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Who the hell needs TV? Who needs movies?
There are characters everywhere, more interesting than any that can be contrived.
A few months ago, through a friend, I met El Bento Maximo.
Bento, aka Alister Kewell, is a white rapper based out of the North Shore of Sydney, Australia. He is a college dropout, a former drug dealer and addict who performs rap during his free time. As he’s proclaimed in his songs, he’s the greatest white rapper in the world.
I was invited to read some of his rhymes posted on the Internet and watch some grainy footage of him from a cell phone video.
He was part Wesley Willis, part Vanilla Ice and completely amazing.
Here was the opening lines of “Poke Me in the Hiney”:
I’m a rampant fornicator/
ain’t a desperate masturbator/
you pray that I call you later/
’cause you love me but I hate ya.
And here’s a bit from “It’s El Bento,” a remix of “Ice-Ice Baby”:
When I get there some blow flows up my nose/
cause the party’s still goin’ man, you know how it goes/
Girls everywhere wearing no underwear/
Like the hottie over there, giving me that sexy stare/
she’s walking over to me, looking quite corny/
I say “I’m El Bento,” she says, “I’m horny.”
It was then that I broke into laughter and my man crush on Bento began.
I contacted him through Facebook: “I absolutely need to be your manager, El Bento. You are the greatest Aussie rapper of all time, but I will make you bigger than Kanye and 50 Cent put together.”
Soon we were coordinating a summer tour featuring Bento in Columbus bars.
Here’s what I’ve gathered about his back story, according to Bento, though I’m not sure what to believe. He spent a short time in college, during which he “had a line of people out the door” of his dorm room willing to buy drugs. This included his residence advisor, who “was a major druggie.”
He tried every drug available to him and lived the fast-paced party lifestyle. He surely has the stories to tell from it.
“I had spent that entire night spewing (puking) in the bin (dumpster) outside … and my mate said I was making high-pitched noises all night…
“I had ordered too many shipments of pills by mistake, so I had to stay awake all weekend to deal ’em just so I’d break even.”
Eventually he made his way to rehab. He’s relapsed a few times, but has been clean for awhile now, holding a job and a steady girlfriend.
“Rehab was good for me … it helped me learn a lot about myself.”
Last weekend I was connected on the phone with El Bento, and everyone in the room persuaded him to perform a remix of Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love?” entitled “Where is the Bong?”
People pilling, people popping/
people sniffing, people snorting/
people injecting, people shafting/
but there is no one smoking/
Father, father, father, help us/
cause we got no bud to smoke on,
and no dealers are on so it’s got me questioning/
Where is the bong?
After the more-than-eight-minute rap, I wiped away the tears and composed myself long enough to invite him to sign on to my upstart label, Awkward Turtle Records. He accepted.
Some kid in the back of the room, still howling with laughter, asked me who was rapping on the speakerphone.
“That, my friend, is El Bento f**king Maximo.”
Graham Beckwith is The Lantern’s Arts & Life editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
