King Kapisi - The quiet achiever of hip-hop

By AIDAN RASMUSSEN

The imposing figure of King Kapisi shuffles sheepishly into the Pon-sonby offices of his record label. The jovial giant, known to his family as Bill Urale, has been trying unsuccessfully to calm his young son at home and is an hour late.

Laidback and relaxed, you could say the Wellington-raised Samoan is running on island time. He apologises but says if he hadn't taken the time to settle his son, the boy would have screamed his head off. Even a man regarded as one of this country's best hip-hop artists is not free from fatherly responsibilities.

Grabbing a Coke from the fridge, he decides we should do the interview in a windswept park nearby. There, the 26-year-old explains why it has taken so long for Savage Thoughts, his eagerly anticipated debut album, to hit the streets.

The award-winning songwriter — Kapisi won the 1999 APRA Silver Scroll Award for best song award for the single Reverse Resistance, competing against established names — is something of a paradox when it comes to writing and recording music.

A lack of inspiration — "sometimes I would wake up and not want to go to the studio" — and a decline in interest have all factored in the stymied release of his first album.

"It became more and more of a mission because it kept dragging on. All I wanted to do was go surfing and play some basketball. I just wasn't into it."

But you could also say the delay was due to the unfocused creativity of the multitalented MC who not only wrote but also produced Savage Thoughts.

"I had too many ideas and I couldn't put them all down. There are 12 songs on the album but I created about 19. If you're producing, you're writing the rhymes, thinking of the melodies, harmonies and backing vocals. I was trying to think like a bass player or a piano player or whatever so I could connect with everyone. When it came time to have the album done I didn't even know what tracks I was going to put on the album. It took so long because I was trying to cover everything."

A gust of wind unties several strands of hair from Kapisi's topknot. They fall about a face that has relief rather than contentment written all over it. While the ex-Wellington High pupil is pleased to have completed the album, he's not entirely happy with it.

"There are a lot of imperfections that I can find in the music already," he says forlornly. "The way I see it, the only way to do something is to do it up to your standard. I don't think that I've reached my peak. Maybe I'll get there on the next one, maybe not until the album after that."

If Savage Thoughts suffers from a little musical and lyrical repetitiveness, it also resonates with beauty on tracks like Reverse Resistance, get-up-on-the-dancefloor groove U-Not-Red-I and with toe-tapping nod-ability on 2nd Migration. Inevitably, Kapisi's first effort will be compared to Che Fu's 2 b S. Pacific, even if it's more of a pure hip-hop affair than Fu's soul-reggae hybrid. Though Kapisi's album is virtually sample-free, a trademark of his sound.

"I don't sample other people's music, I make my own. You can get the same kind of feel from doing that, but it's not yours, you're just taking it and borrowing it. You don't get the same kind of pleasure from sitting there and making and playing it. It's all mine, it's all my ideas, I played all the instruments," he says with understated pride.

Thinking for himself and doing for himself are two traits instilled by his
mother — a woman who made Kapisi go to those dreaded piano lessons he is now grateful for. From an early age she encouraged her children to speak up and question anything they weren't sure about. This dogged independence of the young Urale occasionally left the teacher in tears.

But the hardest questions he reserves for himself and his music. The man who used to breakdance in his teens at the Lower Hutt Town Hall and now dreams of rocking Wembley Stadium constantly checks his work to make sure he's not straying into formulaic hip-hop territory. The gun-toting, champagne-sipping, sex-obsessed American stereotype.

"I could be out there talking about how I drive a big fat car, how I've got girls all around me and I'm the baddest.

"But nah, I'm not down with that, I'm not the baddest. Heaps of people have been brainwashed by that American gangster shit."

His family wouldn't have a bar of it anyway — essentially they're experiences he's never had.

"I didn't have a family where there were structural problems or separate mothers or fathers. I didn't carry a gun wanting to shoot people, bang, bang, saying 'I'm from the West Side, South Side, wassup nigga' kind of thing. We just felt love for each other and the way I felt was that I couldn't follow along that way [gangsta rapping] because that would be disrespectful to my family."

Instead he writes and sings about issues relevant to him and the South Pacific. The dumping of nuclear waste, families breaking up, his people's experience of living in a European society and the mind-numbing effects that organised religion has had on Polynesia.

Kapisi's aims are to take a stand, and be willing to make a difference through doing something he loves, as well as uplifting people through music. That and making sure people don't forget about things like the Treaty of Waitangi, the dawn raids and "our people getting chucked out of this country."

Kapisi saves his strongest criticisms for that cornerstone of Polynesian society, the Church. It's at this point that the cheerfully earnest Kapisi becomes his most passionate and serious. That softly spoken voice of his lowers a couple of octaves as he says, "A lot of our people have been oppressed and brainwashed by the Church."

It's something he doesn't like or understand: "I don't need to go and talk to an invisible friend to feel better. I can look within myself and say 'okay Bill you need to do this.' I don't have to pray to someone. You can find all that within yourself."

* King Kapisi's Savage Thoughts is released this week with a show at the Control Room, Queen St, on Wednesday.