Hip-Hop Goes Canto

There’s going to be a fight. LMF — Hong Kong’s subversive Cantonese hip-hop group — has stopped playing, and a tall, staggering drunk, maybe inspired by the string of expletive lyrics he just heard, is returning the volley, suggesting a few things band members should do to their mothers. Some 500 fans freeze — for a beat. Then the DJ spins a record, a guitarist slashes a chord and soon lips, lobes and eyebrows, pierced by stainless steel, glint again from the mosh pit. Wallet chains jangle, tattooed fists pump the air and well-worn skate shoes tamp the Hong Kong Exhibition Center floor. It’s Friday night and LMF’s 11 band members overflow the stage: three electric guitars, one DJ hovering over two turntables, two standing bongos, one full drum set and four cordless microphones gripped by four dragon-eyed meanies. This is the hardcore, hard-bitten hip-hop engendered by the Wu-Tang Clan, the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine. The set ends and the drunk is at it again. “Why stop playing?” he slurs. “You so lazy!” The crowd splits, giving him a wide berth. Three band members — faces red, neck muscles straining, shirts coming off — rush the barriers. This is their concert, their hall, their fans and they’re not going to let anyone wreck the show.

LMF has a lot to prove. Products of Hong Kong’s labyrinthine government housing estates, the potty-mouthed hip-hop collective is an affront to the scrubbed-clean Canto-pop starmakers who package and micromanage saccharin-sweet crooners as carefully as Madison Avenue launches a new line of soap. Warning labels decree their albums may not be distributed, circulated, sold, rented, given, lent, shown, played or projected to anyone under the age of 18. Even LMF’s schoolyard acronym grates on Hong Kong’s frantic, money-obsessed culture: lazy muthaf**kas.

But these guys don’t need the mainstream Hong Kong music machine. LMF writes its own songs, designs its own album covers and has its own recording studio. They’ve performed in South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Shenzhen and Macau. Lazy Clan, the latest album, wasn’t a breakout seller by Canto-pop standards, but fans bought about 80,000 copies. The best measure of LMF’s success: its wide-ranging influence on Cantonese youth culture. LMF members have spawned their own clothing lines, inspired a line of popular action figures and are the subject of a documentary that is spinning through filmmaker Louis Tan’s editing room right now. They are a one-band, underground entertainment conglomerate, earning vast amounts of street cred instead of big bucks. And whether they like it or not, mainstream acceptance is on its way. Last month, the band performed alongside Countess of Canto-pop Sammi Cheng when she sold out the 20,000-seat Hong Kong Coliseum 11 nights in a row.

So what does an LMF song have that you can’t get in a bubblegum-smacking Kelly Chan tune? “They say what the young want to say,” says Cheung Chi Wai, a 29-year-old photographer who has worked with the band. “It’s not about foul language. The young generation gets the lyrics because they’ve had the same experience.” Twenty-nine-year-old lyricist and rapper Chan Kwong-yan, a.k.a. M.C. Yan, wants to make music that reflects the way people really talk. “We use a lot of Cantonese street slang in our songs. Canto-pop love songs use written Chinese,” says Yan, sliding his hand through the horse’s tail of hair that he sometimes wears in his two long signature braids: “We created Canto-rap.”

LMF’s M.C.s (the guys with the microphones) — Kit, Yan, Phat and Wah — rap about fat girls, absent fathers, uncool triad gangsters, smoking dope and creating an authentic, home-grown pop culture. “So many kids in Hong Kong try to imitate the Japanese,” says Yan, sitting in the LMF band room, meticulously rolling a Rizla cigarette paper around a line of weed. “It’s not about nationalism or anything,” he insists, “but no one should want to be a fake Japanese person.” The group rarely uses English in their songs and resent accusations that they’re just copying American hip-hop fashions. “We are not trying to pretend to be black people,” says Yan, who sports a scraggly goatee and a tattoo of an Alaskan killer whale totem on his shoulder.

The band members are a loose group of a dozen musicians mostly from early-’90s Hong Kong rock bands N.T., Mai Tai, Screw and Anodize. They started jamming 10 years ago, and in 1999 put together a rap album with live guitars and drums. To do so, they turned bass player Jimmy’s apartment — which had earlier doubled as the Anodize band HQ — into a recording studio that has since produced four LMF albums, plus solo albums by band members DJ Tommy, who spins and scratches hip-hop beats onstage, and guitarist and producer Davy Chan. The band’s songs are collaborations, but Davy and DJ Tommy — who both have more than a decade of experience professionally fiddling with sound equipment — are the ones largely responsible for the high quality of LMF’s recordings. Davy — who plays several instruments — composes, arranges and edits the music, while Tommy is the master at splicing in new beats.

Up a flight of stairs just blocks from the Mongkok police station is A.Room — the name of the studio, the label and the band’s hangout — the perfect lazy boy’s lair. Everything in the front room is centered around a 30-in. television where every night some combination of LMF members and friends are playing Winning Eleven 5 or GT Grand Tourismo 3 on the Sony PlayStation. A black-and-white security monitor shows who’s at the door. Band coordinator, art director and guitarist Prodip’s many action figures, which are still in their packages, hang from the walls: Jason from Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. In a section dedicated to Kiss paraphernalia the tag on one Gene Simmons doll reads: “Costume replicas of those worn during the Destroyer era.”

In the sound-padded back room, Davy crouches in front of a drum set. Even sitting down he seems tall, but it may be just his hair, long and gelled straight up as though he’s falling from a plane. A studio musician for pop stars like Kelly Chan and Leslie Cheung, Davy is the only LMFer who earns a living wage with his music. “I do pop music only for the money,” Davy says, looking around the room, his neck tattooed with two dice rolling a hard eight. “But here it’s my music. Here we do what we want.”

After LMF’s first album was released, Warner Music, sister company of TIME, approached producers Davy and Prodip with a deal to distribute A.Room’s output. Was signing with one of the world’s biggest record labels selling out? “Warner pays all the expenses of recording. We keep 15% of the royalties, and A.Room keeps the copyright,” explains Davy. “It’s a great deal.”

When he talks about the future of the label, Davy starts sounding suspiciously like a studio exec himself. This month he’s rerecording and remixing tracks from Singaporean hip-hop group CPJ. (“What they sent us (earlier) was good, but the sound quality just wasn’t there.”) He’s testing music styles for the solo albums of the bad girls of the Hong Kong music scene — Paisley and Josie Ho. And Davy’s got his eye out for the right girls to create Lady Muthaf**ckas. “They’re either talented or they’re hot,” he says of the women he has heard so far. “Hard to find both.”

A.Room might have struck a chord by waving the flag for Cantonese hip-hop but with success it’s suddenly finding a larger mission. DJ Tommy earned raves from Japanese and Korean music ‘zines in August with his A.Room-produced album Respect 4 Da Chopstick Hip Hop — which he recorded with an eclectic mix of Japanese, Korean and Cantonese hip-hop artists. He believes beats can bring Asian youth together. “Because we like hip-hop we have something in common,” says Tommy, who won international fame in the early ’90s with his blurry-handed appearances at the world DJ competition in London. “We don’t need to hate each other.”

With all the hype and an ever-expanding business can LMF and A.Room keep it real? Already the group is doing songs and graffiti in San Miguel beer ads and performing in Levi’s-sponsored concerts. Their possible salvation: laziness. It’s been 14 months since their last album. “We really don’t produce a lot,” says Yan, as he holds his joint in the air and gestures toward the crew huddled around the PlayStation. “These guys are very lazy.”