Killer Mike explains why Michael is his most personal album to date

Q31:56Killer Mike on his latest album Michael

Killer Mike is a character, according to Killer Mike.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, the Atlanta-based rapper best known as one-half of Run the Jewels said he created Killer Mike as a way to be loud, direct, political, bombastic and unapologetic.

"In a world that punishes Black masculinity — in a world that makes that Southern [Black]  mothers tell their boys to be quiet and docile, because you didn't want the word of a white woman, like [what happened to] Emmett Till, to get you beaten and battered — you create an MC image, you create the personification of you, and you take that into the world," he said.

On his new album, Michael — his first solo album in more than a decade — Mike explores the man behind the character. That's evident even from the album's cover, which has a picture of nine-year-old Michael Render (Killer Mike's real name) with both a halo and devil horns. He says that after 20-plus years working as Killer Mike, he wanted audiences to get to know Michale Render a little better.

"It was time to show that behind this superhero Killer Mike, it's just a nine-year-old kid," he told Power. "He's the child of teenage parents. And he's raised by his grandparents. And he grew up in this all-Black enclave called the Collier Heights and Adamsville community, so he never felt like a minority. He never felt incompetent…. It's a different story than you're used to hearing out of rap. It's a different story than you're used to hearing out of the Black male experience. It's a different story than you're used to hearing from the working class, but it's a far more common story than it gets credit for. And I wanted an opportunity to tell Michael's story."

Mike said he started making this new, more personal album during the pandemic shut down, shortly after the release of Run the Jewels' fourth album in 2020.

"I just had a bunch of time, and me and [longtime collaborator] Cuz Lightyear were home, and I had these old demos," he said. "Down by Law, the first record, I started that as a freestyle during the Obama era."

At one point, he said, Lightyear turned to him and asked if he wanted to do something more substantive than just mess around with old demos and knock out mixtape tracks. 

"And I said, 'I want to work on the Michael album, or a solo album,'" said Mike. "And he was like, 'That's what we're going to do.' And he put his career on hold and we spent the last two years crafting, to me, what will decades from now still be regarded as one of the greatest of the greatest rap albums."

Mike recorded 39 songs in 90 days, and then began to whittle them down to a 14 or 15-song album. In his mind, he'd created the most raw, personal album he could muster, but when he took it to legendary hip-hop producer No I.D. — his longtime friend and the project's executive producer — No I.D. disagreed.

"He said 'I don't think you went deep enough.'" said Mike. "'What are you afraid of?' And I said, 'Well I've already faced my greatest fears, my grandmother and my mother are dead. And he said, 'Well that's what you're going to talk about.' And I try to get out of doing the song, and he re-does the beat right there in the studio."

The resulting song, Motherless talks about the death of both women, and their influence on who the rapper is today. Mike said while they were diametric opposites in some ways, they both wanted the same things both for and from him.

"My grandmother didn't care for rap at all. My mother loved it," he said. "My grandmother loved Jesus and the church more than anything in the world. My mother believed in God, but believed God was found in a tree somewhere and in living your freedom as a human existence. My mother wanted to make sure I went to the best schools possible, and those schools were in my grandmother's neighborhood. So these women were very different in terms of the way they viewed life, but they were very similar in terms of wanting me to be the absolute best representation of my family I could be."

WATCH | Official video for Motherless:

He added that when people ask why he remains so politically active on both the national level and at home in Atlanta, that's entirely his grandmother's influence.

"People ask me, 'Why would you fly home from a Rage Against Machine tour, when you have an off day, to do a city council meeting to help protect small Black clubs in Atlanta?'" he said. "I say, because that's what you're supposed to do. My grandmother, if I asked her why we were at city council, she'd say, 'Because this is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to take care of your neighbour. You're supposed to be an advocate and a lobbyist for the betterment of your community.' I just do it because this is what I'm supposed to do."

The full interview with Killer Mike is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Killer Mike produced by Lise Hosein.