In the first five minutes of MTV's new reality show "Buzzin'," which stars rising Malibu rapper Shwayze and his ne'er-do-well producer Cisco Adler, Shwayze's faced with an only-in-L.A. Sophie's Choice that could break his fledgling career.
On one hand, he's booked to play a potentially lucrative Super Bowl party gig in Phoenix where sponsors from Pontiac want to talk song placements in an ad. On the other, he's due in Malibu at 8 a.m. the next day for a court date involving an old fake ID he bought on Alvarado Street.
Missing the former will infuriate his new taskmaster, label boss Jordan Schur of Geffen affiliate Suretone Records. Missing the latter could land him in jail.
Fortunately, a white knight arrives in the form of a rented Hummer that whisks the 22-year-old back to L.A. from the party in time to be sentenced for a misdemeanor and 30 days of trash-pickup duty on the beach (he also landed the ad campaign).
It's the kind of deus ex machina that seems to exist only in the rarefied world of MTV-reality. But for Shwayze it's a perk of being a new kind of aspiring pop idol -- one whose legal foibles, girlfriend drama and everyday goofiness are all potentially star-making fodder.
"We were nervous about 'Buzzin'," Shwayze said in the Pomona Fairplex parking lot after his Warped Tour set last month. "It's reality TV, and we'd seen all those shows."
But Adler, a tabloid and reality-TV veteran himself, is quick to remind Shwayze of how little he really has to worry about, "Fool, you live in Malibu, and the fridge is full."
The rapper, born Aaron Smith, has had a charmed rise to his complicated kind of prospective fame. The show, which is set to debut tonight, is built around Shwayze's tongue-in-cheek biography of growing up as "the only black kid in Malibu" in the most picturesque trailer park in America. As the show reveals, his childhood home has a knockout ocean view.
After he hassled Adler -- son of music impresario Lou Adler, front man of the band Whitestarr and the producer behind Mickey Avalon -- at the Malibu Inn nearly three years ago, the two partnered up and began demo-ing tracks in Adler's home studio. They hit on a melange of 1970s California folk-rock with laid-back beats and easygoing rhymes about drinking beer and chasing girls.
"I love A Tribe Called Quest, I wanted to be Snoop growing up," Shwayze said. "But I could never rap over hard-core beats."
