10 Rappers From Hawaii To Listen In 2023

MadeinTYO is the stage name of American rapper Malcolm Jamaal Davis. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on April 12, 1992.

The rapper gained global fame off the back of his 2016 single Uber Everywhere, and especially its official remix featuring famed rapper Travis Scott. Since then, the rapper has released three albums Sincerely, Tokyo in 2018, Never Forgotten in 2020, and Yokohama with UnoTheActivist in 2021.

MadeinTYO was born to a military family which is the reason why he was born in Hawaii. However, he didn’t spend much time on the islands as he spent much of his youth moving around various places like California, Texas, Virginia, and New York.

He would spend much of his teenage years in Tokyo, Japan, which would affect him greatly and give birth to his name, MadeinTYO is meant to be pronounced as Made in Tokyo. His musical career started when he moved back to the United States from Tokyo to live with his older brother, Robert Dozier Davis III, who goes by the moniker 24hrs.

The rapper started living in Atlanta, which was going through a cultural shift in the mid-2010s and fast becoming one of, if not the hub of hip-hop and rap, and would remain so for the rest of the decade. Capitalizing on that momentum, MadeinTYO released his debut single, Uber Everywhere on February 26, 2016.

It achieved success in both the main charts and urban radio as it peaked at number 51 on the Hot 100, and number 10 on the latter. The song’s remix has since been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Khia is the mononym of the American rapper and singer, Khia Shamone Finch. She was born on November 8, 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The rapper is the opposite of MadeinTYO in the sense that she came to live in Hawaii in her late teens while the aforementioned rapper left the islands then. Khia was raised in the Germantown neighborhood in Philadelphia but moved to Tampa, Florida at age 11.

She came to live in Hawaii after a series of bad events which started when she got expelled from her high school in ninth grade, got pregnant and had her daughter in 1991, and then moved to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1992 when she was only 16 years old.

Khia would go on to have another child, a son while living in Hawaii. The rapper would move back to Tampa, Florida, and start working at Club XS as a bartender before starting her career in music.

The rapper would release her first album, Thug Misses, on April 23, 2002, which would eventually go on to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. Since then, she has released seven albums in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019 respectively.

However, Khia is perhaps remembered most for her iconic debut single, My Neck, My Back (Lick It) from her debut album. The song, although it only peaked at number 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 has become immortalized due to its sexually explicit lyrics.

The lyrics, which contain explicit and detailed descriptions of cunnilingus and anilingus shocked and amazed audiences and turned Khia into something of a sex symbol. The song’s fame has long since eclipsed her own.

Thomas Iannucci is an American rapper who used to go by the rap moniker, Illtalian. He was born on June 11, 1992, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Iannucci is best known for being a two-time recipient of the prestigious Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards which are the equivalent of the Grammy awards in Hawaii. The awards he won were the Best Hip Hop Album award in 2018, while he was using the moniker, Illtalian, and the same award again in 2020.

In fact, the rapper is very critically acclaimed in his native state and has been bestowed with various awards and commendations. He was a finalist for the John Lennon Songwriting contest in 2016 and was a member and popular vote winner of the Rapzilla Freshman Class of 2020. 

One of the main reasons why the rapper has amassed such a celebrated audience is due to his subject matter. He is famous for being an outspoken advocate for many of Hawaii’s social issues, which not many rappers or public figures are doing.

Due to his outspokenness and support for Hawaii’s social causes, he has been known as one of the rappers most prominently bringing light to Hip-Hop in Hawaii. He was called as such by the state’s news station, KHON2 News.

Though the rapper’s professional career started in 2014, he has been rapping since high school, which is also where he adopted the moniker, Illtalian. He released two records under that name with Notti Insonni in 2014, and Makana in 2017.

However, he chose to drop the moniker and start making music in his birth name in 2018. He has since released three records, Kuleana in 2019, Doubting Thomas in 2020, and The Illyinde Tape in 2021.

Shing02 is the stage name of the Japanese hip-hop artist, Shingo Annen. He was born on October 18, 1975, in Tokyo, and is currently based in Hawaii.

The rapper gained international fame for his collaborations with the late Japanese producer, Nujabes, and through these collaborations courted both a Western and Japanese audience. The former was helped due in part because of the rapper’s multilingual characteristics as he was able to rap in Japanese and English because he grew up in various Western cities.

