Words by

Bart Cameron

Geno Sydal will be opening up for 50 Cent on August 11th: “I think we’re going to steal the show, honestly,” he says.
We sit in a clean and unusually sparse old house of Laugavegur, built by Geno’s great grandfather. The contents of the room include an iPod, an enormous English language dictionary, three notes pads, two comics from the library, and a hatchet.
Geno: I haven’t heard anybody here do stuff like mine.
Grapevine: Yeah, I’d agree. It’s a bit smoother.
Geno: It’s the delivery. Here they have good flow and good rhymes, but I haven’t heard good delivery.
GV: The new single from Quarashi?
Geno: Yeah, MC Tiny has the best delivery in Iceland. But then the chorus.
GV: It is a shame.
Geno: So much of the hip hop here sounds boring to me, honestly. Usually if I hear something I’m just waiting for it to end. That’s why I went to Norway. (which is where you´d go to escape boring hiphop -ed.)
GV: Is this your first show since you came back?
Geno: The 50 Cent show will be my coming out party. We got a great crew coming. Dancers. I’ll be up there with Hinir from Huxin, that’s the future of Icelandic hip hop.
GV: Then what? What are you going to do after the show?
Geno: Then I leave for LA. I grew up in LA. I came out here in ´94 with my brother.
GV: So you were here when hip hop first got started. In 1999, I’ve been told.
Geno: With Rottweiler? I was here for that. That was big, but there was always a scene, it just got bigger when that came out.
GV: So the Battle of the MCs isn’t just an 8 Mile rip off?
Geno: Actually, that was here before. I mean, after that movie everybody is a rapper, but that battle has been around for a while.
GV: But you’re not competing?
Geno: No reason to. If you respond in English, you’re gonna lose. And every battle I see, the judges are in the same crew as the people battling. And somehow the people from the same crews end up winning.