Kampala — JUST when you thought only Luganda-pop and dancehall songs could get a buzz in Uganda, here comes the future. And it came from the place you would never have thought to look. What? A hip hopper? Rocking Nakivubo Stadium after Bobi Wine?

GNL grins when he remembers his set at the recent Embuutu y'Embuutikiziconcert sponsored by Bukedde FM.

"It was one of the best shows I've done," he says. "We mixed with real fans, guys from DT (downtown) Owino, bodaboda dudes..."

Village shows are some of the best, GNL says, the shows where fans can't pronounce his stage name, and call him everything from "Gyenelo" to even "General", but still recite the lyrics word-perfect along with him.

The ex-Arapapa model, who studied Environmental Studies at Makerere, now scrolls through a Nokia 9330 organiser phone to keep track of his piling engagements. Chill modeling and chill Environmental Studies. ("I finished with a nice degree," he says. "I even had a job lined up in Mubende, but I wasn't about to go to a place where mosquitoes have teeth.") Ernest Zamba took a different route and is now a professional rapper, taking in three or more shows every weekend, and earning a good living off it.

When It's Kawa last spoke to him in July last year, the rapper lamented the degree of prejudice leveled against hip hop music. He was optimistic, however, about how walls were beginning to crumble, and more people were beginning to accept this music. And now black sheep of Ugandan music, hip hop, is taking him all over the country, enabling him to not only cross district borders, but leap the boundaries between genres and classes. In that organiser/phone of his lie engagements to perform at high schools, corporate events, upcountry shows, even family functions.

"I enjoy school shows more," GNL says. "People relate to our music better. They sing along with the lyrics. At the corporate shows, we have to show that we are reasonable and that we can also wear suits. I just did a wedding on Ggabba Road. We sang Mwana w'abaaba."

GNL and his crew jam in Ishaka, Fort Portal and Gulu, too. "There is a club in Kasese which doesn't have windows. Man, we sweated! I left with a vest which was torn after playing Koi Koi," he recalls.

It's not a watered down, simplified version of hip hop that GNL serves up - it is the artform in its purest sense: A man talks about his life, his thoughts and himself in clever rhymes. That was what hip hop has always been about, way before the bling and the ganster posturing: being you. If you are a Kampala kid with a swagger to your step and thing for the party life, you say it, and your song, hooked on a refrain from an old Ginger Ale commercial will grab our ears.

"To me it's an achievement for the whole hip hop genre. We are no longer an island. Before we never used to associate with anyone else. It was us and them. Now we can even rock the same shows and even get louder applause."

The trick was to find roots. To find a rhymes which connect with the society outside that island. Connecting with the tap root was the first step to success. "I rhymed in English for so long," GNL says, "but I was getting booed. The first time I did a stage show rhyming in English guys were just looking at me like this. Then, in 2005 Lyrical G called me on stage and I did a Luganda verse. They loved it. From then I never went back to English again."

That was just the beginning. There isn't that great a shortage of struggling "lugaflow" artistes out there, which is evidence that merely rapping in Luganda is not enough. You need to be good at it, too. You need an arsenal of killer punchlines that people who have never looked at a rapper without sneering will be quoting to their friends for weeks. Add to that a flow that rides the bassline like a well-toned percussion instrument in its own right. Top it with an intelligent, confident persona that marks every line as uniquely yours and you have GNL.

The ability to rock the hell out of a stage is a massive bonus, too. When GNL was featured at Club Silk's monthly Unplugged show the fans were packed before him like fingers in a fist. It was hot, airless and insane and they were hanging on his every word, rhyming along to his raps, responding "Dya!" to his every call of "Koi Koi."

But the main thing that made him cross over to such a broad audience, from Kasese to Silk, was the quality of his writing. He boasts a wicked wit and an incredible facility for metaphors that send you straight to your phone, itching to SMS that crazy linee to your buddies. There is a string on his Facebook Fan's page where fans discuss their favourite GNL couplets and no shortage of Ugandans on that social networking site who post GNL lines as status messages, lines ripped mercilessly from the dozen or so GNL hits out already, whether it is the party songs like Soda, or the serious songs-with-a-message like Musajja and Lukka.

He's a hard worker- there is one CD in circulation: Klassified, which he insists is a "demo", not an album, and two actual albums of material on the way.

It was all hustling and muscling down that got him this far. "Radio had completely failed to play Soda Ginjale at first, but I said I'm not going to be one of those rappers who makes a song and only your buddies listen to it," GNL says. "I went to Ivory Plaza, places rappers would never even know about, places in Kasubi, basically everywhere we would go I had a CD on me. I carried a flash disk around. I would plug it into anyone's computer. It was all about giving it out. On every CD I would put a phone number: 'You want more, call this number.' Next thing some dude is calling you from Mbale, saying, 'I just heard your song!'"

And that is what the rise of GNL means to Ugandan music: He hustled his way through, without the support of radio, with just the talent and the faith in his music, and scored a hit before the deejays knew what they had missed. A lot of us heard of Soda before we eventually heard it, and then before we heard it on radio the MP3 had spread through Facebook, email and our phone Bluetooth connections and flash disks. GNL means that daring, courage and innovation can work. That's the future. He likes to ask in his songs: "Ani aluleeta?" or, "Who is going to bring it?" The answer comes next. "Your boy GNL."