The legacy of Toronto rapper Devon and his protest anthem 'Mr. Metro'

Mr. Metro! 
Hey, hey! 
Metro! 
Nah nah nah nah nah!

This catchy chorus refrain from rapper Devon Martin's "Mr. Metro" was heard often in the early 1990s thanks to MuchMusic, during the heady days when the nation's music station exerted significant pop-culture significance. 

Wearing a black bowler hat, Devon jumped out of the screen with his gregarious presence while he delivered a serious message: "Mr. Metro" was actually an unapologetic critique of the shootings of Black people by Metro Toronto police officers, replete with archival footage of defiant protests against police harassment and brutality. 

"Mr. Metro" voiced the deep concerns of many Black people in Toronto at a time when there were few media outlets that would share his viewpoint. Soberingly, the themes in the song continue to have relevance today. The song caused a stir in the city and across the country at the time, and would become the eventual Juno Award winner's signature track.

"You couldn't walk down any street of Toronto with Devon without hearing someone yell, 'Mr. Metro!' across the road," his younger brother, comic Jay Martin, said.

On July 23, 2024, word spread on social media that Devon had died at the age of 62 in Vancouver. A few days later, Martin confirmed Devon's death on Instagram.

"It's with great sadness to have to announce the passing of my brother Devon 'Mr. Metro' Martin," he wrote. "His children, siblings and family are in shock to say the least."

Born in England to Jamaican parents, Devon later moved to Malton in Mississauga, Ont., showing an early interest in music when he began to play a keyboard, a Christmas gift that was initially given to his brother.

Despite enduring the deep personal grief triggered by the death of both his mother and oldest brother when he was a young child, Devon developed a positive outlook on life with an "infectious personality," according to his brother.

"He was robust, the life of the party," said Martin. "He had a big heart."

The spark for 'Mr. Metro'

Devon channelled his focus into music, becoming a multi-instrumentalist who formed his first band, Shock Waves, when he was 14 years old. Devon eventually became a keyboardist and vocalist in Toronto reggae band 20th Century Rebels, a popular fixture on the influential 1980s Queen Street West scene. 

On tour with Juno Award-winning dub poet Lillian Allen's band in California in 1989, Devon visited a Redondo Beach record store with fellow touring bandmates Billy Bryans and Dave Gray, of Parachute Club fame, when he was racially profiled as a robbery suspect. 

He said what people were thinking and afraid to say.- Jay Martin, Devon's brother

Devon was pushed up against the wall and searched by police, and only received an apology when Bryans and Gray intervened on his behalf. 

"That California stuff really shook him up," Allen said. 

It was the combination of his experience in California and the realities at home that spurred Devon to write a song to articulate his feelings. In Toronto, there were ongoing demonstrations in the wake of the police shooting deaths of Michael Wade Lawson and Lester Donaldson, raising tensions between police and the Black community.

"Toronto had some turmoil of its own," Allen later added. "And, you know, he'd been to a lot of the [anti-Black racism demonstrations] too, and played at demos for years. So I think that crystallized it." 

"He said what people were thinking and afraid to say," said Martin.

Inspired by the authoritative baritones and incisive cultural commentary of hip-hop MCs such as KRS-One and Chuck D of Public Enemy, Devon enlisted award-winning musician Orin Isaacs and his Metro Squad band to help him write and produce the '80s funk and R&B-infused "Mr. Metro." 

Despite the song's catchy chorus, Devon levelled serious charges of his own against the police in his lyrics:

Metro's number one problem
Is that no one really trusts them
Causing all of this tension
For something I won't even mention
Pick up the Star, pick up the Sun 
Headline: "Metro gets another one."

"He's a bridge between dub, spoken word and rap music, " said Rinaldo Walcott,  professor and chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. "'Mr. Metro' … really arrived and rode the zeitgeist in that moment. That was another moment where Black people in the city of Toronto were being subjected to significant forms of police violence, and that track just arrived and articulated in the clearest possible terms — with a backbeat that you could dance to — the stakes of what Black people were living."

There was no Black radio station in Canada to play the song at the time, and the theme of the track didn't lend itself to heavy rotation on commercial radio. That's why it was crucial that the song enjoyed significant airplay on MuchMusic, which funded the Jim Banks-directed video through its Videofact program.

That airplay didn't come without controversy, as Toronto Police threatened to sue for defamation until the faces of police officers were pixelated so they were no longer identifiable. The video would end up winning best R&B video at the 1990 MuchMusic Video Awards.

"['Mr. Metro' is] an important historical document and record," said Walcott, who titled one of his academic papers after a Devon song. "There's a way in which people respond to Black Lives Matter from 2014 on in Canada, as though nothing had happened before, as though that was a totally lone eruption, but those things were continuations…. We see that there's a history, that there's a longevity of Black people, and particularly Black artists, responding to the conditions of Black people's lives in Canada … through their music."

The success of "Mr. Metro" would also lead to Devon snagging a major record deal with Capitol/EMI, which released his 1992 album, It's My Nature, featuring Canadian R&B singers Simone Denny and Deborah Cox early on in their careers. The album included a reworked version of "Mr. Metro" and the single "Keep it Slammin,'" for which Devon won the 1993 Juno for best rap recording. A year later, Devon performed a musical montage at the Juno Awards.

Devon would relocate to Vancouver in the late 1990s and continue to play, even performing a show in Toronto just a month before his death. No matter the era, the significance of "Mr. Metro" remains.

"Society hasn't moved on from what it should have been from 30 years ago," said his brother Martin. "The same foolish things that were happening are still happening. It was definitely a game-changer. To the city of Malton [he's] a hero … he's done a lot for this country, for hip-hop, for music. Iconic."