Killer Mike on Taking Off His “Mask” and Becoming Michael
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The post Killer Mike on Taking Off His “Mask” and Becoming Michael appeared first on Consequence.
On the eve of releasing MICHAEL, Killer Mike’s first solo album since 2012, he tells me early and often that he is “one half of the world’s greatest rap group, living.” His work with Run the Jewels and his partner El-P are close on his mind, even as he takes this independent detour.
“I went on a journey,” he says of the LP out June 16th. “I had to go through the desert and I didn’t get to have my friend with me. But it was so I could grow and come back a stronger MC.”
That journey included separating the artist born Michael Render from what he called the “character” of Killer Mike. He likened himself to a favorite grizzled X-Man: “Behind the mask of me as Wolverine is Logan. This is behind the mask.” MICHAEL answers some of the same questions as X-Men stories centered around Logan, learning “why that man’s so damn grumpy, why is he so protective of his friends: Because he suffered the knocks.” He leans closer to the Zoom call camera. “I wanted to give people a deeper peek into the character Killer Mike and show them the man named Michael.”
Those obstacles he alluded to included the 2017 death of his mother, a topic Mike delves into on the album standout, “MOTHERLESS.” “My mama dead,” he raps, “My grandmama dead/ To keep it honest, I get depressed and be feelin’ scared.” As he explained at the time of the song’s release and again to me, “I had never said the words, ‘My mom is dead,’ never said the words until the record. So if I never would have written a record, I never would have said the words. So art compels me and grew me.”
He adds, “You had to pick the scar and let it heal properly. Like, I didn’t want to make ‘MOTHERLESS.’ There is a romanticism around pain with hip hop, but yeah, I had to show my pain.”
He’s careful to explain that this Michael is not a character: “I’m rapping differently. Like KRS-One taught me, it’s about style. You gotta master styles… I’ve grown and I’ve evolved stylistically. I didn’t want to give you a replay of Killer Mike from Run the Jewels just over different beats. I needed to push. I needed to feel personal. I needed to feel like a conversation with you.”
But one thing Michael shares with Killer Mike is an inner fire. “Talkin Dat SHIT!” is a blistering attack on “a lot of people full of shit,” he says. It was specifically inspired by an episode of United Shades of America, a CNN series hosted by W. Kamau Bell, whom Mike hastens to add he respects. “Me and him got fucking high together and ate takeout with our hands. So I would consider him a strong associate, possibly a friend, right?”
However, the episode “The Woke Wars” featured what Mike considers an inaccurate retelling of the history of the politically charged word “woke.” As Mike recalls, one of Bell’s guests was “talking about, ‘Woke goes all the way back to this blues song where these Alabama boys had been jailed and possibly killed.’ He says that’s the first time you hear the word ‘woke.’ Like it just sat on the sidelines as this Black word that was waiting to get in the game. ‘Oh, we’re woke now.’ I’m from the south. Neither of these men are, and the guy who gave that definition did not know what the fuck he was talking about.”
Mike raises his voice. “The best definition of that word was given by Erykah Badu: ‘Stay Woke means to simply pay attention.’ Like Nas said, ‘Don’t sleep because sleep is a cousin of death.’ And if you’re going to give credit to why that word is popular amongst people in our age group, you must start with the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation of Islam. Both of these were Black radical theologies that people were afraid of, so you used to see them on Donahue, Oprah, and shit like that to kind of scare greater America: ‘You better go ahead and deal with the negroes that are docile. Because these n****s crazy.'”
I ask him what he thinks about politicians like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis railing against woke politics, but Mike does not care about what he calls “political theater” from white people. “Y’all fuck it up,” he laughs. “Just like putting raisins in the macaroni salad. God bless your soul. I love you. But ya’ll sure know how to fuck up something.”
Within the Black community, “I would challenge us to do what our grandparents did, and shut the fuck up publicly and get together in living rooms, or after church, or in your Masonic halls, or wherever the fuck you meet up, and just talk amongst yourselves. With Black folks, it’s okay to not always agree on everything, but it’s not okay to be fighting in public.”
He still supports Bernie Sanders but he does not overly trouble himself with national politics, and he respects some Republicans, like Herman Cain, who was “deeply involved in our community, helping the homeless, helping the sick and disenfranchised.” Although Mike says, “I don’t agree with him politically,” he still tries to “acknowledge the good work he did.”
Despite the personal intentions behind MICHAEL, he’s still having a ball, and while he spends most of the 14 tracks with the mask off, Logan again becomes Wolverine as the story reaches its climax. “The character Killer Mike pops up on ‘Don’t Let the Devil,'” the penultimate track that features thankugoodsir and Mike’s old partner, El-P. Why return to the character?
“Because it’s Run the Jewels, we back together, we badass. Just when the fans are like, ‘What the fuck, I haven’t heard El-P on this album,’ Run the Jewels pops up on a No I.D. beat, chopped by El-P, drums done by Taco.”
“Don’t Let the Devil” is a windows-down banger, as funky and fun as anything Run the Jewels has produced to date. “‘Don’t Let the Devil'” was more about the hook,” Mike explains. “Don’t let the devil of success entice you. Don’t get so content with what you’ve done that you forget, as an artist, your job is to cut deeper, to draw blood.”
On MICHAEL he certainly draws blood, his own and other’s. And his growth is audible, the result of a resolution to improve himself: “There was a determination to come back to Run the Jewels a better version of me. That required getting in the studio with just myself, that required finding ways to become a better ‘ear’ producer, meaning I can’t program the machine but I can tell you what this is supposed to sound like or what I’m looking for.
“I’m not the same artist I was two years ago,” he says. “I’m a better rapper than I was two years ago. And God willing, if I keep this trajectory of being honest and forcing myself to get better, I’ll be a better rapper two years from now.”
Killer Mike on Taking Off His “Mask” and Becoming Michael
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