His quest to bring new ideas to Brisbane with his rhymes has taken him across the hip hop universe and back to the roots of his past.

“I grew up listening to some of the first hip hop, Ice Cube and NWA stuff,” says MC Rainman; in those early days he was just Ray Bourne. “The first live show I ever went to was a Ice Cube and Cypress Hill concert at Festival Hall in 1994, when I was in grade 8. Thirteen odd years later, I was going back to an Ice Cube show to do a support, it was a nice feeling.”

Even if the illusion of youth didn’t stack up against the frigid truth, Ray was just glad to have the experience of supporting one of hip hop’s heavy hitters.

“I didn’t even get to meet the dude. There was a hallway full of security between the support act green room and Ice Cube’s. It’s fair enough though; he is a big Hollywood star these days.”

Ray is a stayer. One of the few faces on the Brisbane hip hop scene that have been around since the turn of the millennium, he has an acute understanding of what Brisbane’s hip hop culture has grown into.

“There is a lot of different stuff that happens in Brisbane. There has been a lot of interaction between different scenes; Resin Dogs coming from not a purely hip hop background, to bands like Butterfingers, to now with Winnie Coopers. I think there has always been a mash-up of sounds, maybe because we are a smaller city.”

Looking back on more than ten years of writing and rapping, Rainman muses on how local sounds have built a strong foundation for future MCs.

“When I was growing up listening to hip hop, there wasn’t much local stuff to listen to. We came from ... a cultural cringe about hearing our own accent in vocals to now, (where) there is the extreme opposite of people not listening to any other hip hop other than Australian, which I think means you miss out on a lot of other good hip hop. “

Catch Rainman at Decked Out TV, at the Jubilee Hotel, April 9. He also performs as part of the Battle City event for National Youth Week at King George Square Saturday April 16.