Image via Jesse Fox Hallen
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MESSIAH!’s the villain wins! reminds me of dramaturgical masks with a crying and a laughing face. On one song, the North Carolina native sounds weary and defeated. On the next, he’s triumphant and jubilant. It’s this duality within songs and across the album that gives it such depth.
All things considered, MESSIAH! is generally happy. He has close friends and collaborators, a tight-knit family, and a burgeoning rap career. But nihilism always lurks. Quitting feels awfully tempting when you’re barely surviving, and you know that living well means cultivating a villainous streak.
The title for the August release was inspired by Jay-Z’s “Dead Presidents II” lyric: “I’ll tell you half the story, the rest, you fill it in/ Long as the villain win.” It’s a tribute to his dad’s favorite rapper, but it’s also representative of an idea he examines throughout the album. “In my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil.”
Outside of the Hova classics in his dad’s car, MESSIAH! was raised in a household where music was a constant. He got his taste from whoever was DJing. “My pops was obsessed with JAY-Z. My mom was the R&B head, and to this day Usher’s Confessions remains one of my favorite albums,” he explains. “When family was visiting, my grandparents would play gospel music and my auntie was always in charge of the radio hits.”
MESSIAH! was a listener. He rarely spoke and was painfully shy as a child — hard to believe considering how many thoughts he crams into the villain wins’!. He rarely talked at school, and the only way he felt comfortable expressing himself, he claims, was by freestyling with his buddies.
The meaning of rap changed for him when Trayvon Martin died in 2012. This was the first moment that a then-teenaged MESSIAH! saw someone like him as “the villain,” a victim murdered for merely being Black. Rap became more than a fun way to pass the time with his friends. He saw someone like him get killed for walking down the street. It created an empathy for marginalized people that still makes its way into most of his songs. “I wrote a rap about his death. I was 12, having emotions about a young Black boy who was dead. When I transformed it into a song, I think I finally realized what rap could do for me,” he explains.
Two years later, MESSIAH! got his first official feature. He earned $50 from his dad’s friend who owned a recording studio and needed a last-minute verse for a project he was working on. That same family friend helped him build his first studio, lending spare mics and offering advice.
“I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up to a laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, making demos whenever I could,” he explains. It was because of this set-up that he met his schoolmate MAVI, and the only rapper who MESSIAH! says could keep up with him during those high school battles.
The duo quickly forged a brotherly kinship from rap. While attending Howard University, they crashed spoken word slams and tested their rhymes. Another experience at Howard helped further illuminate American corruption. He was the victim of the massive financial aid scandal at Howard, after an internal investigation “found evidence of misappropriated financial aid funds allegedly totaling $1 million.” MESSIAH! took out a loan to cover the difference in his scholarship money and ultimately had to leave the school because his aid fell through. Even still, he remained saddled with debt.
The nightmarish experience perversely helped him become an adult. He remained in the area, living a lonely life in Maryland and kept writing raps. When he needed a break, he’d link up with MAVI in the district. During this period, MESSIAH! fully threw himself into his rap career.
The next logical step involved moving to LA. Here, he recorded 2022’s PERFECT 7 and found a like-minded community of collaborators. Hope was squashed as quickly as it formed. Despite finding inspiration, MESSIAH! returned home for “personal reasons.”
MESSIAH!’s style takes cues from the South, East Coast, and LA alike, so his sound is boundary-less. Imagine Vince Staples penning an anti-cop anthem in the vein of “March Madness” and you get close. Little Brother hopping into a lowrider with Bun B comes even closer. MESSIAH! is cerebral, but he delivers gut punching emotion. His music reflects the sound of someone who endured myriad struggles ans persevered. He was robbed of an education, but still built a thriving career. He was hit by a car that could have left him dead, yet he walked away without a scratch. MESSIAH! didn’t need to be the bad guy, but this crooked world made him this way. This villain is winning.
Where are you living these days?
MESSIAH!: Charlotte, North Carolina, where I’m from.
The new record’s been out for a bit. How are you feeling?
MESSIAH!: I’m geeked and vexed as the homies say. I’m very excited, bro.
Before the record dropped, were you nervous?
MESSIAH!: It has been like over two years at his point since I dropped, so it’s a lot of everything. A lot of nerves, a lot of emotion. I’m happy though.
Did you start working on this shortly after you dropped PERFECT 7?
MESSIAH!: This one came together within the past six, eight months. I got another one sitting. That’s the one I was working on right after PERFECT 7. This one is the precursor, the prelude.
Were you not feeling what you were working on?
