After being almost brought up on the street, a rapper who found his turning point in Cyprus is a force for good, treating working the summer in Napa as a bonus

We’re at the Bedrock Café in Ayia Napa, surrounded by Flintstones merch and plastic dinosaurs – but Aeropryme isn’t happy with his coffee. “I wanted an iced coffee with no milk, no sugar. I wanted it black.” The drink does indeed look quite creamy, but the waiter assures him it’s just coffee and water – and a single, rather tentative sip confirms that he’s right. Phew!

You’d expect a rapper, even in the more mellow genre of ‘alternative hip-hop’, to be something of a diva – but in fact there’s good reason why Aeropryme has to watch himself. He’s on a strict diet, the so-called Omad or One Meal a Day diet. He’ll usually eat at around 4am, after a night of emceeing and “hyping up the crowd” at ZicZac Bar up the road – today’s meal was zero per cent Greek yogurt with chia seeds, then a stacked salad with egg, tuna, tomatoes, onions, kidney beans and chickpeas; he also had a couple of cookies, because “I can cheat a little bit” – then consumes only water, tea and coffee for the rest of the 24 hours, as well as exercising and doing close to 300 push-ups a day. He’s lost around 30 kilos in a couple of months.

“The way I’m feeling right now, I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I feel great,” he enthuses. This current version of himself is perhaps the best ever: “It’s probably the most prime de Pryme!”.

Aeropryme is enthusiastic in general, a good talker and a people person. He released a new song (‘Time’) a couple of weeks ago – yet his job at ZicZac isn’t primarily to perform his music, it’s to work the crowd. “My job is to make them feel special… I’m good at making people feel good.”

He can talk to anyone; all ages, all walks of life. It’s his third year doing a summer residency in Napa (he’s usually based in Malmo, Sweden), and it’s true that he does it mostly to network and make new fans – yet he’ll also chat for the sake of it, without having to plug his work. “I’m a very down-to-earth guy,” he explains. “I have a music video with a million-plus views – but I can just go meet somebody and strike up a conversation, and the conversation might not even be about music at all.”

That video with a million-plus views (1,027,046 at time of writing) is for a song called ‘Get Tha Bag’ – “I invested a lot into promotion,” he says, when asked how it went so viral – but it’s a bit of an outlier on his YouTube page. In fact, we should make it clear right now that Aeropryme isn’t a professional musician – at least not yet.

He does make music, and also runs his own independent label (Enterprise, named after the starship in Star Trek; he’s a major geek). He’s been approached by five record labels, he says, and rejected all of them. Currently, though, he makes his living as a bartender at a four-star hotel in downtown Malmo. Before that, he worked for a while in cybersecurity. Before that, he studied Hospitality, Tourism and Event Management at European University in Nicosia (more on this later). It’s only recently, however, that he found his focus and turned his attention fully to music.

When was the turning point?     

“I would say it was in 2019 – when I got my heart broken for the last time!”

Our own conversation, like the ones he strikes up with strangers, isn’t really about music. It’s there, of course – but mostly as background, “my escape” as he puts it, a lodestar shining down on the rest of it. We talk about relationships, an area where he’s had mixed fortunes. We talk about hip-hop, and the lure of the streets for a young African-American. We talk about his parents’ divorce when he was nine, sparking feelings of abandonment that he struggles with to this day.

He was born Taiye Taiwofakunle (friends call him ‘Tai’ or ‘Aero’), to Nigerian parents in the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas. He and his twin are the second-last of six siblings, all of them close (his older brother’s death during Covid “really took me out,” he recalls, “to the point that I didn’t get out of bed for three months”). His dad was a medical professor, now retired. It sounds like a stable, middle-class childhood – at least till the split, leading to a rocky decade-plus that nearly ruined him.

Unusually, it was his mother who left the family, relocating to the UK. She and Tai were estranged for years, though she later ended up being responsible for perhaps the single most significant decision of his life. His dad had to raise five kids as a single parent – though in fact he also left soon after, taking a job in Saudi Arabia and leaving the kids with a guardian.

The guardian (one of their relatives) did his best, but he was “younger,” says Aeropryme, “and still in the party phase. I mean, I’m like 11-12 years old and he’s bringing girlfriends over, and I’m seeing women in their lingerie walking in and out of his room”. That’s when he started to “rebel, a little bit… I had kind of a pyromaniac phase, also”. He didn’t do any serious damage, he just liked to watch things burn – as if thinking of the sudden devastation in his own life.

“My teens were a little rocky, in the sense where – uh, self-awareness was a struggle. Self-esteem, very, very low. I used to have panic attacks. And very rebellious, very – unaware. Disturbed, in a sense…

“I had abandonment issues, when I’m looking back on it. Self-destructive, taking a lot of unnecessary risks. I would say, for a good part of my youth, I’ll say the streets raised me.”