He has grown up in Tanzania, Tokyo, and London, and at the age of fourteen, moved to the San Francisco Area of California. While there, he started string art at the University of California, Berkeley, and got involved with the community’s hip-hop scene. 

Due to his close association with descendants of the Black Panthers and Asian American activists, his music started having a lot of political and social messages. In the early 2000s, he started collaborating with Nujabes and pioneered a jazz rap style of music that would go on to inspire the Lo-fi hip-hop and Chillhop trend that became popular in the 2010s.

The rapper has released over 16 albums collaborating with various producers ranging from Nujabes, DJ Top Bill, and Chimp Beans to name a few. However, he is best remembered for his work with Nujabes, especially in the latter’s luv(sic) series, and for providing music to the Adult Swim anime, Samurai Champloo.

Shing has been based in Honolulu, Hawaii for the recent part of his career as he has expanded into clothing design and creative outlets. He is connected to Lane Lane Studios as of the writing of this article.

Nicole Scherzinger is an American singer, rapper, and actress. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 29, 1978.

She is best known as the lead singer and frontwoman of the famed pop group The Pussycat Dolls, which was active from 2003 until 2010, and then briefly from 2019 to 2022. They are one of the best-selling girl groups of all time and catapulted from their fame, Nicole has since embarked on a successful solo career.

Though born in Hawaii, Nicole was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, by her parents Alfonso Valiente and Rosemary Elikolani Frederick. She is of Filipino descent from her father, Alfonso’s side, and of Native Hawaiian and Ukrainian descent from her mother, Rosemary’s side.

Initially wanting to become an actress, Nicole starred in various local plays throughout high school and college. In the final year of her undergraduate studies at Wright State University, she was picked by the rock band Days of the New’s band leader, Travis Meeks, to become a backup singer for the band’s second album.

She dropped out of college to tour with the band and then joined the show Popstars USA, which sought to create a girl group and create their debut album. Through the show, she became part of a girl group called Eden’s Crush. 

Eventually, she would end up joining the Pussycat Dolls, and becoming their lead singer. Despite the group’s implosion in little over five years, Nicole survived as the group’s most successful member and still continues that success to this day.

Leo Kekoa is a Korean-American rapper born on February 22, 1980, in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is currently based in Dallas, Texas.

Kekoa started his career in 2000 by founding the South Korean hip-hop group Ill Skillz alongside fellow rappers Make-1 and Vinnie Del Neegro. Sadly, the group wouldn’t amount to much as Vinnie would leave the group in 2001 due to internal conflicts, and the group disbanded in 2004 without recording or releasing an album.

The rapper would then strike out on his own three years later after releasing his debut album, Ill Skill, on February 13, 2007. Ill Skill contains fourteen tracks in Korean with features from rappers like YDG, ALi, M.C. Mong, Rhymebus, and Jinbo among others.

Despite limited success, the rapper would continue to release music for the next five years with his sophomore album 검은띠 being released on February 12, 2009. He would follow that up with his third album, 보물섬 being released on July 1, 2010.

Sadly, the rapper would end his recording career with his last album, Missing Soul, being released on April 3, 2012. It would also be his shortest album at only ten tracks long.

Since the dissolution of his recording career, the rapper has since rebranded himself as a sushi chef. He owns and operates the sushi restaurant, Kinzo, in Frisco, Texas.

Kinzo is an exclusive restaurant and boasts a rare full five stars on Google with over 42 Google reviews. Aside from Japanese sushi, the restaurant also provides French cuisine. 

Bruno Mars is the professional name of the American singer and rapper, Peter Gene Hernandez. He was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Mars is one of the most popular musical artists of the modern day and in a career that now spans close to 20 years has created classic albums, chart-topping hits, and more than a handful of Grammy awards. In fact, Mars is one of the best-selling musical artists of all time as he has sold over 130 million records worldwide.

He was born to Peter Hernandez, of Puerto Rican and Jewish descent, and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, of Filipino and Spanish descent. Like their son, his parents were performers too and met when his mother was a Hula dancer and his father played the percussions.

Mars has been performing since a young age, and since the age of 3 has been performing on stage with some of his earliest performances seeing him impersonating Elvis Presley. In fact, he was known as Little Elvis when he was younger and performed in the 1990 Aloha Bowl’s halftime show at age five.

