Home Grown: Wale

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AN ARRAY OF rap legends will grace Merriweather Post Pavilion during the Rock the Bells festival on Sunday: A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, De La Soul, three-eighths of the original Wu-Tang Clan.

But Rock the Bells also provides a taste of the future, in the form of talented but less well-known MCs.

The most intriguing among them may be Wale Folarin, a 23-year-old D.C. native who spits wildly inventive rhymes, often over beats juiced with go-go percussion. He had already garnered plenty of local and Internet attention before May, when he dropped his acclaimed "The Mixtape About Nothing" (whose Seinfeldian accoutrements include a drop from Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

To join the pantheon, though, Wale must do more, and he knows it:

"I want to present the best album ever, nahmean? You got to shoot for that."

Though Wale (pronounced "Wah-lay"; don't say "Wall-ee") is grateful to be included in Rock the Bells — "I feel like that's the utmost respect that you can give to somebody my age and so young in my career. This is pretty much my summer school" — touring sometimes complicates his album work.

"It gets kind of difficult to write, because I'm thinking about a lot of things. Sometimes it just comes quickly, but I never want to get into forcing it, you know what I'm saying? Or else it's just monotonous music, disposable music."

The verbal pyrotechnics on "The Mixtape About Nothing" ("Zoom like Boosie / Higher than Bootsy / Get 'em inspired with the spiral looseleaf ... Autobiog that is bought up by y'all / They pressed for the ice, they Oksana Baiul") help to dispel such worries. But on the tape, Wale also ruminates on hip-hop's use of the n-word, romantic dilemmas and maintaining his integrity amid the hype.

Expect more such content on the album: A song he's recording with Chrisette Michelle, "Shades," discusses "the racism within our own race." (He promises that "Chrisette's killing this hook right now," too.)

Growing up, Wale moved from D.C. to the soft middle of Montgomery County; he currently calls Largo home.

"I feel like if I would have stayed in the geographical D.C. — I say the geographical D.C. 'cause the metaphorical D.C. is D.C., Maryland, Virginia — I might not have known a lot," he says. "That's what makes me the person that I am, that I understand the suburban side of it and the urban part of it, the city's part of it."

His love for the DMV goes beyond his curly-W Nats cap or Northeast Groovers samples. When the album drops in early 2009, he says, "I want D.C., Maryland and Virginia to be proud. At this point, I'm not gonna rest until people like UCB see significant success, people like Marky, Circle Boys, Southeast Slim. Until other people in this village that we call D.C. start succeeding, too, then I don't consider myself much of a person, much of a flag-holder or ambassador."

» Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia; Sun., 11 a.m. (doors), noon (show), $40-$83; 800-551-7328.

Written by Express contributor Andrew Lindemann Malone

» Download "The Mixtape About Nothing" for free

Photos by David S. Holloway