Callum McDougall blends family connections, social issues and hip-hop.
Callum McDougall blends family connections, social issues and hip-hop.
Rei's music is rooted in hip-hop, but the rising rapper wants fans to dig a little deeper.
At the age of 13, Callum McDougall used his mum's "rugged" computer set-up to record his first EP.
He burned a few CDs, then gifted them to family and friends for Christmas.
"They were really happy - especially my grandparents," he remembers. "They had a song for them, called Grandma and Grandad's Golden Anniversary. It was cheesy as."
Full of woozy samples, summery electronica and Rei's smooth vocal talents, A Place to Stand was recorded over the past two years in McDougall's Auckland bedroom, where he had a hand in ever facet of the album's creation.
He takes that hands-on approach to extremes for his videos. For Deep's swimming pool shoot, he learned how to sing underwater; for The Chief's Speech, he spent several weeks learning how to rap the song backwards, something that was so overwhelming he can still recite most of it.
Callum McDougall, aka Rei, mixes Maori and English in his new album, A Place to Stand.
But McDougall also uses his music to show off his Maori heritage, often switching between languages on the same song. "I only do it when it feels right," he says. "I don't force it."
It's something he's only recently embraced fully. "Te reo Maori has been a big part of who I am. Mum sang a lot of waiata around me when I was little. I went along to her te reo classes when I was growing up - that gave me quite a strong connection to Maori culture."
He's enjoyed that side of things so much he's already working on a new EP recorded entirely in Maori. "It is fun because it flows so nice. In Maori there's no stop between words, if one word ends in a vowel the next words starts with a vowel, you don't stop."
More important are the messages behind the music. The Chief's Speech, for example, is about sovereignty, a concept McDougall's given a personal touch to.
"It's all about being a chief of your own environment and taking control of your future. I'm not trying to say I'm a chief of anyone else, I'm trying to be a chief of myself. Just backing yourself," he says.
McDougall's determined to mix positive messages and conscious lyrics to confound expectations. On the day TimeOut meets him, he's heading into hip-hop radio station Flava. But he's not playing one of his bangers - he's lugging a guitar to play his acoustic ballad Mix.
It will, he admits, probably always be that way. Besides, there's one particular word he's not allowed to use in his songs - unless he wants to risk a blast from his mum.
"She doesn't like it when I mix Maori words with swear words," he says. "The term motherf***er ... she gets mad whenever I use that term."
