How Tony Yomaki Overcame Loss & Turned Struggles Into Motivation Through Music

“# How Tony Yomaki Overcame Loss & Turned Struggles Into Motivation Through Music\n\nOn this episode of the Monica Black Diamond show, host Monica welcomed rapper Tony Yomaki — known on stage as Adequate — for a conversation about grief, grind, and building a hip-hop career out of British Columbia. Tony explained the story behind his stage name early on: "adequate" means satisfactory or up to par, a deliberately humble label rather than an egotistical one, paired with a personal slogan — "but more than" — because he’s adequate, but more than that too.\n\nBorn in Campbell River and raised across British Columbia, including stretches in Kamloops and Kelowna, Tony traced his musical roots back to childhood, listening to his dad’s mix of Eminem, Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit starting around age four or five. From there he found Nas, Tupac, Big L, and Obie Trice, artists he says fueled his love of rap. The real turning point came in a grade six or seven drama class, when he convinced his teacher to let him write raps instead of poetry for an assignment — and never really stopped.\n\nGraffiti entered the picture around the same time; Tony said he’s been doing it since he was twelve, and has been arrested for it more than once. But the deeper catalyst was personal loss: his father passed away when Tony was thirteen, in 2009, leaving him with what he described as pent-up rage and emotion. Rapping and graffiti became the outlet for that anger, and the same graffiti crew he and his friends started around 2009-2010 eventually grew into the clothing company behind a Kickstarter campaign he had just launched at the time of this interview.\n\nAsked about the hustle behind the music, Tony described loving the solitary, focused grind of sitting down and getting work done, calling the money and time he invests now "paying dues" rather than money lost — framing it as an investment in a future payoff rather than a sacrifice. He also spoke about wanting to represent an underrepresented side of BC culture, pushing back on outside perceptions of the province as just "hippies and loggers," and tracing his own family story — a mother working two jobs as a single parent raising him and his brother — into his lyrics and word play.\n\nA recurring theme was collaboration beyond his own backyard. Tony pointed to work he was doing with an artist in Queensbridge, New York, and another based in Alberta, arguing that too many artists limit themselves early on by only working with people in their immediate area. Expanding outward from the start, he said, builds real connections rather than just a bigger network. When asked who he’d most want to work with, he named Apathy of Demigodz — a Connecticut-based artist he admires for handling beats, raps, and intelligent subject matter all at once.\n\nAt the time of the interview, Tony had an EP or album in the works with no fixed length decided yet, plus a run of shows lined up with Junan Locksmith across Prince George, Vancouver, and Vernon in mid-June, and a cross-Canada tour he was helping bring Robbie G through. He gave a shout-out to D Dai Entertainment for connecting him to the Monica Black Diamond show and for bringing him up to open for Mercules in Terrace the year before, along with the promotions team and fellow artists helping him sell tickets for upcoming shows.\n\nThe conversation closed on advice for other artists grinding through the same process. Tony’s central piece of encouragement was to use other people’s negativity as fuel rather than letting it discourage you — invoking Thomas Edison’s famous reframe of his many failed light bulb attempts not as failures, but as hundreds of ways that didn’t work on the way to the one that did. He also shared a written note he keeps on his desk as a personal reminder: if you only do things when you feel like doing them, they never get done. Though he hasn’t formally battled in a league yet, Tony said he watches battle rap regularly and hopes to get into it eventually. The episode closed with a clip of one of his songs, touching on anxiety and depression alongside the hustle themes discussed throughout the interview.\n”