MESSIAH!: Oh, no, no, no, no. I love it. It is very special and precious to me, honestly. How this came together was, it had been a minute since I dropped. I wanted to go on a single run before dropping the project. And then the singles kind of slowly fell together into another project. This felt like a cool way to dip my toe back in the water of releasing before giving my actual firstborn child up.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
The new record’s been out for a bit. How are you feeling?
MESSIAH!: I’m geeked and vexed as the homies say. I’m very excited, bro.
Before the record dropped, were you nervous?
MESSIAH!: It has been like over two years at his point since I dropped, so it’s a lot of everything. A lot of nerves, a lot of emotion. I’m happy though.
Did you start working on this shortly after you dropped PERFECT 7?
MESSIAH!: This one came together within the past six, eight months. I got another one sitting. That’s the one I was working on right after PERFECT 7. This one is the precursor, the prelude.
Were you not feeling what you were working on?
MESSIAH!: Oh, no, no, no, no. I love it. It is very special and precious to me, honestly. How this came together was, it had been a minute since I dropped. I wanted to go on a single run before dropping the project. And then the singles kind of slowly fell together into another project. This felt like a cool way to dip my toe back in the water of releasing before giving my actual firstborn child up.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Before the record dropped, were you nervous?
MESSIAH!: It has been like over two years at his point since I dropped, so it’s a lot of everything. A lot of nerves, a lot of emotion. I’m happy though.
Did you start working on this shortly after you dropped PERFECT 7?
MESSIAH!: This one came together within the past six, eight months. I got another one sitting. That’s the one I was working on right after PERFECT 7. This one is the precursor, the prelude.
Were you not feeling what you were working on?
MESSIAH!: Oh, no, no, no, no. I love it. It is very special and precious to me, honestly. How this came together was, it had been a minute since I dropped. I wanted to go on a single run before dropping the project. And then the singles kind of slowly fell together into another project. This felt like a cool way to dip my toe back in the water of releasing before giving my actual firstborn child up.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Did you start working on this shortly after you dropped PERFECT 7?
MESSIAH!: This one came together within the past six, eight months. I got another one sitting. That’s the one I was working on right after PERFECT 7. This one is the precursor, the prelude.
Were you not feeling what you were working on?
MESSIAH!: Oh, no, no, no, no. I love it. It is very special and precious to me, honestly. How this came together was, it had been a minute since I dropped. I wanted to go on a single run before dropping the project. And then the singles kind of slowly fell together into another project. This felt like a cool way to dip my toe back in the water of releasing before giving my actual firstborn child up.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Were you not feeling what you were working on?
MESSIAH!: Oh, no, no, no, no. I love it. It is very special and precious to me, honestly. How this came together was, it had been a minute since I dropped. I wanted to go on a single run before dropping the project. And then the singles kind of slowly fell together into another project. This felt like a cool way to dip my toe back in the water of releasing before giving my actual firstborn child up.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
The singles that you dropped, they’ve done so well. The one with MAVI and Ovrkast., “silent heel” did some numbers and is a great track. Were you expecting that?
MESSIAH!: It feels good. It just feels good to be welcomed back with open arms. My fan base has grown enormously since the last time I dropped. It feels like I’m hosting a party and I opened the door for a few guests and then I went back in the room to change and I came back out and it’s just mad people.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Did that mean when you were getting ready to drop this, there was more anticipation, nervousness than ever before?
MESSIAH!: A hundred percent, bro. A hundred percent. I overthought everything, every aspect of the art specifically. Even though this was not the project I intended to make, I want to be intentional about how I put it together. I am so particular and sensitive about that kind of shit.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
When was the first moment you knew that you not only liked rap music, but were better at making it than everyone else around you?
MESSIAH!: It was probably early on, and I think I thought I was better than everybody before I actually was. That’s the thing. That’s the spirit of being a rapper for real. I was always big on music in general, but especially rap because the household I grew up in. I always knew I wanted to be a rapper for as long as I can remember, but I was a shy kid type shit. I remember in middle school, I used to battle n****s in class. Well, really, n****s would try to battle me. They found out that I wanted to be a rapper, so they would try to prove that they were better than me.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
It was like nobody really was. Then it kind of just kept going, and I really started fine tuning the music and the lyrics and everything. I was telling my mom the other day, even when I wasn’t as good as I am now, I think I had the intention to be. I remember, bro, I was in sixth or seventh grade when Trayvon Martin got killed. I wrote a rap about it. I was 12 years old and having emotions of a young black boy and transforming it into a song. That’s crazy, that early on, you know what I’m saying? By the time I was a teenager in high school, 10th grade, around the time I met MAVI and all of this, it was pretty solidified. Me and him would go back and forth trading verses, and he was the first person I met that I was like, ‘Damn, you can actually keep up with me.’
Who introduced you to music? Someone in your family?
