New Zealand hip-hop's man of the hour

By REBECCA BARRY

Malo Luafutu quite likes Scribe - he won't listen to anything else until his album is released next month.

But the softly spoken 24-year-old is not much like his alter ego.

"Scribe has a lot of confidence but that's not really me," he says. "I've seen people on the internet saying I'm arrogant but they don't even know me ... Malo is not Scribe, you know what I mean?"

Last night he won the best vocalist/MC prize at the 2003 b.Net awards and his side project, Verse Two, took away the Most Promising New Act.

A few days earlier, sitting over an untouched moccacino, hoodie pulled up over his baseball cap, backpack on, it's hard to believe Luafutu is the smirking MC whose hit single demands New Zealand hip-hop "stand the f*** up".

The patriotic single not only cussed its way to number one after bouncing around the top three for the past six weeks, it has just been certified gold (5000 copies sold). And Scribe isn't the only one celebrating.

Of those he name-drops on Stand Up - members of Deceptikonz, Nesian Mystik and rock band the D4, to name a few - all have put their money where his mouth is.

"Someone said that I only named all those people to get props by association, which is totally not true," he says. "All the names there are mainly my friends that I've been hanging out with for a few years now. I've worked with all of them except for the D4. But I admire the D4's stuff."

P-Money's rock-tinged production is confirmation of that, with Evan Short of Concord Dawn (and metal band Evil Priest) contributing chunky guitar riffs.

After Scribe featured on six tracks of P-Money's 2001 album, Big Things, he wanted to return the favour, a tribute to his belief the MC is "the one".

Scribe seems to agree on his second single, Not Many - "How many dudes you know flow like this?" - but in real life he's somewhat humbler.

He wrote Dreaming, for instance, about growing up poor, recording rhymes on a beat-up tape deck.

"When I was born my dad was in jail and he was there, but he wasn't there, if you know what I mean. I've got an intellectually handicapped brother who is older than me. My oldest brother and me didn't get along with each other when we were younger, because of the age difference [five years]. But I always wanted to be like him."

Both his parents have 12 siblings, so Christmases were "like the Partridge Family", musical get-togethers where he began to nurture his performance skills. As a child he wasn't impressed by the Public Enemy and NWA his brother tried to introduce him to, preferring the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cranberries, Cat Stevens and Bob Marley. But in his teens he joined the hip-hop four-piece Beats and Pieces, started fooling around freestyling and getting detention for writing rhymes in class.

He also joined Pacific Underground, the Christchurch theatre company started by his cousin, TV personality Oscar Kightley. Together, they would write children's plays.

"I think that's where my success in story writing, in terms of music, comes from," he says. "When I was young I thought I would be a Broadway actor, to be honest. But in my late teens I started getting shy. It was funny because in my last year [of high school] I got the main role for the play Annie Get Your Gun. My understudy was Paul Reid [Shortland Street, Rubicon]. At the last minute I pulled out and he went on to be the star. I think that was an indication as to where I was going."

He became more heavily involved in the hip-hop scene, organising gigs with Auckland artists P-Money and DJ Sir-Vere, recording tracks with his friend DJ Ali (Too Late was nominated for a b.Net award last year) and trying to learn as much as possible.

"Christchurch City and the South Island - I look at it now and think of it as my training ground. If you couldn't do it in your own city, what's the point of trying to move up to Auckland and do it there?"

When he did make the move late last year, he encountered the kind of backlash that would inspire the name of his album.

"It's been a mad crusade to get here, battling against lots of invisible things like negative energy and jealousy. There are a lot of people that say that New Zealand hip-hop is all shit and that we won't make it.

"Someone said that my rhymes for Stand Up were just standard, that they're pretty basic, pretty simple. I already knew that. I'm not trying to amaze anyone with my rhymes, I'm just saying something. It was obvious to me that the person just missed the whole point."

The point, he says, is to aim for commercial success by staying true to your roots. For that reason, he's not rhyming about his Samoan identity but his New Zealand one.

"[King Kapisi] has that market locked down. I kind of just do my music for my generation and people who are like me, because we're not in the Islands anymore, we're in New Zealand, and I wasn't brought up in a strict traditional way, like most people.

"I definitely know my culture, I know my roots, I know where I've come from, I've been there twice. I have a mad love for my nationality and a mad pride but in terms of my music, I don't come from, like 'I'm a Samoan' type of thing. I just try and relate to everyone and anyone.

"I'm going to go out there and open up the market," he says. "And then open up that spot so that it's there forever, so there's always a place for New Zealand hip-hop.

"I would hate to be the only hip-hop album to come out this year. That would be kind of sad for me. To hear that Mareko has an album out and heaps of my other friends are dropping their releases pretty soon is a good thing because the competition gives me motivation to make sure my stuff is going to be good. At the same time, I hope that when my stuff comes out that the dude that's like me, trying to get into it, can listen to my stuff and make his stuff better. By me doing it, he can see that he can do it too."

* Scribe appears at the Aotearoa Hip-Hop Summit, The Edge, Auckland, Sat October 11. His debut album, The Crusader, is released on October 16.