“The rest of this track is boring, I’m going to stop it now,” Paul Williams mutters apologetically into his microphone, halfway through a song. He fades it out by tapping his MacBook’s volume button a bunch of times. You can hear the clicks through the PA. As far as rap EP launch parties go, this one isn’t exactly turnt up.
Paul is a tee-totalling 21-year-old pakeha from Nelson, whose claim to fame, still, is a parody song about his local Night ‘n Day dairy he made when he was 17. The crowd of about 15 people consists of comedians – friends of his New Zealand-famous brother, Guy – and, for some reason, the guy from Broods. Maybe everyone from Nelson knows each other.
Paul sips on the can of Fanta that he has clearly gone to the effort of smuggling into the venue. He “hypes” us up for each song with a lengthy back story about the lyrics. Instead of backing tracks, he plays his new EP Songs About Girls as is, singing along with himself.
At the launch for Paul Williams' EP Songs About Girls Photo: Tim Batt
The whole thing is a bloody shambles. But it works. As he knocks off each song, with their earnest rapped verses and radio-friendly bombastic hooks, it becomes clear that he’s no joke. Paul Williams has the talent, personality and press release (which quotes praise from David Dallas, Scribe and former Black Cap Jesse Ryder) necessary to become a star.
If only he could sort out his SEO. Google “Paul Williams” and the first five pages of results are all on the ‘Rainbow Connection’ singer. That’s despite the fact that Paul is prolific: Songs About Girls is his third self-released record in as many years. Over that period, he’s gone through a musical puberty of sorts, transitioning from a novelty teen rapper in a ‘Nelson State of Mind’ to an earnest adult rapper-singer who makes jokes sometimes.
Maybe this rebrand of sorts has been the hardest sell to serious fans of hip-hop and pop music. But it’s not like his songs are alienating. On Songs About Girls, he tackles all of the classic hip-hop tropes – going to parties, getting girls, taking on his rivals. The difference is in his approach. He sings about drinking Sprite at parties, getting girls only in fantasies in which he’s “more like Drake”, stalking his rivals on Facebook.
The heyday of rap music, driven by violence, politics and social unrest, passed Paul by. “In my books, Kanye is old school,” he admits – and even Yeezy had two or three albums out before Paul ‘discovered’ him.
He remembers getting really into Lupe Fiasco’s ‘Kick Push’ from one of the NBA Live video game soundtracks. “That was the first one that made a big impact on me. The first rap name I came up with was Fufe Columbus, because ‘Fufe’ just rhymed with ‘Lupe’. I was 15.”
Paul’s awkward talking about his influences. He refers to the song ‘Niggas in Paris’ as ‘Boop in Paris’ – not just saying “boop”, but fully imitating a censor’s beep. It might be a joke. I can never tell with Paul, and I’ve known him for three years.
Paul Williams Photo: Tim Batt
I ask him if he’s ever aspired to any part of the hip-hop lifestyle. “Some things definitely appealed,” he agrees. “Like chillin’ on a mean beach.”
I ask to hear some of Paul’s earlier work, and he emails me attached as mp3s. “They’re really bad,” he says. “I wrote them when I was 16, the same age Lorde was when she wrote ‘Royals’.”
He took them off YouTube out of embarrassment, and I wish he hadn’t. They’re bloody great – the unrefined product of a teenager with heaps of potential, zero experience and a Miley Cyrus sample (‘Just Being Pauly’), basically giving being a ‘rap star’ a go.
‘Smokin’ and Drinkin’’ samples Burt Bacharach’s ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’ with a chipmunk effect applied to such an extreme it sounds like it might just break GarageBand. He raps the hook, “I’m smokin’ and drinkin’ and tokin’ and dopin’” with all the swagger of someone who has never done any of those things before.
In ‘Maui’, he name checks his peers, like Rick Ross “balling like LeBron” – except in Paul’s case, he’s giving a shout-out to his school friend, who worked as a barista: “Listen haters, please don’t ease off me / I’m hot like a pot of Ramsey’s coffee”.
READ Williams’ friend and collaborator Ollie Neas’ thoughts on Williams’ career this far.
