The Stool Pigeon

With Justice lined up to produce her album, Swedish/American rapper MAPEI is destined to put herself on the map in a big way. But only in her own time.

Words: Phil Hebblethwaite

Photographer: Unknown

Mapei’s got her own swing.

The phone at her home in Stockholm rings.

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” she lies.

“And you’re okay to do this interview now? I mean, you’re pretty hard to get hold of.”

We end with: “Erika is going to call you, and email you. This weekend, right? Please. We really want to take your picture and she’s only in Sweden till Monday.”

Erika, Tuesday: “I called her and mailed her over and over, but my stalking didn’t work and now I just got back to London again... I saw her in a magazine today and she looks cool. I just like her more for being a nightmare.”

From the subs bench was summoned a fashion photographer friend of Erika’s, Fredrik.

Fredrik, some days later: “I’ve been trying to reach Mapei but she has no phone for the moment. Will try my best to sort it out for you. I know she’s in the city, and she knows I’m looking for her.”

Fredrik, even later: “Sorry, still no call back yet.”

Leader of the pack, she’s gonna do her own dance.

This hunt for Mapei started over a year ago, just as tracks and videos of hers began to do the rounds on the internet. A spaghetti-and-meatballs rapper with a killer flow and lyrical punch to boot, it was clear straight off the bat that her brand of pop was going to be systematically hip hop. To prove a point, a DJ Mehdi remix of Ghostface’s ‘Charlie Brown’ featuring Mapei hit the blogs in March 2008. Somehow she managed to upstage the Wu man on that track, and apparently she was from... Sweden.

Mapei had no record deal a year ago, no PR, not even a manager. A MySpace request for an interview bombed. So did another a few months later. Then a manager’s email address appeared on her site. Still no dice, and only when it was announced that she’d be releasing a low-key Mehdi-produced EP, ‘Cocoa Butter Diaries’, in July this year - when, gulp, there were suddenly other people interested in promoting her - did our phone ring: “I hear you’ve been trying to get hold of Mapei...”

Oh, how silly the music business can be. Privy to a nugget of information that, hilariously, this newspaper was told was “secret” - that Mapei was going to do her album with Parisian dance dudes, Justice - the interview collapsed, or rather we were told we could speak to her, but we weren’t allowed to ask her about Justice. Duh.

And now it’s August, and now Mapei’s forgotten she’s been told to do an interview, and now we’re talking about CSS and how they’re the quintessential internet band because their music could come from anywhere, and now she says, “People need to have their own trademark, because I don’t want everyone to become the next Beatles. We live in a cheeseburger culture where everything moves so fast. I try to keep my own pace, do everything in my own time, and I don’t fiend for attention.”

She has her own swing. Leader of the pack, she’s gonna do her own dance.

Mapei was born in Providence, Rhode Island to an Italian American father and an African mother, from Liberia. Her father was political, and still is (“He’s like an Italian-American communist,” she says, only half joking), and she ended up in Stockholm, aged 10, because her parents’ marriage collapsed and her mother had got together with a Swedish man.

Of Providence, she says: “It’s really mixed. It’s an intellectual town, but at the same time it’s really hood. Brown University is there, but I grew up in the projects. You also have a lot of Italians because they were the ones, along with the Brits, that discovered Rhode Island. So there are a lot of pizza places, and a lot of frat boys. You can walk around the city in an hour, and everyone talks like they’re in Family Guy.”

And of moving to Stockholm, she adds: “At first it was like, ‘Wow, this is so fun!’ I was really curious and everyone seemed so nice, as opposed to where I grew up. But then after a while, because I didn’t know the language, I found myself just sitting there and not understanding anything. It was hard, I was at a fragile age - 10 to 12 - and I met the bullies in school.”

Of course, the experience of being transported from Providence to a city where for three years she couldn’t speak the language and was a victim of racism, informs the music she makes today and, in fact, Mapei found herself back in the States - in Bushwink, Brooklyn - as an 18-year-old. She stayed for three years, met Spank Rock and lived for a while with her friend Lykke Li. But New York didn’t turn out to be the artistic paradise others imagine it to be. “It was a good time, but at the same time it wasn’t because there were all these frustrated twenty-somethings who came to Brooklyn wanting to be the next Bob Dylan,” she explains. “There was all this energy, but people didn’t know who they really were. It was like they had read some rock’n’roll biography.”

Twenty-four now and back in Stockholm, she says, “I wanna be the hip hop president of Sweden.”

But hang on, where does the sudden raw ambition come from? In her signature track from the ‘Cocoa Butter Diaries’ EP, ‘Leader Of The Pack’, she sets out her stall with, ‘I got my own swing / Leader of the pack, I’m gonna do own my own dance,’ and that’s how it works with Mapei: she wants to be ready, and she wants to be in control, and if she’s working with producers she wants them to know exactly what she needs. And that means first knowing how to cut the perfect beat herself. “I find it hard to explain what I want, so I need to learn how to do things for myself,” she says. “When I explain things, I’ll explain them very abstractly; I explain what I want in colours.”

The Justice hook-up is bubbling. Mapei is signed to Downtown Records now, as are the French duo in the States. They’ve been working on tracks together and will continue to do so. It’s all very relaxed. DJ Mehdi is French as well, and there’s every chance he might turn up on the LP, too. “I just think they’re developing pop music,” she says of her French connections. “Their music is really poppy but they’re all DJs. I think they have cool ideas and I come from the urban/hip hop side of things. I just want to develop sounds with them and take hip hop to a new plateau.”

When, exactly? Whenever. It’s as she writes on her MySpace page:

My masterplan was to not have a plan at all.

Things take time, as the world turns so fast... stillness stands out from the crowd.

The truth changes from mouth to mouth.

Don’t believe the hype.

We got a picture in the end. No idea who took it, but we got one.

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