Killer Mike, Rap Superhero, Faces His Greatest Fears on ‘Michael’

Killer Mike, AKA Michael Render, has been in the rap game for a long time, guesting on Outkast's 2001 Grammy-winning single “The Whole World” and Jay-Z's 2002 song “Poppin’ Tags.” But despite releasing well-regarded albums in the 2000s such as 2006’s I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, he freely admits he never really found his footing in the early part of his career and that, in some ways, he was holding back.

After splitting with the major label system, he worked as an independent artist for a while, signing with the Adult Swim-affiliated label Williams Street. At the recommendation of Adult Swim vice president/creative director Jason DeMarco, he teamed with Jaime “El-P” Meline, a veteran New York underground rapper and producer who was also in the midst of a career reboot. The two were immediate soulmates, with Render often comparing their first pairing, his acclaimed 2012 album R.A.P. Music to the cross-cultural exchange that led to Ice Cube’s groundbreaking album AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted.

Something about Meline’s industrial beats and wry East Coast cynicism melded with Render’s empathic storytelling, social conscience, and wicked sense of humor and the pair immediately followed it up with their 2013 debut Run the Jewels. Three more albums followed, with 2014’s Run the Jewels 2 earning Album of the Year accolades from both Pitchfork and Stereogum.

Along the way, Render truly came into his own, hosting the Netflix documentary series Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, serving as a campaign surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders and also campaigning for Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. He’s become an in-demand political commentator, has written op-eds about the need for police reform, and continues to be an organizer and activist in Atlanta politics. He’s also a prolific actor, making a memorable cameo in the most recent season of FX’s Dave.

During the pandemic, Render was urged by his friend, the rapper Cuz Lightyear (Bryan Charles Jones) to work on a mixtape that became Michael, his most personal solo album yet. Executive-produced by No I.D. (Ernest Dion Wilson), it finds Render exploring the grief over his mother and grandmother passing and his role and responsibility as a Black man, father, and husband in times of turmoil. It also finds him, as ever, talking shit and absolutely obliterating every beat thrown at him.

Run the Jewels are very much an active concern Render will have you know (they’re doing a series of 10-year anniversary shows later this year), but Michael reveals even more layers to one of the most complex artists of the day. He has a lot to say about almost every subject, as we discovered when he Zoomed in to talk about why his new album scared him, what he looks for in political leadership and which X-Man he relates to the most.

This interview had been edited for clarity and concision.

So my first question is, what made you think that now, 11 years after your last solo album, you want to step out again on your own? Have you had to do a lot of reassurance to Run the Jewel fans along the lines of “No, we’re not breaking up. I’m just doing this on the side?”

Yeah, I don't believe in break-ups. If I’m being with you, I’m being with you. I’m married, I’ve married once. I’m not looking for no divorce. If we just get angry, I'll just sleep on the floor next to the bed with you. I knew that Run the Jewels fans may get a little spooked, but I don’t want people to think of this as a solo album that’s away from Run the Jewels. It is a part of the universe of Run the Jewels. Run the Jewels originally was a mixtape that was supposed to be a one-off. But I was like fuck that, I’m coming up, we’re gonna record this shit together, we’re gonna tour it, because I didn’t have to chase radio. Southern rap had become a hit-making machine in terms of radio. El-P gave me an opportunity to do what I thought rappers did, get on the road to do shows. And after Run the Jewels was born, I was in. I knew we were a perfect group together, I knew I was going to rap over his records, I knew any good rap group, you had four records that were the foundation. Outkast had done it. And we did it. And right when we’re about to do it even bigger, then a worldwide pandemic happens. And I’m just sitting here kind of tooling my thumbs, I don’t have anything to do, just aggravating my wife and children. They're like, “Why don’t you figure something out?”

I wanted the world to understand that behind the superhero that was Killer Mike, there’s this 9-year-old little goofy buck-tooth kid, whose grandmother makes him go to church, the pretty girl in school kissed on the cheek and told him he was handsome, who helped the church lady cross the street when cars were coming fast. Just this all-American type boy, and he’s still in love with hip-hop. And his mother, who’s only 16 years older than him, smoking a joint when he said he wanted to be a rapper, was like “fuck it.” And now the young boy has become a man. He’s grown up with this city. He’s grown up culturally insulated from vehement racism and things, because he grew up with a purpose in an all-Black neighborhood, in a city where Black political power has reigned for all of his life.