But faking a rap persona carries a stigma, in part because of the value of authenticity, and being “true and real”, in hip-hop culture; just look at the flak Rozay got for his stint as a probation officer. The gulf between the life Paul rapped about, however jokingly, and the life he lived as a teenager in Nelson became too wide to bridge.
Four years ago, he performed in Trafalgar Square after the city council’s annual masked parade. “One song had a line that was meant to say ‘You ain’t no Biggie Smalls / You’re just a bigot’, but it just sounds like I was calling Biggie Smalls a bigot,” he remembers. “There were these two dudes just pulling the fingers because of that line. They thought I dissed Bigg Smalls. I guess it was badly worded.”
After moving to Wellington to study musical theatre, Paul began consciously trying to make less jokey music, dropping a lot of his mock-swagger in the process. “Sometimes I’d watch a video of me rapping like that, and it seemed just a bit too ridiculous,” he says. “I guess it’s because I’m very white, and I’m very from Nelson.”
I’m bout to be bawling, and not like the balling a rapper normally means / I’m talkin’ salty streams / drippin’ down onto my jeans
He started “attempting songs that weren’t that funny”, singing about his real life, rather than rapping about his poorly-informed hip-hop fantasies. His music became very earnest – sometimes embarrassingly so.
Paul wrote the hook for ‘Alone’, a track on his second EP Largo Jones, within an hour of breaking up with his girlfriend, whom he was living with at the time. “I stupidly thought, ‘She won’t listen to this’. Seconds later, I heard the opening bars from the kitchen, where all of my flatmates were, including her. I just went to the movies. I had to get out of there.”
‘Sam Bowie’, on Songs About Girls, sees Paul looking up the same ex’s new guy on Facebook. (He’s not called Sam Bowie. That’s an ‘80s basketball reference). “He likes Cody’s on Facebook / I hope you’re well aware of this, girl / and he likes a page that’s called Fap Nation / I wish you all the luck in the world.”
Paul Williams, Songs About Girls Photo: Facebook
I ask him if he’s ever had second thoughts about being this open about this personal life, especially given the fact that the introduction of Facebook graph search makes it very easy to find people in Wellington who like both Cody’s and Fap Nation on Facebook.
But apparently it wasn’t hard to tell who the song was about, even before Facebook graph search.
“When I first released the EP I got a lot of texts from people saying, ‘Oh, I know who that person is’,” he says. “I’d forgotten it was a real full-on song and distanced myself from it. I just thought it was a banger.”
A banger that ended up in him receiving a text from the ex’s older sister reading simply, “Seriously?”.
He told his ex that he was sorry, but he just liked the song too much. So did she, it turned out. “She said ‘Why didn’t you tell me he liked those things on Facebook?” he says. “She gave me $12 for the album.”
A couple of weeks after Paul’s EP launch, he, Guy and I go to a hip-hop club on K Road to see US R&B singer Jeremih. The club, which has only been open a week, has VIP booths, an oxygen bar, and two stripper poles.
We run into an acquaintance, a fellow up-and-coming R&B performer/TV presenter. Guy asks him if he’s performing tonight. “Nah, I got asked to, but I just wanna get fucked up.” If he’s lying, it’s not that impressive a lie.
At one stage, the barman recognises Guy from TV and offers us all free drinks. We turn them down. We hear that Jeremih won’t be on ‘til after 1am – three hours from now. So we do what any group of dudes in their 20s in a hip-hop club with three hours to kill would do: we go back to Paul’s house to play Mario Kart.
“We’re in the club. We leave the club to play Mario Kart. Then we’re going back to the club,” Paul observes, bringing out Pringles and cookies from his pantry. “This is going to make a great Snapchat story.”
Eventually, we head back to the club. Jeremih’s DJ is playing the songs charting on Mai FM that week, and Paul sings along, saying “boop” instead of the swear words. He seems so removed from the world he has awkwardly auto-tuned his way into. But not for a second does it feel like he doesn’t belong there.
Cover image from Paul Williams’ Bandcamp.
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.
