Will Hayes on Hip Hop, Authenticity & Calgary’s Rise — Inspiration for Creatives

Before he was Will Hayes, he was Kane Cash — “Kane Cashes Kane” to anyone who knew him before 2000. On this episode of the show, Monica sits down with the Calgary entertainer, podcast host, and hip hop artist to talk about what it actually takes to build a scene from nothing, why authenticity is the only currency that lasts, and why he’s stepped back from rapping even as his platform keeps growing.

Will opens by describing himself less as a rapper and more as “an entertainer for higher” — someone who makes music and does production, but has increasingly shifted toward being a personality who “brings the culture to people” rather than just being a product in it. That shift shows up in his slate of projects: the Will Hayes Show, hosting gigs, and a new podcast in the works. He traces the instinct back to childhood, joking that his mother used to say he could “sell fire to the devil,” and that people called him “motor mouth” because his mouth never stopped.

When Monica poses her signature question — if you were a diamond or a rock, what would you look like? — Will leans all the way into the bit, describing himself as an oblong, athletic rock that can skip across water eight times, one that would apologize if it accidentally hit you in the back of the neck. It’s a funny, self-aware answer, and it sets the tone for a conversation that stays candid even as it gets serious.

The heart of the episode is Calgary itself. Will is blunt about how hard it was to build a hip hop scene in a city he calls “the anti-hip-hop city” — describing clubs run by people who used dress codes to keep out the urban community and wouldn’t play urban music, while rougher venues came with real danger. He and others who came up before him didn’t have anywhere to host hip hop shows, so they built their own venues from scratch, laying a foundation he says later artists — and the current club scene — are now standing on.

He draws a sharp contrast between Calgary and hip hop scenes in the United States. In the U.S., he says, local communities tend to push their own rappers up even when there’s competition for the same spotlight. In Calgary, he argues, the opposite happens — the city tends to tear down the one person who’s trying to make it. On the flip side, he offers real praise for Calgary’s female rappers, naming Nicki Louise and Brandon City as standouts, and mentioning that he taught Nicki Louise to rap back in the ’90s, before she “surpassed” him.

Authenticity is the through-line of the whole conversation. Will argues that most of today’s music is technically solid but interchangeable — trap beats, in particular, tend to blur together — and that the artists who actually last are the ones who sound like no one else. He points to Cash Money, Wu-Tang, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and Future as acts that set trends rather than chased them, and uses Post Malone’s early “White Iverson” era as an example of an artist who was distinct before the copycats arrived. He also contrasts Eminem’s bar-heavy controversy with what he sees as hollow imitators. His challenge to any artist, and really to anyone: “what are you doing that’s setting you apart” from the person sitting next to you?

That question is also why he’s pulled back from rapping himself. He admits candidly that his mouth, his opinions, and his show now pull more attention than his music ever has — a fact that frustrates him even as he leans into it. The Will Hayes Show airs weekly, and he’s become selective about who gets booked, judging potential guests by how their content performs before offering them a slot.

Toward the end, Will turns reflective about hip hop’s staying power, describing the culture as something that pushes out whatever doesn’t belong the way a body eventually pushes out a bullet — battered sometimes, but never destroyed. His closing advice to artists still finding their footing is simple and direct: don’t stop, give it everything, and don’t let anyone else’s opinion decide your worth unless it’s adding something positive. If people aren’t fans yet, he says, make them fans.

Monica closes out the episode with a shoutout to the network for creating space for conversations like this one — real, unfiltered, and rooted in the actual work of building something in a city that didn’t make it easy.