I'm just damn proud to have been a product of hip-hop, and I wanted to show a prodigal son story, a native son story of Atlanta, of Georgia, and of America. Because I know that even if you’re not Black, if you’re just a working-class man, you’re gonna relate to this record. If you’re the women that love us, be it our mothers, our lovers, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, you’re gonna love this. So for me, this record is a testimonial. It is an audio movie that you get to close your eyes to and listen to for 55 minutes, and follow a character through the evolution of him and his city and the ways in the world. I’m very proud of the work I've created, and it’s not separate from Run the Jewels. It expands the world of Run the Jewels. If you imagine Run the Jewels like the X-Men, one of those characters who I would compare myself to is Wolverine. It gives you his backstory. It helps you understand why some days he can be so grumpy, and it’s out of a place of love.

On the Run the Jewels albums, you were always able to balance talking a lot of shit about how awesome you guys are, then you’ll give your political commentary, and then you’ll open up about what’s really going on inside. Sometimes you do all three in the same song, like with “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation).” But on this album, you really opened up like never before. What was it like to go very deep and get completely vulnerable on “Motherless,” in a way we haven’t heard before? It’s a very moving song.

Man, thank you. I keep my girls with me. That’s my mother, Denise. That’s my grandmother, her mother, Betty. And man, every interview, I get a little shaky voice. It triggers you. I miss them. I miss my girls so much. And I don’t have the stereotypical story that all I had was my mother, grandmother, my father. I had amazing men around. But these two women, my mom and my grandmother. My grandmother died in my arms 11 years ago.

I’m sorry to hear that.

And it was after this very intense conversation in which she was literally making sure that I was prepared to be a total man. You spend your life chasing a dream. So that 9-year-old buck-tooth kid wanted to be a rapper. He became a teenager. He made children. He dropped out of Morehouse College. He scared the shit out of this woman that raised him, my grandmother, Betty. And I remember her asking me, my youngest daughter's mother had gotten married. My baby was about 4 or 5 years old. Why don’t I let her and her husband adopt my child? And then it just cut me like a knife. I was like, fuck that. My child doesn’t need an extra dad. And my grandmother could be a very stern woman. They say even as a child she preferred to work the fields than do domestic work, like a girl in the kitchen. So she could be rough and not mean or bad, but just rough. She looks at me after a few minutes of silence and says, “Did I hurt your feelings? I said, “Yes, ma’am. It was my daughter.” She said, “Well, I’m sorry.” And she never said I’m sorry. She might say “My bad.”

So she died in my arms. She died walking up a hill. She looked at me. She looked past me. I saw her see something. And she looked back at me and she smiled. She put her arms on me and she was gone. And I tried to get her CPR and eventually I realized she’s just gone. And I just laid in the grass with her, said our prayer. My mother, who was her only biological child, our relationship was at times like a mother-son, at times like a coach and player, at times like a big sister-little brother. Because she was only 16 when she had me. And I never really realized the sacrifice she made. But I remember her saying it wasn’t fair that her mom died in my arms. And I was like, the fuck you talking about? I was like, y’all don’t even always get along. If anybody from the Westside of Atlanta knew Betty and Denise, they were tumultuous, because my grandmother wanted my mom in church, and my mom was an artist.

I never understood the pain of losing your mother. But I thought I did because I lost my grandmother who raised me. But my mom told me, “I'm gonna be gone. One day, Michael, you’re going to see that my mama wanted you, but you belong to me.” She really told me that. She really said that to me. And it wasn't until my mother died… when my mother transitioned to another plane, I was sitting on a plane, telling her to hold on, she tried hard, but she just didn’t. You hear that from the mouth of the superhero Killer Mike. And you feel it, but on “Motherless,” you get to see the man as he loses the two closest things to God that he'd ever known. [Render begins crying, and after a few seconds wipes tears from his eyes.]

Thank you for sharing that. How did it feel when you were in the studio with No I.D., once you finished your verses?

