From The Archives: Killer Mike, “New Breed” [Originally Published July 2003]

Last week, Killer Mike and El-P unleashed the first collaboration "Get It" off their upcoming collaborative project Run The Jewels. Although this isn't the first time that the two MCs have linked up - that would be last year's stellar R.A.P. Music - Mike's career trajectory has been interesting to say the least. Now, XXL looks back to one of its earliest interviews with Killer Mike from ten years ago in July 2003 when he released his debut album Monster.

His biggest hit to date is about the pleasures of flesh, but Killer Mike's story is much deep than that. With more ghetto tales than your average studio gangsta, OutKast's offspring is here to save the rap game.

Written by Michael A. Gonzales

Taking a brief breather during a magazine photo shoot, deep-voice Killer Mike relaxes for a moment in a black leather booth. Inside the Atlanta nightspot The Riviera, with its kitschy Las Vegas motif, Mike stares at one of the high-heeled, phat-bottomed models prancing across the star-patterened blue carpet. On the wall across the room is a 3-D mural of Vegas' finest, the intoxicated cool of the Rat Pack ("What's up, Sammy!") flashing their wicked, painted-on smiles in approval.

"Most dudes that come to Atlanta always want to go to the strip clubs," says the author of the infectious boogie "A.D.I.D.A.S." ("All Day I Dream About Sex".) The second single from his debut Monster, this track has had folks from six to 60 shimmying to its bouncy beat. Known primarily for his collaborations with OutKast, including the Grammy-winning single "The Whole World," A-town's latest country grammarian, Michael Santiago Render, gulps an aqua-blue drink that resembles toilet bowl cleaner on the rocks.

"Man," he says, nodding his cranium to the Brooklyn boom of Jay-Z blaring from massive speakers. "I been going to them spots since I was 15 years old. i even got my first blowjob in this gutter-ass strip club that looked like my uncle's basement. It was called monetary."

Looking more like a burly bouncer than the latest Southern supersar, Killer Mike finishes his plastic cup of Hpnotiq mixed with Grey Goose vodka. A sly grin brightens his face as the hulking rapper takes a trip down mammary lane. "To this day, I swear that my homeboy paid the chick," he says. "But he has always denied it. All I do know is one second she was giving me a dance, the next her hand was in my pants and then - blam - I was a man. After that, I was gig on head missions all the time. I was addicted to head."

"When your 15, it's cute watching girls shaking their ass," says Mike. "But you have to understand the brutal truths that these girls live. A lot of them are dealing with mental issuers or they've been raped or their daddy's done fucked them when they were children. That stuff that sobers one up about the scene."

While he shares his stores of sin freely ("I once had a hooker for four of us in the back of a Buick Skylark") Killer Mike has never been one to romanticize. Not the pussy nor the guns, the drugs nor the money. Indeed, as the latest fire-breathing dragon to escape from the Dungeon Family (OutKast, Organized Noize, Goodie Mob), Killer Mike is all about true life experience.

"I like old chicks now," he says with a hearty laugh. "A dude can learn a lot about sex from older women; they're more comfortable with their bodies and they're more willing to try shit. I'm down for Stella to get her groove back - her neck and her crack. And that's real, goddamn."

With the recent release of his solo joint Monster (Aquemini/Columbia Records), an autobiographical document of his 28-year existence in the dirty South, Killer Mike pays rhythmic homage to his hip-hop heroes - Kilo Ali, Afrika Bambaattaa and N.W.A., among others. "When I was a kid my grandmother used to take me to a Pentecostal church," recalls Mike. "I hated going to church, but I was into the music and listening to people's testimonials. When I started working on Monster, I knew I wanted it to sound like me testifying."

As his Aquemini labelmate Slimm Calhoun, who first met Killer Mike during OutKast's Stankonia sessions (Mike made his debut on the classic album's "Snappin' & Trappin'"), notes: "With Mike, there is such honesty when he talks to you about his life, the last thing he could ever be in front of the mic is fake."

After four hours inside the faux-casino, the afternoon sunlight beaming from the Atlanta sky is blinding, Squinting like a posse of hood-rat Eastwoods, Big Mike's collective of sound providers and rhyme slayers - known around these parts as the Grime Time Officials - congregate in the parking lot. Drowning out the chirping of sparrows, the motley crew posts up against a brown van with Killer Mike's grim mug plastered on the side.

"Are we about ready?" asks producer Nsiso, a.k.a. Mr. C-Lo. The crew has a five-hour drive ahead of them, to perform at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina's Club New York. Not to be confused with the soulful poet from Goodie Mob, Nsiso has known Mike since their school daze at Atlanta's Morehouse College. "We lived in the same dorm," Nsiso recalls. "On the fourth floor of DuBois Hall, Mike would be ripping everybody with his ill freestyles. He was only in school for a year, but anybody who thought they could rap, Mike would just murder them."

Having grown up with OutKast's Big Boi in Savannah, Nsiso started coming to the studio with the Georgia rap kings while recording their second album, 1996's ATLiens. With a background in classical piano and saxophone, Nsiso remembers the sessions like trips to the candy store. "They allowed me to come into the studio and mess around with the equipment

"Off and on, we worked on Monster for two years," Nsiso says of making Mike's debut. "We went through different labels [Aquemini Records was originally distributed through Elektra], different directions and different people voicing their opinions. There were times when we became frustrated, but we never stopped working." Under the moniker the Beat Bullies, Nsiso and his production team recording 40 funky, bottom-heavy tracks for Mike to rap atop. "We sampled a little bit but I still prefer the sound of live instrumentation."

