Born in Zimbabwe and raised across cities like London, New York and Toronto before eventually settling in Calgary, Kuzi Cee doesn’t come from one fixed scene—and you can hear that in the music. His approach to R&B feels shaped by movement: different cities, different influences, all landing in one place.
Over the past couple of years, he’s been building steady momentum, first catching attention online with early snippets of ‘Rather Be,’ a track that went on to pick up millions of streams and views across platforms. That moment translated offline too—festival slots, opening sets, and a growing audience that’s been following him from social media into real rooms. He’s shared stages with artists like Mario, Nelly and Ashanti, while also performing at spaces like the Calgary Stampede, slowly building a live presence to match the online buzz.
In 2026, that trajectory took a bigger step forward with his signing to Universal Music Canada, marking a shift from independent momentum to a wider global push. But what’s been consistent through all of it is the core of his music—songs that sit in vulnerability and lean into love, even when it’s messy or unresolved. His recent releases continue to double down on that space, positioning him as part of a new wave of Canadian R&B artists who aren’t trying to fit into one lane, but are instead building their own from the ground up.
For Rolling Stone Canada’s Future of Music 2026, Kuzi Cee talks about coming up outside the usual industry centres, why emotion still sits at the centre of his writing, and how he’s thinking about building his career one release at a time.
You’re coming out of Calgary, which isn’t always seen as a central R&B hub. How has that shaped the way you approach your music and audience?
For me, my background is tied to many cultures and regions, so naturally, my music incorporates different sub-genres and production elements. That has played a major role in shaping my take on R&B and how it’s been received locally. It’s still deeply rooted in R&B, but it also welcomes listeners who gravitate toward pop, rap/hip-hop, Afrobeats, dancehall, and dance music. Blending genres came naturally to me, and it’s helped bring both new and existing listeners into the space. Calgary has seen a lot of success in folk, pop, and country, so it’s not always easy to pull people’s attention away from those legends and get them to take a chance on my music and on R&B as a whole.
R&B right now is pulling in a lot of different influences and directions. Where do you feel your voice fits within that space?
I like to think I’m carving out my own lane in the R&B space with the yearners, the lovers, and the “wear your heart on your sleeve” types. The best part of R&B, in my opinion, is the vulnerability and emotion tied to the music. That is exactly where I try to live. I don’t shy away from telling uncomfortable stories that people can relate to and think, “I’ve definitely been there.”
As a songwriter, what are you trying to say that you don’t feel like you’re hearing enough from other artists?
It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to be sad, depressed, or overjoyed. Emotions are just that—emotions. There aren’t necessarily good or bad ones, even though they can feel difficult at times. It’s important to feel things fully and take your time with that. That’s one of the best parts of being human.
A lot of artists today are building through singles and moments rather than full projects. How are you planning to pace your releases?
It’s hard to push a full-length project of all new songs as an emerging artist, especially in the attention economy we’re in. I have hopes of doing that one day, but for now, I want to stay consistent with releases and continue building out my artist world before taking that on. I’m an album listener too, so I’d want to really take the time to build out the music and then tell that story in a longer form. For now, let’s keep the singles pushing. It’s definitely a different game from what I grew up on as a music listener, but the change has allowed a lot of voices, including mine, to be heard.
If someone listens to your music for the first time, what do you want them to sit with after it ends?
“Man, he really loves to love” or “who hurt him?” (ahaha). I want first-time listeners to be hit by the sonics right away—strong instrumentation, tight vocal arrangements, storytelling. I also want them to be brought into a world of love they might not have heard before, or haven’t felt in a long time.
Do you think R&B right now is being shaped more by artists or by the platforms it lives on?
I would say R&B is being shaped by the artists. When I look at the ones leading the genre right now, they all have their own distinct sounds, which isn’t easy in R&B. Artists like Leon Thomas and Kehlani each have their own way of telling their stories, which inspires millions. From production to themes to visuals and live shows, artists are the driving force. Platforms help amplify that spotlight, but the genre is in a really healthy place because artists are focused on the details and care about their craft.
What are your thoughts about the Future of Music in Canada?
Music in Canada is in a strong place. We have so many talented people being recognized on a global stage and across platforms. It’s amazing to see our voices being heard, our stories being shared, and our community continuing to grow.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?