Roach

Roach may refer to:

Animals

Places

Arts and entertainment

Eric Denis

Eric Denis better known as Eric "Roach" Denis is a Canadian documentary film maker and activist whose films deal with social justice, and particularly homelessness.

Earlier Life

Denis was born in Grenville, Quebec. At age 9, his parents divorced and he went on to live with his mother in Hawkesbury, Ontario. After a brief stay with his father, he was put in a juvenile detention centre because he had been hooked to smoking marijuana. At the age of 14, he escaped from the center he was assigned to and started living as a street kid in the streets of Montreal acquiring addiction to hard drugs in the process as a teenager.

Denis assuming the pseudonym "Roach" became a squeegee teenager sleeping in parks, abandoned cars and refuge centres and was arrested many times. It was during these troubled times that he met EyeSteelFilm's director Daniel Cross who was planning to shoot a documentary film about squeegees and amazingly Roach offered to tell his part of the story by film thus beginning a prosperous career as a well-known documentary filmmaker and activist.

Roach Gigz

Orlando Rinaldi Campbell (born April 25, 1988), better known by the stage name Roach Gigz or Roach, is an American rapper and hyphy hip hop artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. Gigz released his first independent album in 2012, entitled Bugged Out. He is signed to Goomba his own record label.

Biography

Roach Gigz was born in San Francisco, California. His father was an Italian supporter of the Sandinista National Liberation Front during the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s. His American mother was pregnant with him while in Nicaragua, before returning home to San Francisco, where she gave birth to Gigz. Roach first met his father when he was eight years old.

Career

Early career

While a student at Leadership High School, Roach Gigz was involved with Youth Radio, an East Bay Area nonprofit youth organization, and then started to develop an interest in rapping. In 2006, Gigz started rapping in his closet with a microphone, and started to create his own hip hop songs, which were liked by his peers. He first gained fame locally after forming a hip hop duo called Bitch I Go (B.I.G.) with rapper Lil 4Tay. Roach Gigz was given the nickname due to his resemblance to a character from the movie Next Friday named Roach, and "gigz" due to his frequent performance at gigs around Northern California.