MESSIAH!: Both my parents. It wasn’t even an intentional thing. My dad is a hip hop head who collected CDs. I don’t think he’d call himself a collector, it is just what he does. He had every mixed tape you can imagine, especially Jay-Z shit. I heard a lot of Jay-Z deep cuts that I feel like nobody’s ever heard. My pops was always on that. He used to burn CDs and shit when I was a kid. My dad would ask us to write down a list of songs that we liked and make us mixtapes.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
With my mom, it was a lot of R&B nineties type of music. I remember she had Usher Confessions, and that’s one of my favorite albums to this day. Growing up in a Black household, my dad was the super underground hip hop dude, and my mom was into gospel and R&B. My grandparents were into gospel, too, and my auntie liked the popular radio hits. I had a good melting pot for sure.
Do you have siblings?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I got two little sisters. They’re twins.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Do they like your music?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, I like to think so. One of my little sisters, she actually just texted me recently, and they came to the show we did last year in Charlotte at the Fillmore. She was so grateful for the VIP tickets we gave her. They had a little section seated type shit, all the family members. She was telling me she saw BKTHERULA at the same venue but was in the moshpit and it was mad hectic [laughs].
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
When did you start going from freestyling to actually recording and putting your stuff on record?
MESSIAH!: Super early, bro. One of my dad’s friends is a producer, so he used to bring me to his studio. He was the first person to ever pay me for a verse. I think he gave me $50 or a hundred dollars or something, and I was like 14 or something. He just wanted a verse for this album he was producing. I don’t know where it went or what happened with it, but it was just on some family friend love type of shit. Other than that, though, I was so passionate about this shit, I was figuring out ways to record demos for myself. I had a fucking busted ass laptop. We used to have Guitar Hero, the rock band version with all the instruments. I figured out you could hook the Guitar Hero mic up. It was a USB mic, and you could hook it up to the laptop. I was using that shit on Audacity, and I was probably in sixth, seventh grade around the time, and I was just recording demos. I started teaching myself to audio engineer and mix and all of this around that same time. My family saw how into it I was, and so they started getting me little equipment, little interfaces and microphones and shit. It got to a point where I just had it set up. That’s part of how I met MAVI. It was like, damn, I’m nice. I got the set up at the crib.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Was freestyling as a kid a way to express yourself because you were so shy?
MESSIAH!: Low key probably, honestly. Even in those instances, it was amongst the homies. So the homies already kind of seen my real personality anyway, but I think that was more of some just fun with the homie shit. But then I would go back home and have the super deep moments. None of my friends ever heard the Trayvon Martin song, you feel me? I would sit and write poetry and real deep songs about my emotions and shit that nobody ever really heard. Then I would go do the fun battle with the homies, like, ‘nah, I actually can rap.’ There were two sides of it.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
And how old are you now?
MESSIAH!: 25.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
I know you dropped some music towards the end of high school. How do you feel about that work now?
MESSIAH!: I hate ’em [laughs]. DEADMAN was senior year of high school, and when I listen to it, I just hear angsty, teenage version of myself. I hate it, but people fuck with it, so I just keep it up. After high school, I went to Howard University in DC. Me and MAVI went together. We was roommates.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
We were doing so much rap, and that’s how I think he made no roses at the same time. I was making HARD 2 KILL. I brought the little setup from the crib to college and we just was recording in the dorm every day. We had dropped some songs on SoundCloud and shit like that, but it was like once I got to college, there was these open mics that they used to do. It was just a talent show type of thing. So everybody comes and plays guitar or does spoken word type of shit. They didn’t have anybody that was out there rapping. It was just a circle of kids just sitting down on the yard basically and doing whatever performance.
Me and MAVI was like, ‘Bro, fuck it. Let’s go rap our verses acapella.’ It is poetry. So we started doing that, and the reception I got from that really is what made me realize I could be a rapper, even though I had made music and put it out, I never really had that type of public feedback up until that point. I ended up leaving Howard after the financial aid scandal they had and all of this shit. So I went back home to Charlotte and I would go up to the campus to visit MAVI and see people and shit. Every time I was on campus, people would stop me and be like, ‘Bro, I remember this verse that you did months ago at the open mic thing.’ That was what had me like, ‘Oh yeah, I got something special I can really build from here.’
You left after that scandal broke?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, basically I was directly affected by, so I went home for a year, and then I ended up moving back to DC and going to the University of DC.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
They stole money that was going to you essentially.
MESSIAH!: Exactly. It was nuts. But at this point they cleared my debt at least, so…I had a crazy bill. They sent it to my credit score and everything for a second. It was fucked up.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Do you go back to Charlotte immediately after getting your degree?
