“Hip-hop has always been ever-changing and evolving,” Adam says when asked about the music’s direction. “House, techno – taking all these different genres and extending it with hip hop is just the next step. I think it’s going to turn out real good in a couple of years. It’s a lot easier to break down that barrier with major hits and major albums. I know Kanye is already up there doing that. We need acts like Wale and the Cool Kids and Kid Cudi – something new and 100 percent electro-hip hop.”

You can hear the electronica style in ‘My Cool,’ – the defining 2007 single that made him a star last year in Sweden and started drawing his own Kanye-comparisons. It’s bold, bouncy and woven with lots of synths and vocoders.

In three years, Adam himself has gone from hustling self-produced and recorded mix tapes on street corners to having his first single, ‘Banging on the System,’ downloaded 150,000 times and playing what he estimates to be about 260 gigs last year. The success of ‘Banging on the System’ and ‘My Cool’ led to the release of his album, It’s A Tensta Thing, in November 2008. He capped off the year nicely by winning a Swedish Grammy Award in January.

Now, he’s poised to take over the States. “Time to make up with the white people abroad,” he says, laughing. Adam’s just come off of an eight-gig tour de force around New York City, where he worked the crowd everywhere from Tenjune to Webster Hall – and picked up a U.S. booking agent along the way.

Interscope head Jimmy Iovine recently flew him and his manager, Babak, to Los Angeles, where he worked on remixes for Keri Hilson and Lil’ Wayne – in the fabled studio where the late Michael Jackson recorded ‘Thriller.’

“They told me that Quincy Jones actually sat down in the rocking chair, because they had the speakers mastered in the ceiling, and he sat down and listened to the mix,” Adam recalls. “Like, listening to Michael on the roof. I seldom get nervous, but I got goosebumps when thinking about the notion that Michael actually recorded ‘Thriller’ there.”

Los Angeles is a long ways away from Tensta, the housing project in Stockholm from which he hails (and from where he adopted his MC moniker). His father, a heroin addict who was never really around, is from Ghana; his mother is Swedish-Finnish. But being an outsider shaped his perspective and ultimately, his penchant for music.

“Tensta is extremely segregated from the rest of the culture,” he says. “It’s a place where the population is probably 99 percent multi-cultural. There are people from all over the world – Africa, Asia, other parts of Europe, mostly war-ridden countries like Somalia and Yugoslavia. Refugees. So growing up there, I just learned to live with people from different cultures. There were a lot of languages, a lot of colors, a lot of inspiration growing up.”

Speaking to Adam on the phone, his early exposure to different cultures is apparent. For one thing he has no accent, attributing it to all the U.S. hip-hop he listened to during his “influential years.”

“My little brother played Nas and other New York-based artists,” he remembers. “I got into it around ’94, ’95, but I didn’t start writing lyrics until I was 18 or 19 years old. My mom and my aunt played Bob Marley before I even knew what he was saying. When I got to the point where I actually understood it … man, the message lives on. All these universal things he said about freedom.”

“I got real inspired by Dead Prez around ’99, 2000. They had a song called ‘Lets Get Free.’ That shit was my Bible for a year. That was the start of it all. Dead Prez actually got me into taking this serious. The more I do this, it becomes more than just being an artist. It’s trying to convey something larger than life, about freedom.”