It wasn’t exactly a life of crime. He ran with a bunch of boys who were wannabe rappers, and his dream was to own a record label and produce all his friends’ songs (Enterprise, at least in embryo form, dates from this time) – but his friends never took it seriously, gradually succumbing to the aimless, sketchy life of the street.

“In and out of prison,” sighs Aeropryme, thinking of his old comrades now. “They have several baby mamas, y’know… They’re not doing much with their lives.

“I mean, look at me. I’ve travelled around the world. I’ve established my music career to the point where I own my own record label, even though it’s independent – I can sign artists, I can distribute for them… I have a business partner in Sweden who has his own law firm, it’s like the No. 5-rated law firm in Sweden.”

He shakes his head ruefully: “Basically, my life could’ve been like my homie Dre – who’s in and out of prison, and he’s got, like, three kids… Last I heard of him, he’s just in and out of prison. We lost contact – because my life has gone in a completely different direction. I’ve got a degree and everything.”

At some point, Tai’s family staged an intervention – and his mum stepped in (they’d made peace by that point) with a fairly radical idea. Mum had been on holiday to Cyprus a few years earlier, she even had some old Cyprus Pounds as a souvenir. It’s a tourist country, she told her wayward son, you’ve always been very outgoing; you should go there and study something tourism-related.

“And that’s the turning point in my life. That’s the point when my life went 180.”

A black musician with experience of the rough side of life moving from Arkansas to Nicosia isn’t something you see every day – but Tai made friends and thrived in other ways too, discovering things about himself. “I’m a great cook. I’m a good bartender. I’d never have known I had these skills, if I hadn’t come to Cyprus.”

These days his work life is mostly in Sweden and Kosovo (his friend Ruzbeatz works as a producer there). Napa is mostly a summer bonus, a way to “keep on feeding the horse,” as he says – meaning you have to hustle and promote yourself every minute, if you want to make it in the music business – but it’s also more than that, a reminder of our island’s unlikely role in the making of Aeropryme. “In the rescuing of my life,” as he puts it. “And, I would say, the evolution of my personality as well.”

Tai is Aeropryme now, his suave superhero persona – and in fact the name comes from Optimus Prime, of Transformers fame. (Like I said, he’s a major geek.) Aeropryme isn’t invincible, especially in his love life, plagued – he admits – by the awkward fact that men who have issues tend to attract women who also have issues. Still, he’s a force for good, rather surprisingly mentioning that his life-plan is eventually to go into charity work and “build, like, orphanages in Africa… That’s my ultimate goal”.

His music, too, is a force for good. “Every time I see a black girl I say ‘Wakanda’ / Every time I see a white chick I say ‘forever’,” he raps on ‘Get Tha Bag’, proclaiming his inclusive love of all women. (‘Wakanda forever,’ for the uninitiated, is a Black Panther reference.) He’s actually been told that “it’s going to be difficult for me to break out”, because he doesn’t do enough of “the popular themes… Promoting violence, drug dealing, being mean to women, and all these kinds of things.

“I try to stay away from these themes,” he confirms, “because it’s not part of what Aeropryme represents. Aeropryme, in short form, would be ‘happy-go-lucky guy, adventurous, optimistic, total geek, Tony Stark, Iron Man’. That’s it!

“Even though I’m very, very akin to the street stuff, this is not what I want to be remembered as… Because people who promote the streets, people who live that street life, there’s only one of two outcomes: either you’re dead, or you’re in jail.” He smiles happily, looking around as if daring Dre and the rest of his old Arkansas homies to prove him wrong. “I’m travelling around the world. So I made it out, baby!”

Any final thoughts? “We’re not meant to have great days every single day,” says formerly-confused Tai, speaking now with Aeropryme’s air of experience and authority.

“So it’s a lot of losses, a few wins in between. You cherish those wins – and then prepare for the next bumpy ride.”   

His own ride in life has been “very, very bumpy” – right down to the year 2019, when he got his heart broken for the last time. That’s a story in itself, how he met a woman who seemed to fit a “childhood fantasy” he’d been carrying around in his head since the age of nine, of “the kind of woman I would want to have as a life partner”.

Needless to say, holding an adult woman to the fantasy of an unhappy child – a child craving the connection he’d just lost, and the restoration of his once-happy childhood – is a recipe for disaster. The relationship ended badly – “and at that point,” says Aeropryme firmly, “I was like, ‘You can’t keep chasing fairytales. You actually have to do something for yourself, for once in your life’”.

So here we are six years later, at the Bedrock Café. A new song coming out, a night of hyping up the crowd at the ZicZac Bar, a career not entirely fulfilled but waiting, he says, for “a breakthrough” – but also, more importantly, a sense of focus and positivity, excess weight shed, things panning out, Aeropryme in his prime. “I lost myself,” he says of the past, “and found myself again. And I’m never going to lose myself again.” I leave him to his dreams, and his zero-calorie coffee.