KILL YOU
Sqaz existed before the song. The name started as an online alias around 2000–2001 and followed me into writing and recording. By 17, when I created Kill You, I identified with Sqaz as an alter person in me — not merely a username or artist name.
The story did not begin with a 2026 remix, and it did not even begin with a microphone. Sqaz started online first, then the writing, the identity and the recording followed.
I created the online alias Sqaz around 2000 or 2001. The name came from the number 1 spelled out with keyboard letters. People commonly misspelled it as Squaz or Spaz.
I also built a website teaching people how to hack a game I used to play. I marketed the site myself and, before social media made that kind of reach ordinary, it was generating roughly 1,000 hits a day.
After my parents locked the computer room door, I was sent to live in an adolescent treatment centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That period became a major writing chapter for me: I began writing poetry regularly there, and it was also where I was introduced to drugs and alcohol.
Sqaz already existed as the online identity. What changed here was the habit of turning whatever was in my head into words.
By the time I created Kill You in high school, Sqaz was no longer just the screen name I had invented years earlier. I identified with Sqaz as an alter person in me. That was the identity behind the song.
I recorded Kill You as Sqaz — not the Eminem song, my own. I was teaching myself by reading, experimenting and doing the work before video tutorials were the default. It became the first studio-quality rap song I knew of being recorded by someone at my high school.
I took music business and home recording while I was already composing in FL Studio and learning Pro Tools with an Mbox 2. The point wasn't just rapping. I was interested in how songs were built, recorded and turned into finished things.
Kill You (Special 2026 version remix from 2007) brings that old Sqaz recording back into the present with context. Not a new threat. Not a cleaned-up autobiography. An old performance put under better lighting.
When we pulled the lyrics apart, the most interesting thing was that the loudest material wasn't necessarily the deepest material.
The violence is theatrical, but Sqaz was not merely a disposable stage name. By 17 I identified with Sqaz as an alter person in me, and Kill You was created through that identity.
It began years earlier as an online alias. By the Kill You era, it had become something I identified with much more personally — an alter person in me rather than simply the name attached to a recording.
The sanctuary / “house of God” material isn't just there for shock. It pushes against moral and religious authority — the same instinct that runs through the rest of the song: nobody gets to tell this character where the line is.
That is the trick in plain sight. The song knows it is provoking the listener. Shock isn't an accidental side effect; it is part of the performance.
A mundane Canadian setting sitting beside horror-movie aggression makes the persona feel even more obviously constructed. Everyday life and theatrical violence crash into each other.
Buried inside all the threats is the idea that the real enemy can be internal. That lands differently once the role of Sqaz is understood: the song is not only projecting danger outward; it also documents an identity I experienced as existing inside me.
Sqaz started as an online alias years before the music. By 17, when I created Kill You, I identified Sqaz as an alter person in me. Hearing the song now means hearing both things at once: the deliberately extreme performance and the identity I was using to create it.
The 2026 release keeps the Sqaz name attached to the material instead of folding it into Call Me Daddy. Sqaz is the explicit archive of that era; the later MusicSubject history continues elsewhere on the site.