Killer Mike, rap’s compassionate capitalist: ‘I’m not a millionaire to make you feel bad’

Kingston upon Thames on a damp, windy autumn night is an incongruous place to encounter an Atlanta rapper who might win best rap album at next year’s Grammy Awards. Adding to the incongruity of Killer Mike’s presence in this unexciting suburban town on the edge of London is the venue for his gig — an Anglican church with a flag of St George flapping stiffly from a pole on its tower.

But is it really so odd? “This ain’t no ordinary rap show,” the emcee, dressed in white, announces to whoops from his audience. “We’re going to church now.” Fanning around him in the nave are five gospel singers and his tour DJ, Trackstar, who operates decks on a white-clothed table as though mixing a sacrament. Carved angels with musical instruments look down benignly from the church ceiling as tracks are performed from Mike’s latest album Michael, a labour of love by one of the most highly respected figures in US hip-hop. It has gained three Grammy nominations.

The next day I meet the rapper, real name Michael Render, at his UK record label office in north London. Best known as one half of powerhouse duo Run the Jewels with New York’s El-P, Mike is 48. His stage name comes from his killer use of the microphone.

The saintly white garments of the previous night have been replaced by black T-shirt and trousers. He has closely shaved hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and is a look-you-in-the-eyes person when conversing. The medallion necklace he wears contains two photographs, one showing his grandmother, the other his mother. Both are no longer alive.

While talking about his mother, Denise, Mike just about stops himself from welling up with tears. The display of feeling goes against the grain of his Run the Jewels persona, that of “a badass, swaggering MC”, in his words. “I come from the Ice Cube school of emceeing,” he tells me. “My voice has always sounded authoritative, maybe menacing on some records. On the Run the Jewels records it can be pretty fierce.”

Michael is a solo venture on which he spent more than $500,000 of his own money. “At about a quarter of a million dollars, my wife is going, what the fuck is going on here?” he recalls, laughing. He told her: “I’m making my dream happen!” The album is his equivalent of a memoir. “It’s a testimonial that I needed to make before I left the Earth. I wanted people to see the man, the whole human being.”

The album’s gospel influences draw on his upbringing in Atlanta’s Collier Heights, a neighbourhood founded in 1946 “by black people for black people”. Born in 1975, when his mother was just 16, and co-raised by his grandparents, Mike went twice a week to different churches as a child. One was a staid Baptist with a middle-class congregation. The other was a much livelier Pentecostal place with working-class worshippers.

Mike got bored at the Baptist services. “But when we went to the Pentecostal church, oh man! People were jumping around, running up and down the aisles, the music was involving. It felt celebratory in a different way, music was a tool.” The preacher’s words were at the centre of the action, a spoken performance with call-and-response routines and musical accompaniment, like the heightened speech of a rap song. “That’s something I took directly out of my Pentecostal church experience.”

Michael also pays tribute to Atlanta’s rap history. Incubator of popular sub-genres such as crunk and trap, the Georgia city shifted hip-hop’s centre of gravity southwards in the 2000s, away from the previously dominant east and west coasts. Many old and new names join Mike on his album, including André 3000 of trailblazing duo OutKast. They were important supporters of Mike early in his career.

For his new songs, he altered his rap style. “I better learn how to use my voice as an instrument for this album,” he told himself. There is less patterning — he cites OutKast’s Big Boi as a maestro of this type of diction — and instead a more conversational flow, like André 3000, or an idol from when he was growing up, New York’s Rakim. “He was a god,” Mike says.

He began rapping when he was nine, a sickly child with a big imagination and an appetite for reading. He suffered from asthma and bronchitis, and sustained hearing damage after an ear infection. “It probably helped me have a better voice,” he reasons. “Because I couldn’t hear as well so I had to project loud, to hear myself. It gave me an orator’s voice.”

His mother was a music fan who introduced him to hip-hop, playing records by early rap acts such as The Fat Boys and Run-DMC. His father was a police officer but left the force when Mike was a child after a colleague was killed. The rapper also has what he calls a non-biological father, who helped raise him and his two younger sisters. He partly lived with his grandparents, a nurse and a dump-truck driver who drummed values of hard work and respectfulness into him.

Speaking of the choices facing him as a youth, he says: “I’m glad I made more good than bad. But I made some pretty bad ones.” On Michael, he raps about getting a girlfriend pregnant as a teenager: she had an abortion. In another song, he apologises to a drug addict for taking his money. Mike was a petty dealer, selling drugs occasionally to make extra cash after cocaine flooded black communities in the 1980s. He blames Ronald Reagan’s administration for the blight, a result according to him of the Iran-Contra arms-for-drugs subterfuge. (This is the topic of his ferocious song “Reagan” on his 2012 solo album RAP Music.)

He kept his dabbling in the drug trade secret from his grandparents. But not so his mother: she had the same sideline. It began after the florist and interior design business she set up went wrong. Denise met “rich white women” who “were into coke” through the venture. They did not know where to buy it; Denise did. “She seized her opportunity,” her son says.

Mike’s relationship with her was close but frictional until her death in 2017. He recalls her telling him: “I wish I could be softer or easier on you, but you’re the only boy I have. I have to make sure you’re a man. I have to make sure that you understand life isn’t fair and it’s going to be tough and you’re going to have to take care of a woman yourself one day.” His eyes glisten.

Her lesson was learnt. Mike and his wife Shana Render have four children ranging in age from 16 to 29. Mike is also co-founder of the fintech firm Greenwood, which caters for bank-deprived black and working-class neighbourhoods. Among the most politically engaged of rappers, he campaigned for Bernie Sanders as presidential candidate in 2016.

A self-described “compassionate capitalist”, he is an unpredictably aligned figure who has caused controversy with his support for black gun ownership. “Black Americans should take our right [to bear arms] as preciously as we take our First Amendment right. We should be fierce about it,” he insists. He views the US as violently racist, a failed state almost, yet also believes that black Americans can thrive given the opportunity.

“The people who were taken to the US from West Africa and have been there for 400 years, since 1619, they had to master the system they were in. They had to master entrepreneurialism, they had to master self-sufficiency and independence,” he says.

For the master craftsman of rap, named after his way with the mic, the right tools and proper mentality are everything. “I’m a millionaire,” he states baldly. “I don’t have any shame in saying that. But I’m not a millionaire to make you feel bad. I didn’t become a millionaire to shit on anyone or look down on anyone. I became a millionaire because I want my children’s children to have something.”

killermike.com

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