I didn't even finish the first night, I started fucking crying so much. [laughter] Like the first verse and a half out, I was out, gone. We were finished. We had finished the album, and Dion said as great as the album, is something’s missing, we can go deeper. He said, “What really scares you?” I was like, I already faced my greatest fear. I lost my mom and my grandmother, and he said, “That’s what we gonna talk about.” So I made up every excuse in the book. I was trying to avoid the shit out of it. And I go in that booth and that microphone is in front of me. And for the first time since my mother had died and since my grandmother died, I would say they passed on, I’d say they joined the ancestors. I would say they transitioned. I would not say they had died, but that was the first time I said my mama was dead, my grand-mom was dead. And it just poured through me. The song just came, about the time I got through the second verse, I was done. I just, I didn’t have anything else. It was a truly spiritual experience. I was weak afterwards. I was crying in the booth. But that record was a powerful record to do because I had to confront the reality that I’m never gonna be able to call my girls again. And luckily they saw me have some success while they were alive. But the greatest success to me is that they got a chance to be proud of the man that I became.

Now, let’s say you could time-travel to Michael exactly 10 years ago this summer. And you told him Run the Jewels will be mind bogglingly huge. You’ll have several TV shows and you’ll be a sought-after political commentator. What would that Michael have thought?

He would’ve known he had the potential to do all of that. I’ve been an organizer since I was 15 and a public spokesman. So I knew I could lead when called to lead, but I never saw my leadership pass my local level because to me you’re supposed to be hyperactive locally. I didn’t get paid by Sanders or anybody’s campaign. I did it because that’s what my grandmother taught me to do. You believe in someone’s policy and then, and you take your butt out there and help ’em. I’ve been doing that since I was 5.

Musically, I always knew I had what it takes to be an elite MC. I realized that I was clumsy in the first part of my career. And that I was given the opportunity to get on some highs, whether it was “Poppin’ Tags” or “The Whole World.” I showed up and showed out, walked away with the Grammy, but that was my being a passenger on the train, but it wasn’t mine. It was like God saying, “Hey, this is what's possible when you work your ass off and you figure it out.” But I had to travel back through the desert of independence, and I had to learn things in that desert. And it made me a sharper artist and it made me appreciative when I met El. And the next thing, this appreciation, mutually for music and for one another becomes arguably one of the greatest raps you’ve ever had. It presents us with this mind-boggling thing to watch in which two rappers in their thirties hit their prime together as a team. So that is something I’m forever thankful for, we didn’t let our egos or insecurity get in the way. We left those at the door. And we just became two 15-year-old boys again making records.

Now, do you wanna put your political commentator hat on for a moment?

I can. [laughter]

This is just really fresh. Have you had time to really look into the Supreme Court decision in Alabama?

The redistricting, yeah. Alabama pulled some snake shit that the South has been doing for years. Stokely Carmichael talked about it. You would have counties with the majority Black population, and the Black people are interested in advancing themselves. They would break up these districts. It's an old-school trick here. So even two of the conservative judges siding with the more liberal judges, that was something that really reassured me.

It’s all very fresh, of course. But there is the idea out there that this might set a precedent, and you never know with this Supreme Court, but it could make it easier for, say, Louisiana, Georgia, and other Southern states to send more Black leaders elected to the House next year.

Well, Georgia had a few years ago the most Blacks under our gold dome. What we didn’t have or don’t have, to me—and this is not criticizing any leader in particular or leaders, because if you are a leader, it just means that you are still working with and for one of the two political parties. So those are leaders, but with an asterisk beside it. You have to beg for a vote. You have to get money for the campaign. Essentially, you are in an oligarch mafia of sorts, right? The real leaders are the people who are doing the grassroots organizing on that level. For me, I don’t mind us getting more faces under the gold domes, but they have to get marching orders from the bottom up versus the top down. In terms of my politics, I’m not married to a political party. I’m not married to a political personality. I’m married to the greater good of my community. As much as I was helping Bernie run for president, I was helping him because his policy felt more like what I was in line with. I’m built to be in politics by my grandmother. I didn’t have a choice. And I’m going to do whatever I can on the behalf of my community as long as I can or I’m called to. And when it’s not nothing for me to say, I shut the fuck up. That's why y’all don’t see me chasing every subject, because some subjects ain’t my business. [laughter]

Do you have any thoughts on next year's election?

Nope.

Fair enough.

I have thoughts on the city of South Fulton, the city of Atlanta, and county of DeKalb and county of the Cobb, making sure that they stay clean, the school systems stay strong and we have a local relationship, that will economically make it better so that our children can prosper in the next 20 years. I don’t have no thoughts on the political soap opera that’s coming.

Killer Mike Is Bernie Sanders’s Unofficial Campaign Adviser

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