![]() I think Michael is telling not just your story but a wider one about the resilience of the South and the Dungeon Family. What made you itch to talk about it 11 years after R.A.P. For the past decade, you and El were focused on Run the Jewels. I was surprised to hear you’d made a solo album. He’s an effective orator, and what he doesn’t say is just as illuminating as what he does. Michael owns its namesake’s strengths and flaws and the generational movements that make him possible, so I spoke to Killer Mike over Zoom in mid-May to dive into the rap history he’s been a part of and the ways Michael builds on the street narratives and social consciousness introduced in his 2003 debut, Monster, but also to pick his brain about politics and backlash. “Scientists and Engineers” with Future and Andre 3000 is a jaw-dropping Dungeon Family reunion “Motherless” reckons painfully with the loss of a parent and the toughness and yearning that come with it. Music, and it’s a window into the circumstances informing his musical and political sensibilities, a family history, an Atlanta hip-hop primer, and a snapshot of lives that were altered forever during the crack era. This month’s Michael (out June 16) is his first solo album since 2012’s El-P-produced R.A.P. But the 48-year-old rapper has no problem clapping back. and Atlanta’s then-mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, during which he implored protesters “not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy.” Where Killer Mike’s fans see a truth teller, his critics see a capitalist in activist’s clothes and question his ideas and intentions: How his advocacy for gun ownership plays into the NRA’s agenda and whether his meetings with Georgia governor Brian Kemp and football star and chaotic 2022 Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker were fruitful endeavors. In 2016, Mike endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, and in 2020, in the heat of the George Floyd protests, came under fire for a press conference with rapper T.I. He is also a product of the Black entrepreneurial spirit of Atlanta in all its complex permutations: the trapper, the musician, the mom-and-pop business owner, the voice in local and national politics. ![]() Killer Mike is a fascinating character, a rapper whose nonlinear career path took him from incredible work with OutKast to the mixtape grind and then into arenas and music festivals alongside El-P, his partner in Run the Jewels.
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