Pioneer hip-hop artist Twista hits Akl festival

Pioneer hip-hop artist Twista hits Akl festival

The hip-hop world is all about fast living, but one man leaves even the biggest names in his dust.

Twista once set a Guinness World Record for rhyming at 11.2 syllables a second. It made him the fastest rapper on Earth.

"I still look at that as a big accomplishment in life," says Twista.

"You sit back, grow old, look back and think of the things you did. You look at your accolades. That was something that I did in my life that I was real proud of." 

Twista started out on the streets of Chicago and became one hip-hop's pioneers.

As he grew as a rapper, he picked up in pace, and a new style of rap known as "chopper" was born.

"I was like, I wanna change up the cadence or the flow or something," he says. "I just started changing it up a little bit, and those rhythms start turning into doubling up the words."

But that in turn sparked feuds with other hip hop legends, like Naughty By Nature and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, all of whom laid their claim to the new, faster style.

"It was probably a little more intense with Treach from Naughty By Nature," Twista says.

"We actually had all sit down in Chicago about it because we all thought the violence would escalate into something else." 

Today, the violence is a thing of the past. 

Twista's here on tour with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, sitting and laughing side-by-side with men he once saw as bitter rivals.

The world record now belongs to Spain's El Chojin, but Twista's still the king of rapid rap. And at 42 years old, he wants to add to his resume.

"I wanna do some voiceovers for some cartoons and sh**," says Twista.

"I don't know why, but I think I'm pretty good at something like that. You might be watching a new cartoon someday and they gon' be like, 'That's Twista'. And you gon' be like, 'What?!'."

But the rapper isn't quitting his day job yet.

He's headlining the Block Party festival in Auckland, where he'll share the spotlight with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony -- the feud of who's fastest long since put to bed.

Newshub.