RAPPIN’ WITH MARKY : ‘The Fame Can Be a Headache at Times, You Know’

At age 20, Marky Mark (a.k.a. Mark Wahlberg) has a lot going for him--like a debut single, “Good Vibrations,” that went gold, leading to a 1.5-million-selling album, “Music for the People.”

During a phone interview from a Louisiana concert venue last week, Wahlberg was interrupted several times by a tour manager, worried that his young charge would be unable to make it through the crowds filing into the arena.

Along with older hip-hop aficionados, his fandom does indeed include the breed of avid young teen that also mobs his brother Donnie’s group, the New Kids on the Block. They go for his music: solidly constructed dance grooves--produced by brother Donnie--and PG raps. They go for his scowling baby face and hunked-out torso. They go for his undershorts, sometimes all he performs in, signed copies of which are sold at concession booths at his concerts.

Wahlberg’s been doing hip-hop for the last eight years and was an original pre-fame member of the New Kids (he left because their lightweight music didn’t suit him). Before “Good Vibrations” hit last year he’d been earning his keep as a bricklayer’s apprentice. He’s not exactly bowled over by his new-found fame, one reason being that he’s seen his brother go through the life-sized-kissable-pinup routine already.

“Yeah, I saw everything my brother and the Kids had to go through, but I was just interested in the musical thing,” he said in a sleepy, not-painfully Bostonian voice. “People relating to my music and all is cool, but the fame can be a headache at times, you know, having a lack of freedom and free time. I’m just really glad that people are responding to my music.”

While the success of “Music for the People” may have cramped Mark’s freedom, he thinks that making the album was a route to freedom for brother Donnie, who has at times bucked at the limitations of the mass-marketed New Kids.

“That’s kind of obvious, you know what I mean? That stems from why I left the Kids. He’s very versatile. He’s into hip-hop heavily, but he’s also, you know, into different styles of music. It was definitely another way for him to express his talents and show people he has other talents in other fields, such as producing and stuff like that. He really got a chance to show what he can do.”

There’s a lyric in “I Need Money” that goes, “My brother’s a millionaire and he don’t even share/For all he cares I could be on the welfare.” Mark hopes everyone realizes that’s a joke.

“He produced the record, c’mon now. It’s a comical record, you know.”

The brothers grew up amid a family of nine in the working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. Though Donnie bought a new house for the family after the Kids hit it big, Mark said family members didn’t try to mooch off Donnie’s success.

While the New Kids were striking it rich, Mark dropped out of high school and had a series of minor run-ins with the law. When Mark was ready to launch his career, though, Donnie was there to help him.

The two often write together (they’re well into work on a second album) in a process Mark attempted to describe, though he was clearly distracted by a simultaneous attempt to hit the world record for the most “you knows” in a single statement:

“We’re clashing heads all the time talking about different ideas, you know. It may be something I might like, you know, or an idea that I might have, you know what I mean? Just run it by him or vice versa, you know what I mean? Or talk about different things, you know. There’s a lot of times, you know, we’ll just sit down and talk about, you know, or how do we want to come across, you know, how would you feel about doing a song like this, you know, a deep record, you know, put my faith into talking about this, you know, or that, you know. There’s a lot of different ways you go about it, you know. You might, you know, like I’m doing my own thing right now and he’s been on the road with the Kids for a while, you know, so we’ve just been clashing ideas over the phone and I’ve been, you know, just working on a lot of different stuff on my own, you know, just little rough productions and stuff.”

Meanwhile note, by contrast, the clear, succinct grammar of the Geto Boys’ Bushwick Bill, as he recently explained to the Source magazine how he got his glass eye and “gun powder on the brain”:

“I started out that day drinking Everclear. Then my homeboy came over to the crib and he had me a big ol’ bottle of E&J;, was slammin’ that. . . . And then I told my girl to shoot me and she didn’t want to do it. So, I had to threaten her, I had to shoot at her first, while she was holding the baby.”

While not necessarily Bushwick’s average day, this account does remind that there are different extremes of rap. The Geto Boys’ albums are similarly violent, grisly, angry and verging on insanity, yet somehow affecting and human. Though he does go in for a bit of social consciousness on “Wildside,” Mark’s tracks typically are far friendlier, most often just the standard schoolyard brags and aerobics/slave galley exhortations to “work your body.”

Mark does have street credibility (see, those arrests come in handy) says his label, Interscope Records, which, being affiliated with that street-urchin Time-Warner Corp., clearly should know. He knew it would be an uphill battle to be taken seriously, since a New Kids affiliation tends to work against that. He was so concerned, in fact, that there are some preemptive strikes in his songs, attacking critics for putting him down, though recorded at a time when critics hadn’t even heard him yet.