 The music artist moved to Los Angeles in 2003, at the age of 18, to pursue a musical career. It would take him seven years to achieve fame, but he did when he featured on two 2010 hits with B.o.B’s Nothin’ On You, and Travie McCoy’s Billionaire.

Since then, Mars has released three solo albums and a collaboration with fellow rapper/singer Anderson .Paak. His career has seen him chart 32 songs on the Hot 100 with 18 of them being Top 10 hits and 8 of the 18 topping the charts at number 1.

Sharaya J is the stage name of the American rapper and choreographer Sharaya Howell. She was born on January 17, 1984, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

She was born to a musical family as Sharaya’s father was one-fifth of the hip-hop group Double XX Posse which was active in the early to mid-1990s. The rapper started her career as a dancer in the early 2000s when she joined the French singer Mylene Farmer’s Avant queue l’ombre… a Bercy tour in 2006.

Her dancing was so proficient that she earned the attention of many of the prominent artists of her day ranging from rappers like Jay-Z and Diddy to R&B and pop singers like Alicia Keys, Ciara, and Rihanna. This led her to make cameo appearances in various music videos like Alicia Keys’ Teenage Love Affair to name a few.

Shraya embarked on her own career in 2010 when she signed onto fellow rapper Missy Elliott’s The Goldmind Inc. label. She would go on to release her first single, Banji, three years later on March 2, 2013.

The album put her on the map as she was featured on VIBE Vixen magazine’s rapper-to-watch list. She would then release two more singles, Takin’ It No More and Shut It Down in 2014, alongside a prominent appearance on Faith Evans’ 2014 album, Incomparable with a feature in the third track, I Deserve It alongside Missy Elliott.

Sadly, she has yet to release her album as her career stalled after a split with The Goldmind Inc. in 2016. The most recent song she has been part of is Little Mix’s Strip.

Huening Kai is a Korean American rapper, singer, and dancer. He was born on August 14, 2002, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Kai is best known as one of the members of the South Korean boy band, Tomorrow X Together, who also goes by the acronym, TXT. The group was formed in 2019 by Big Hit Entertainment or Big Hit Music and contains Yeonjun, Soobin, Beomgyu, and Taehyun alongside Huening Kai.

As they were formed and are managed by the same company that backs BTS, the biggest Korean boy band of all time, many see them as the successors of BTS. TXT has gone on to become the fastest K Pop group to appear on the Billboard World Digital Songs chart with their single, Crown.

Kai is the youngest member of the group as he was only 18 when he started with TXT. As stated above, he was born in Hawaii and his parents consisted of a south Korean mother and a German father who was born in Brazil.

Though born in Honolulu, he only stayed there for a month before his parents moved to China, before briefly stopping in South Korea to meet with some family. The family lived in China for the first seven years of the boy’s life but moved to Korea when he was eight years old.

Huening’s family consists of his parents and two sisters named Lea and Bahiyyih. Both his sisters are also in the music industry- Lea, his older sister, was a member of the girl group Viva until 2022, while his younger sister, Bahiyyih, is a member of the girl group Kep1er.

The Grouch is the stage name of rapper Corey Scoffern. He was born on May 20, 1975, in Oakland, California, and is currently based in Maui, Hawaii.

Grouch is best known as one of the founding members of the underground hip-hop collective Living Legends. The rapper has released three albums with the group but has an extensive discography that is 21 albums deep as a lead artist. 

The rapper was born and raised in Oakland, California, and went to Skyline High School. Due to where he was raised, he became integral in the underground scene on the West Coast during the Late 90s, and alongside Aesop, Bicasso, Eligh, Luckyiam, Scarub, Sunspot Jonz, Arata, and Murs, started the collective now known as Living Legends.

Though the group never gained commercial acclaim in the mainstream, they are seen as one of the biggest successes in the indie rap movement as it sold over 300,000 units based on its own efforts without any label backing or big corporate support.

The group’s three albums consist of 2001’s Almost Famous, 2004’s Creative Difference, and 2005’s Classic. However, Grouch’s own discography far eclipses the Living Legend’s not only in length but productivity because he has been releasing music since 1995, and even released five albums alongside the three he released with Living Legends.

Grouch has also earned some acclaim as both a producer and a featured artist. For the former, he produced the entirety of the hip hop duo, Felt’s debut album, Felt: A Tribute to Christina Ricci in 2002, and for the latter, he has had credits in over 117 projects as of the writing of this article.