His first solo studio album in eleven years, Killer Mike’s MICHAEL is the Atlanta rapper’s most personal endeavor to date. The fourteen-track record is an ode to both nativity and naiveté, its narrative being just as personal to him as it is to all those experienced in underprivileged Black life.
From front to back, nothing on MICHAEL is done without consideration. The album’s cover, a picture of the artist as a child with both devil horns and a halo edited atop his head, is the first glimpse listeners get of the project’s careful cohesivity. Along with adolescence and growth, the juxtaposition of good and evil, of debauchery and deliverance, of sin and salvation, is the album’s overarching theme. The cover hints at this before listeners ever hit “play.”
Personal and Painful
Driving the themes of adolescence and growth are sounds and scenes from Killer Mike’s Atlanta upbringing, which are front and center throughout the whole of the album. Executive-produced by No I.D., who’s known for his collaborations with hip hop heavy hitters such as Common, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, MICHAEL’s soundscape is a musical melting pot of Southern (and specifically Atlantan) rap, trap, R&B, gospel, soul, and funk elements. With both musical and oratory gospel taking the reins on the album’s offerings alongside hyperactive hi-hats and booming 808s, the project is at once very hood and very holy. The album’s Atlantan focus is also supported by features from many of the city’s most prominent musical voices. André 3000, Future, CeeLo Green, Young Thug, 2 Chainz, 6LACK, Fabo, and Jagged Edge all contribute verses and vocals, and leading trap hitmaker Honorable C.N.O.T.E. contributes production.
A deeply personal project, MICHAEL covers several educational and painful moments from Killer Mike’s past. Track six, SLUMMER, chronicles a teenage relationship involving a guilt-ridden abortion (“I still feel like we killed our baby girl”). Track twelve, MOTHERLESS, deals with his mother and grandmother’s passing, while the previous track, SOMETHING FOR JUNKIES, details a conversation between him and his drug-addicted aunt. By opening up fully to his audience and sharing his guilt, grief, and darkest days, Killer Mike builds the foundations for the album’s ascension to the light. In MICHAEL, as in his life, the rapper’s story is one of desolation before it’s one of deliverance.
From Trial to Triumph
What’s perhaps most impressive about MICHAEL is the project’s ability to weave a powerful narrative from seemingly contradictory threads. The hopeful, airy notes of freedom, self-sustainability, and triumph coexist with talk of addiction, incarceration, and murder. One of MICHAEL’s primary messages communicates that there can be no triumph without struggle, and it pulls no punches while illustrating its point.
DOWN BY LAW, the album’s opener, immediately assures listeners that “This for the junkie, the fiend, and the loser / Prayin’ to God in the back of a cruiser.” Both the first and second track, SHED TEARS, mention addiction and incarceration, before the succeeding RUN preaches the importance of perseverance for Black Americans. Dave Chappelle opens the track with a monologue comparing them to the beach stormers at Normandy, constantly moving forward despite seeing so many ahead of you fall. “Ain’t no rhyme or reason why it’s not you on the ground,” he says, “but as long as it’s not, better keep your feet underneath you.”
The Personal is Political
Killer Mike’s characteristic political and intellectual stylings are all over MICHAEL. Five minutes can’t go by without fresh commentary on the past and present plights of Black American life. Numerous references to addiction, poverty, the prison-industrial complex, and other symptoms and causes of systemic racism appear in the rapper’s militant and meditative verses.
The fourth track, NRICH, deals heavily in themes of revolution and Black self-determination. Opening with a cynical but brilliant section from The Last Poets’ “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” Killer Mike and featured artists 6LACK and Eryn Allen Kane share their thoughts on the path to redemption. 6LACK corroborates the opening sample, which is focused on Black Americans’ preference for self-destruction over self-determination. Reiterating what many (but still too few), and certainly The Last Poets, know, he posits that “Niggas carjack ‘cause they jampacked and sidetracked.” Mike, referring to the company he cofounded that provides banking services to communities of color, raps, “I opened Greenwood and showed niggas that we is more / Than stickin’ green under the beams in mama’s wooden floor.” In the chorus, Kane lays out the blueprint that Mike and other champions for Black financial freedom follow: “Run up them millions, then build a village, then make your own rules.” Killer Mike’s final verse closes the track in triumph, including the line “They used to own us, but now we owners, that’s independence.”
Symmetry and Structure
Through much of Killer Mike’s intellectual lyricism and motivational musings runs the fast, gritty, pounding notes of Atlanta trap production. MICHAEL simply sounds like Atlanta, even if it lacks the average trap artist’s materialistic and masochistic ardor. The seventh track, SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS, is arguably the album’s most brilliant due to the way it combines differing styles to write a single, sonically diverse love letter to the city in question. Beginning with a deeply poetic and dexterous lyrical display by André 3000, who helped put Atlanta’s rap scene on the map as part of OutKast, the song’s second verse is provided by Future, who has been one of Atlanta’s most successful rappers for nearly a decade. Bringing old and new modes together against a chill-inducing gospel-vocal backdrop, the track paints an impressive, all-inclusive portrait of the founders and maintainers of the Atlanta sound.
Track fourteen, HIGH & HOLY, caps things off exactly the way that an outro should. All of the album’s most prominent themes resurface in the gospel-backed and gospel-themed signoff. On the track, Killer Mike deftly summarizes the album’s multiple messages concerning the move from trial to triumph. Retaining the album’s personal focus, he also summarizes within the context of his own life with lines like “I rightened up and tightened up and God showed me favor,” and “My life’s a testimony, that’s why I stay high and holy.” It’s rare that an album signs off in as cohesive and all-encompassing a fashion as MICHAEL does, a clear testament to the rapper’s trademark intellect.
A Triumph
All in all, on top of having a lot of good songs, the album that Killer Mike refers to as his “come home moment musically” is a masterclass in narrative structure. Forgive the triteness, but they just don’t make them like this anymore. MICHAEL’s cohesion is more reminiscent of time-tested masterworks like The College Dropout and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill than it is the albums of its day. In an era where most of hip hop’s chart toppers throw a random selection of twenty songs together and call it a day, Killer Mike’s latest offering is more than a breath of fresh air: it’s a triumph.
Article image by Gordon Cowie on Unsplash.