With a name like Killer Mike, you’d expect Michael Render would find it difficult to make friends, but his rap career to date has been built largely on partnerships. In 2003, he won a Grammy with his very first appearance on a single, guesting with his fellow Atlanta rappers Outkast.
That year, his major label solo album, Monster, sold unspectacularly next to another hip hop album released around the same time: 50 Cent’s nine-times platinum Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and he has fared better in the years since as half of the duo Run the Jewels with Jaime “El-P” Meline.
Now he’s solo again for the first time in 11 years, and it doesn’t sound like he’s going for hits as a 48-year-old. Think of the Michael album more as a successful musician stepping aside from the day job to put out their autobiography. He’s nine years-old on the cover in what looks like an official school portrait photo, but with both a halo and devil horns superimposed.
While his work with Run the Jewels has often been fiercely political – Walking in the Snow, written in 2019 but unveiled the day after George Floyd’s 2020 murder, was disturbingly accurate on the subject of police brutality – here he’s still vivid and passionate on what it means to be a black man today, but now with a more personal slant.
The song Run depicts his progress from drug dealing teenager to wealthy social activist, while making clear that no one like him can truly relax. In the intro, the comedian Dave Chappelle tells him that being black in America is like “storming the beach at Normandy… you gotta keep running”.
Slummer is a beautiful song overladen with gospel voices on which he undermines his image as a community leader (“I ain’t a pastor, you bastard”) and describes the pregnancy of a teen years’ girlfriend.
In contrast to the aggressive sonics of Run the Jewels, the sombre churchy feel continues on Motherless, an intensely vulnerable song about the deaths of his mother, who had him at 16, and his grandmother, who raised him.
There are a few more commercial moments, such as what counts nowadays as a rare guest appearance from Outkast’s Andre 3000 over the futuristic synths of Scientists & Engineers, and a skyscraping turn from another Atlanta man, CeeLo Green, on Down by Law. But this is really all about what it’s like to be Mike, and it’s a fascinating tale.
