Thats A Rap

The stylish Jared Leto look-alike is tall (6’4”) and buff, his skin covered in intricate tattoos, a tiny treble clef on one cheek. However, the thing you initially notice is his fixed gaze, those eyes luminously blue. Yet nothing is as it seems with 360. The MC has keratoconus, a degenerative eye disorder which, he’s joked blackly, could render him “the first Ray Charles of rap”. Indeed, Colwell has had his struggles – with health, dependency issues, fame and haters – but today he’s sanguine. “Everything’s going really good at the moment – [I’m] just keeping busy,” Colwell says, comfy in EMI’s Melbourne office. “I’ve just moved into a new house as well. I moved in there with [bestie] Pez and another housemate, so we’re just [doing] music all day, every day kinda thing – Pez raps and the other guy who lives there is a singer-songwriter. So it’s quite a good house to live in. Now they’re on a health kick, so they’re making a lot of real healthy foods and stuff like that.”

He’d rock up in a police escort every single show – virtually just get out of his car onto the stage and then get off the stage into his car and go.

Colwell began the year auspiciously with a slot on Eminem’s Australasian Rapture Tour. Alas, he never met Slim Shady, but did gain an insight into the realities of his world. “He was really reclusive. He’d rock up in a police escort every single show – virtually just get out of his car onto the stage and then get off the stage into his car and go. It’s understandable at his level of fame… He has fans who are actually crazy. I’ve had a bunch of them follow me on Instagram – some were really abusive, some were nice – but, even just looking at their fan pages, these kids worship him to another level. They’re exactly like Stan! They had the same tattoos, everything. They just look identical to him. It’s crazy.” Post-Splendour In The Grass, Colwell is embarking on his own Rapture-mode tour.

Colwell was reared in the mundane outer Melbourne suburb of Ringwood, where hip hop signified streetwise excitement. “When I was growing up, I looked up to the tough gangsta dudes and shit, so I was trying to emulate that. But that’s not who I was. I was never a street kid. I’ve been raised really well by two great parents and, me trying to fight and be a negative person and all that, it just wasn’t who I was… I was living a more fake wannabe kinda thing when I was younger.” Colwell had been focused on basketball – but, his eyesight deteriorating, he was diagnosed with keratoconus, necessitating a cornea transplant in one eye. Unable to play sport, music empowered him. Colwell emerged as a formidable battle rapper. From the get-go, he harnessed social media, spearheading the ‘rapper tag’ phenom. Colwell debuted with 2008’s traditionalist hip hop What You See Is What You Get on Soulmate Records. Keen to then experiment, the MC, now on EMI, teamed with producer Styalz Fuego, aka Kaelyn Behr, who’d transplanted to Melbourne from Byron Bay. Behr, who once had a track picked up by US rapper Chamillionaire, masterminded X & Hell’s proto-urban-EDM Million Dollar Sex Party. Falling & Flying broke out of the Aussie hip hop mould, deviating into electro, dubstep and alt-rock – but, lyrically, it remained raw and candid. The album was significantly delayed when Colwell, celebrating his birthday with Bliss N Eso, suffered a shocking go-karting accident. Nonetheless, it was a crossover triumph, spawning several hits – notably, Boys Like You (featuring the pop-folkie Gossling) reached #3, was certified quadruple-platinum, and placed eighth in triple j’s Hottest 100. Colwell received ten ARIA nominations, winning ‘Breakthrough Artist’. (Behr took ‘Producer of the Year’.)

Offstage, however, all was not well. Colwell found celebrity stressful – and this, on top of his health worries, meant his life became increasingly tumultuous. His beloved fans were intense. “It was really hard for me to adapt at first to going down the street and just being mobbed by people for photos,” he admits. “My mind was so fragile because I was always partying and always going on benders and stuff... So I’d get massive anxiety and panic attacks and shit like that – and then after a while [I came to] realise there’s other ways to deal with it, other than alcohol and drugs.” He apparently “detoxed” at his manager Rae Harvey’s house.