“Yeah, but they had heard of me,” he explained. “It was on the New Kids awareness level, so people immediately passed judgment on it, thinking it was going to be another New Kids record. Nobody wanted to take me seriously. But my records did that for me. I felt that the only way it would have been possible was through the music.”

His breakout song, “Good Vibrations,” was a canny C+C Music Factory-styled composite of programmed dance rhythms, “house” piano (actually played by Donnie, not the jazzoid musician in the video), sampled female soul vocals (from disco singer Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 “Love Sensation”), and Mark--who has claimed he can’t sing--rapping out such lines as “I command you to dance, I wanna see motivation” like a drill sergeant.

Unlike some hip-hop artists, Wahlberg gives credit where it’s due, and has featured Holloway in TV appearances and live performances. At other live shows he’s used digital samples of her voice and has now hired a female vocalist to sing her parts. Along with the rest of his Funky Bunch of rappers, singers and dancers, he uses a live six-piece band in his concerts.

“The record itself and the live show is two totally different things,” he maintains. “All the songs are just about rearranged, you know. The show is fly. You’ve got to check it out, especially if you’re into (hearing) a live band. People who aren’t sure of rap and don’t know how rap is being made can see this way that it’s more creative.”

He does think there’s an art to hip-hop’s studio pastiche of borrowed samples. His “I Need Money” rehashes the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” while “Wildside” is a chopped and channeled replay of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wildside,” with a recitation recounting drug deaths, gang violence, and the racism-tinged Carol Stuart murder case.

His album’s title song, “Music for the People,” has a line where Mark explains that by sampling, “I make an old song dope again/Give a played-out pop star hope again!”

“Definitely,” he still says. “I mean, who was thinking about a lot of older records, you know? Nobody was thinking about them records, until somebody revived it, you know what I mean? As well as Loleatta did for me, I think we both did a lot for each other. The public awareness level on her is back up again, people going, ‘Oh, that’s Loleatta Holloway; wow! I wonder what ever happened to her.’ How many people come up to me all the time and talk to me about her?

“People might sample a record and then try to take credit for writing the music. But I feel if you can take six different grooves, blend them all together and make a fly groove that everybody can gig to now, you know what I mean, then that’s dope. I think my song is a lot like Lou Reed’s, but I think mine is an up-to-date version. And I think my song did a lot for the environment of what’s going on in America and the inner cities of the United States. I think the record did a lot.”

What he hopes his audience gets from his music is “lots of different things, you know. I feel what music is doing for a lot of people, like myself and lot of my friends, is it’s just giving people a positive outlook on life. My records are positive records. But it’s not like a preaching type record, it’s a very fun record. But it’s positive. I’m not out there glamorizing gang violence or nothing like that.”

And then there’s this thing with Mark’s shorts, which seem far more susceptible to gravity than most people’s pants. While he’s on stage they often wind up around his ankles, leaving him hopping around the stage in nothing but his underwear.

Two theories come to mind for this: First, it was once the practice in grade schools for tough guys to “pants” their nerd-like lessers, basically pulling their pants down, which was a humiliation tantamount to being pushed into the girls’ restroom. Maybe by him, a tough guy, pantsing himself , working-class Wahlberg is making a show of solidarity with intellectuals, following up on his “music for the people” theme. Right on, Marky!

Second, it could be a clever, and even sensitive, method of marketing a pop star to the young. Great portions of his audience are adolescent girls, who, these days, have scarcely put down their dolls before they are expected to be little adults, compelled by the media and AIDS to perhaps deal with sexuality before they are ready. Mark may be such a piece of beefcake that his fans bring A1 sauce to his shows, but along with its Chippendale aspects, having his pants around his ankles can also conjure a baby-like vulnerability, harking back to images of a confused potty-training toddler.

Wahlberg, who should know, though, says: “It began as an accident. I didn’t have a belt, and my pants were a little oversized.” The audience seemed to think it was a move in the right direction, and he’s done it since, though not on a nightly basis.

“Obviously, if my audience wants it, if the people demand it, then cool. I have no problem with that. But it’s not what I want to be remembered for. It’s a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

Who: Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch.

When: Friday, March 13, at 8 p.m.

Where: Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim.

Whereabouts: Take Harbor Boulevard south from the Riverside (91) Freeway or north from Santa Ana (5) Freeway and head east on Broadway. The Celebrity is on the left, just past Anaheim Boulevard.

Wherewithal: $22.

Where to call: (714) 999-9536.