire life. But I’m so glad that I continued to check out these genres and build my collection of life changing free bangers from Bandcamp when I have time. They have brought me so much joy even with financial and physical struggles I work with daily.
I really should have put the arts second when dealing with a world that is now hellbent on survival. I needed to know that I needed a day job before even thinking about pursuing a career (or at the very least a hobby) as an artist. And yet, my immediate family and close friends believed in me and encouraged me to paint on a canvas full-time (or at least I think they did. I still don’t know today). I still took jobs I hated and found it very difficult to separate work from my art. However, I wish I was better prepared for the world I was going to express myself to. I should have been discouraged from being so stubborn with no backup plan in case I failed, since I equated my desires with God’s desires (I mean how is one supposed to successfully argue with me when I wrongly claimed divine authority).
I understand that parents have to keep kids safe, especially considering we lived in what was once the murder capital of Canada, but I wish mom and dad and all my spiritual leaders encouraged a balance of protection and better preparation for the outside world rather than keeping me on a really short leash with limited access to resources as a creative. While we eventually had a bit more open dialogue about how we connected with the world as a family, I had to eventually learn critical thinking with the help of my wife (and my dad at one point when I started believing in random “Christian” Red Scare documentaries on YouTube), while also experimenting with different methods of art creation and conducting research while safely exposing myself to diverse ideas.