“My mind was so fragile because I was always partying and always going on benders and stuff"

Colwell indicated that Utopia would be “dark” but, in fact, it has light and shade. In some respects the MC, back with Behr, has rediscovered hip hop, albeit an epic embodiment of it, but Utopia still mines rock and electronica (Price Of Fame with Gossling is drum’n’bass). Colwell, determined to privilege his rhymes, studied the game (he rates Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky). “One thing that was such a massive goal for me for this album was to really prove myself as a rapper again, because I’d come from a background of rap and I understand the artform and all that. One of the things that got to me about the criticism from the last album was people saying I’m not a rapper, I’m just a pop singer. That resonated and drove me to really up my game as a rapper and prove myself – like, yeah, I can make songs that do get on the radio and I can get a lot of mainstream success, but, at the forefront of it all, I’m still a rapper. I just wanna be regarded as one of the best.” Colwell isn’t Example… MCs write in different ways. Jay Z constructs verses mentally – as did The Notorious BIG. “I’ve done it where I haven’t written anything, like Jay Z and that – I’ve done it all in my head before,” Colwell explains. “It’s actually quite fun to do it like that. I wrote Live It Up all in my head like that. But, most of the time, I’ll write all the stuff on my phone. I’ll get an instrumental and I’ll just start freestyling over it – like rant, gibberish, not even speaking words – so I can get a flow and understand how I wanna sound over it. Then the content just starts coming.”

This latently conscious MC challenges hip hop’s pernicious homophobia on Man On The Moon. Colwell questioned his own use of ‘faggot’ as a diss in battles following an off-the-record discussion with News Ltd journalist Cameron Adams. “I’d never thought about it and I just was blasé to it all, a bit ignorant – like the rest of the world,” Colwell confesses. “I didn’t realise the weight that that word holds and how offensive it was – and also how powerful my words are to kids and how my influence on them is quite big. From then, I wanted to start being positive... At the end of the day, I wanna be someone who’s a positive role model, not a bad role model.”

On Utopia, Colwell is joined by a new – and unexpected – cohort in former Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns. The MC, who knows Johns’ brother Heath through his publishing company, broached the idea of a collaboration. Heath warned Colwell that Johns, his stance on rap culture a bit Jack White, would probably decline. But the Straight Lines singer surprised them. “It was something about my songwriting that he really, really enjoys.” Their introductory collab was (ironically) Utopia’s lead single, Impossible – industrialised dubstep. Colwell valued Johns as a confidante, too, the rocker himself familiar with the pressures of fame.

Perhaps the true indicator of Colwell’s stature in Australia is his unprecedented ‘beef’ with Sydney rebel Kerser, instigated at a 2011 mega-battle. Colwell now plays down feud talk. “It’s just been an entertainment and a battle thing… There’s been no actual bad blood between either of us, ever. When we’ve seen each other, there’s never been any problems or anything like that. There’s a level of respect between us – even though we’re going at each other on songs or stuff, it’s just healthy competition.” Colwell bumped into Kerser at Big Day Out, uploading a photo of them together on Instagram that continues to get “crazy ‘likes’”.

Colwell is ambitious – and, while genuinely altruistic, doesn’t conceal his entrepreneurial streak. Cracking the US market is “a massive aim”, but he’ll first give Europe a shot. Iggy Azalea has demonstrated that an Australian MC can conquer America – not that Colwell considers her to be representative, as she’s “making American hip hop”. That’s no diss, either. “Personally, I’ve got no problem with it. I feel a sense of pride – even though it’s not the kinda music that I’d make, I think people should be proud of her, really, because she’s an Australian and she’s had crazy success. I think it opens the doors, in a sense that it’s not totally foreign to have an Australian rapper now. If people hear of an Australian rapper, they’ll think of Iggy Azalea – but now at least they’ve got it cemented in their head that there are rappers from Australia. So I don’t know if it’s gonna open many doors for Aussie hip hop people, but just that small thing I think will help… When someone has the right music that’s gonna connect overseas, it will help