Rife with references to Kurt Cobain, Black Sabbath and Led Zepplin, alongside shout-outs to B.I.G., 'Pac and Ice Cube, Mike's song "Rap is Dead" speaks to the diversity of sounds he grew up on. But while the subject of rap/rock fusion is near to Mike's heart, he's been having a little trouble lately with some of the form's leading practitioners. This past April, Mike says his management informed him that California nu-metal group Korn was threatening to sue him over the title of his hit single.

"Fuck those pussy niggas," he says, voice rising. "They had a song called 'A.D.I.D.A.S.' on their album Life is Peachy [1996] but a person can't copyright a title. Their last album didn't do too well, so they figure, sue Killer Mike and get some hype. As long as they been stealing from Black people, it's about time I stole from a cracker. I'm a huge Korn fan, but since they wanna sue a nigga, I'll only buy their stuff on bootleg now." (Korn's management says the band have no plan to sue.)

"Killer Mike's record is a reflection of some of the partying, some of the struggle, some of the girls and some of the politics that go down in poor communities," says Nsiso. "Since he was raised in Adamsville, believe me, Mike knows what he's talking about."

Like many of America's chocolate cities, Adamsville hasn't been what it used to be in a long time. Once the perfect locale for rural Southerners seeking urbanization without the overcrowded condition of Chicago or New York, the Atlanta neighborhood was ravaged in the '80s by the white devil known as crack.

"Crack wiped out an entire generation of people my mother's age," says Killer Mike, positioning his bulky body in the back seat of his homeboy's car. Following the van (loaded with turntables, DJ Cutmaster Swiff and the other Grime Time Officials), Mike is munching on salted crackers and chicken Vienna sausage.

"My mother Niecy was only 16 when I was born," he says. "She was one of those people who always had her problems, but when she started smoking crack it was over. I still remember being over at my cousin's house, where my mother hung out, and these spooked-out people would be sitting around smoking. There was always this terrible stench and roaches were everywhere. I wasn't afraid, but I knew that shit wasn't right.

"Over the years, I've seen my mother suffer. I've seen her with her wrist slit open after attempting suicide. I've seen her being mistreated by the police and placed in mental health facilities. Right now, she has lost both of her kidneys and has to be on dialysis every day, but she's still hanging on."

While his grandparents tried to provide him with a stable household, Mike was one of those badass baby boys who hung out with the older dudes. "My Uncle Antman was a crazy cat," Mike remembers. "When I was eight and he was 18, I'd be rolling with him, looking at his nasty magazines or standing on the street, freestyling with his friends. If I was going to hang with the older dudes, I had to me more than a cute mascot. A nigga had to hold his own.

"A nigga had to just learn how to be a cool nigga. Not cool like The Fonz, but how to just be comfortable smiling. Although Antman dealt drugs, and would pull an AK-47 on a nigga in a minute, he was still a jokester." Polishing off the last of the stinky sausages, Mike goes on. "Uncle Ant was also fat, but he was always fucking hoes. Since I was chubby, it kind of made me realize I didn't have to be skinny to be cool."

Inspired by the music of Run-DMC and Schooly D. (blasting from a beatbox tuned to WAOK 1380 AM), a young Mike began developing his gruff, combative style. "I would battle with Ant and his boys, and after a few years my flow got much better. One day I just opened my mouth and shocked them niggas. That's when I realized, Yo, I can do this. Music saved my life. Believe me, at the height of my selling coke and wilding out, if I didn't have hip-hop in my life I might be dead."

School was salvation, too. Even while he was getting wrapped up in the dirty Southern crime life, Mike kept his grades up at Fredrick Douglass High. "I had mentors," he says. "My English teacher Ms. Pott and my football coach Mr. Frazier encouraged me to go to college." Although he earned an art scholarship to Morris Brown College, he chose the prestigious Black college Morehouse instead. "I had bet my homeroom teach, who was an alumnus, a hundred dollars that I would get in. He never did give me my money."

With his street-honed underworld acumen, Mike made for a strange (and as it turns out, lucrative) fit at the stately academic institution. "When I got to Morehouse and realized how many middle-class Black kids did drugs, it was like heaven. One of my boys first asked me if I could get him some pot. I said, 'What is pot?,' I'd never heard it called that. But after that, I tried to keep every Cosby kid in that school high."

After riding down the darkened "trail of tears," as he's dubbed this stretch of highway 501, Mike gets hyped when the subject turns to the current state of hip-hop. "You wanna know what's fucking up rap?" he says. "People are just content with being mediocre. I was once beat for bringing home all Cs on my report card, because that represented being just average. From that point on, I knew that anything I did, I had to be the best. It's not good enough for me to just be second, because I feel as though I'm competing with every rapper. Friend or foe, I'm trying got slay them."

Mike was supposed to take the stage at midnight, but it's after 3 AM when the crew finally pulls into Club New York's parking lot. While the spot is actually fixin' to close, there's a posse of about 30 dudes hanging out. Too late to perform, Killer Mike signs autographs and shakes a few hands before walking into the club.

Like a fusion of Fred Sanford's junkyard and a backwoods juke joint, Club New York is cosmopolitan in name only. Mike makes his way over to the bar. Spinning records in the rear of the club, a DJ eyes Mike from across the room and, nodding knowingly, cues up OutKast's "The Whole World." In a moment, the song that won Killer Mike his Grammy is pumping through the speakers.

Mike's flattered, but says that, while he displays the golden statuette in his granny's crib, he isn't satisfied. "I won that award because I was on an OutKast record. That's cool, but I still feel the need to bring home another one that is just mine. Fuck sharing, I want me own shit and that's for real."

There's that Killer instinct for you.