A soldier, a rider, a ghetto survivor

Maino hustles hard for ‘Tomorrow’

 

“I knew it was a song that would conquer the radio.” Maino on his hit, “Hi Hater”

 

On tour for his Atlantic debut, “If Tomorrow Comes,” rapper Maino handles the handshaking and small talk that comes with this line of work with relative ease.

If you look at the Brooklyn native’s history, some would say he’s not even supposed to be here.

Watching both his parents struggle with drug addiction and forced to fend for himself, he went down a path of petty crime that led to a 10-year prison bid. During his incarceration he fell in love with hip-hop and used it to sustain himself during the toughest times. Maino says he saw his options after his release in 2003 as either enduring the ups and downs of the music industry or going back to the streets.

“And I knew I didn’t want to go there,” he says. “One thing prison taught me was a degree of patience.”

The patience has paid off: First with the club banger, “Hi Hater,” then with a gold certified follow-up, the T-Pain-assisted “All The Above.”

Maino debuted on a Summer Jam stage last year; Alicia Keys asked him to perform with her.
“I had never been on a stage of that magnitude,” he says of the experience. “It wasn’t so much about the people; it was her. I was intimidated by her star power a little bit.”

The rapper laughs as he remembers being backstage before the performance.

“The mic was getting moist in my hand,” he says. “Messing up my show is one thing, but messing up Alicia Keys’ show is another. I would be the laughing stock of the industry.”

But they pulled it off, and Maino is far from the butt of anyone’s jokes. Gaining a buzz through mixtapes and the song “Rumors,” in which he breaks down some of the more notorious whispers of the hip-hop industry, he finally connected with “Hi Hater.”

“I made ‘Hi Hater’ a year before it came out,” he recounts. “I held it back because I knew it was dynamite. I knew it was a song that would conquer the radio. ... People didn’t see me coming.”

Maino signing
Tomorrow, 6 p.m.
Basement Mix Records
439 Crescent St., Brooklyn
347-663-5124
www.myspace.com/maino