MESSIAH!: Naw, this was during the pandemic, so I was living in Maryland for a little bit after going to school in DC. Me and MAVI had an apartment together. The pandemic hit and my lease in Maryland ended. So I’m like, fuck it, I’m going to go back to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte for maybe a year, then I ended up moving to LA for two years. I really just moved back to Charlotte in October.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
What brought you out to LA?
MESSIAH!: A mix of things. I was with this girl for a lot of years and she ended up going to UCLA for grad school, and it was perfect for me too. It was music shit out there to do. It was a good time. I feel like I didn’t appreciate LA as much until I left, and I didn’t realize how much love I had in LA either until I left.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Did you make good music connections out there?
MESSIAH!: For sure. That’s really what I’m getting at. Even the “silent heel” video was one we shot in LA — that was earlier this year. I had already moved back to Charlotte, like I said, in October. Then I went back out there in January, February to shoot the video, and there were mad people just willing to pop out and show their support.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Do you want to stay in Charlotte long term?
MESSIAH!: Yes. I’m going to always have a spot here. I’m still figuring shit out and how I want to move, but I definitely am going to buy a house here and I think either be back and forth between here and LA for work or however I end up doing it. This is my home base.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
What makes the Charlotte rap scene different from anywhere else?
MESSIAH!: I have a couple answers to that. First, I think what makes it different is what makes the South different in general, which started off as I think a lack of infrastructure to have a rap scene. But Charlotte is behind in that area, still behind Atlanta. It is actually one of those if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere type of shit. It forced me to get creative. It forced us to build our own community and our own internal infrastructure to be able to do shit.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Our stars are stars type of shit. That’s something I think is beautiful. Also, I don’t want to stay in Charlotte for the rap scene. That’s why I was saying being back and forth between LA and here for work. I love Charlotte for other reasons. It’s home base and I feel more steady here. I feel like I do my best writing here, but the parts of the rap job that I got to do, I feel like I got to go outside and go to other cities and shit. I kind of fuck with it this way. When I was in DC I lived in Maryland, I had an apartment right outside the city, and it was super chill. I would have to hop on the train, go to DC to go to class and do all of my music networking and all of that shit. Then it was like I could come home and just be around the trees and be quiet. That’s how I want to set my whole life up.
Tell me about the album title.
MESSIAH!: There’s a personal aspect, too. I think for me it means this idea of survival. Especially for me in my experience as a Black man, the things we got to do to survive be looked at as evil, but survival can’t be evil. It is impossible. You know what I’m saying? I got to do what I got to do to survive and to win and survival is victory at its core. It was also inspired by The Truman Show. I watched that shit when I was too young.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
Did it fuck you up?
MESSIAH!: Yeah, bro. The same age I started making demos and shit is when I watched The Truman Show. Maybe there’s a connection there. I feel like this idea of surveillance on the Black community is how it paralleled to me. They’re trying to keep Truman in this box, and he’s trying to escape for his own sake of mental health and success. That’s what it feels like being a Black man. It was just about breaking out of whatever box they said I was supposed to be in and winning against all odds.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
What about the name Messiah?
MESSIAH!: There are also a lot of layers there [laughs]. My name is Micah, which means something similar to Messiah. But beyond that, in 2018 I was just having a lot of conversations and I was like, ‘What if God is supposed to be in me?’ If I’m made in God’s image, why am I looking at pictures of a white Jesus that’s supposed to be my savior? Why was I raised to be praying to this entity of somebody who doesn’t look like me at all that is supposed to be the perfect human? I can never be him ever. The idea was, if I’m made in God’s image, then God is in me. Everything I do is modeled after God. So, I’m my own savior. I want to give myself an image of somebody that can be a savior, that I can be for myself — that I can look up to myself.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.
I want to give that to people that look like me. The idea, not that I’m their savior, but that you can be Messiah for yourself. You feel me? Everybody can be their own Messiah. And it goes back to the villain wins thing. You are in control of your circumstances, and other times you’re not as much, but you gotta survive. It was also a tongue in cheek way to come back from DEADMAN too, because it was basically after I made DEADMAN, where I got into a crazy accident and I should have died, but I actually walked away without a scratch.
Wow. Was it a car crash?
MESSIAH!: Yeah I was leaving this intersection and I got T-boned by a big ass truck, and the car flipped over in the air and shit and landed on the wheels, and I got hit right on the driver’s door. I couldn’t get out of the car. I had to roll a window down and jump out the window and shit. I had DEADMAN stickers and they were flying out the window as I’m jumping out. I was looking at that, and I was shook up, but I felt like I was looking down on myself, too. There wasn’t a scratch on me. It feels like it shouldn’t have happened that way, but the fact that it did was very symbolic to me. I got God with me, and I’m going to actually put some purpose into my words because it’s clearly why I’m here.