Snow (musician)
Canadian dancehall rapper (born 1969)

Darrin Kenneth O'Brien (born October 30, 1969), known professionally as Snow, is a Canadian rapper and musician. His 1992 single "Informer" spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Early life, family and education
Darrin Kenneth O'Brien was born on October 30, 1969, in North York, Ontario (now part of Toronto), one of three children born to an Irish-Canadian cabdriver and a homemaker. As a child, American musician Rick James served as Snow's babysitter. James was dating a friend's mother at the time. Snow is cousins with both NHL Hall of Famer Brad Park and musician Steven Page.
Following his parents' divorce, he was raised by his mother in the Allenbury Gardens public housing project where he became fascinated with the gangster lifestyle. He became involved in a cycle of fighting, drinking and stealing. He never learned to read properly and dropped out of school while in the 9th grade.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Snow (musician)” as canadian dancehall rapper (born 1969). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q94708. VIAF identifies the subject as 42032524. The Library of Congress control number is no00100307. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Snow (musician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.