Jail is such a part of hip hop culture it is not uncommon for magazines to devote whole articles to rappers doing time. Feuds, violence and bucking the law go with the image of loose-jointed young men who rhyme and shuffle from the ghetto side of town. It’s a culture local hip hop artist Kwok Kin grew up in but is not altogether part of – he doesn’t quite see himself rapping from behind bars.

Kwok was raised in an ‘auk chuen’,
one of Hong Kong’s public housing estates where, among the young, street culture was the law. “I was once pushed out a window until half of my body was just hanging … four stories up, ” laughs the 28-year-old rapper, remembering his terror at the time. He doesn’t recall what led to the incident – a gang fight, a dispute about who would play on the local basketball court or simply “just one look”. “It would have been some trivial matter,” he says. Which may sound rough, but he wasn’t miserable – perhaps because he didn’t know any better. “People often think kids living in public estates are poor, but I was quite happy back then actually. Now I want to write about the feelings of people like me… the grass roots, lower-class people.”

Those are the street people and young gangsters he spent his youth with. Though Kwok was an anomaly – part bad boy (he threw cats and dogs onto the street and shoplifted for fun), he could never totally lose himself in the nastiness of the culture. Nor did he want to, and came to hip hop almost by accident. In his high school days, when lessons were over and with nothing better to do, he would hang around record stores. “It was corny actually. I saw the cover of an MC Hammer album… and thought it was very cool.” Considering how most young people are initially captured by an artist -they are later embarrassed by, that may not have been all that mawkish. But for Kwok Kin, listening to hip hop in Hong Kong 10 years ago was not embarrassing – it was alienating. “I tried to share it with my friends, but they just ignored me. So I listened to the music alone.”

And alone, from an MC Hammer cover, the young rapper graduated to Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die and Me Against the World by 2Pac, though it wasn’t until 2002 that he started to make and spread his own music over the internet. By that time, he was no longer on his hip hop own, and has since worked extensively with Ghost Style and young beat-maker Dennis Zee, and had two tracks, Underground and Love Joint for You, accepted for the recent Boo Boo Boo compilation album. While Underground is a typical outraged complaint about how Hong Kong’s subculture is derided or ignored, Love Joint is a bittersweet love song based on previous experiences.

Now he is putting the finishing touches to a debut album he is calling Did It My Way. Although most tracks have been recorded, he is still uncertain about a release date – it may be May or June depending on a friend with limited time helping out on the design and whether the album will be self-financed or distributed by an indie label. Some of the songs cover usual topics like underground hip hop and the Hong Kong pop scene but others are more out of the ordinary – like basketball, the rapper’s favourite sport. “That song is about how to be cool, like how to cross pass people, box out and shoot.” For Kwok Kin, nothing is beyond a rapper’s reach. “Hip hop is not necessarily angry or unhappy. Some people say writing fun lyrics isn’t hip hop,” he says. “I think that is not true.”

What then is hip hop really all about? So many young people take on the image, the oversized jeans and t-shirt, the head scarf. Yet recently there were many empty seats at the Kanye West and Lloyd Banks gigs. Does that mean hip hop in Hong Kong is all style and no substance? “Some of the kids follow the trend blindly,” says the musician, observing they start by adopting the fashion, go on to listen to the music and then learn what the lyrics are about, step by step. Nor do the concerts indicate how popular – or widely understood – hip hop might be. “The shows are very expensive actually. I only bought the cheapest ticket to Kanye West’s show a few days before the show,” he says. So how was the concert’s opening act, our wealthy and good-looking Edison Chen who raps in Cantonese with English phonetics? He shrugs his shoulders, “What more can we say about him?”