What's it like to spend a weekend in Atlanta with Killer Mike?
He laughed. He cried. I got sunburnt. Then we had one last moment of true vulnerability in his pickup truck
In April of last year I flew to Atlanta, Georgia, to interview Killer Mike for the cover feature of issue 149 of Loud And Quiet. You can read that finished article on loudandquiet.com, and I’ll try to not repeat too much of it here. This is not a piece about Mike’s album Michael, which I went to speak with him about. Or the history of Southern rap, from Outkast to trap to crunk, which I swatted up on before I got on the plane. This is my memory of meeting the giant man himself, and in particular one moment over the weekend that’s stuck with me, just the two of us sat in his pickup, which didn’t make it into that cover feature.
My favourite journalistic profiles, whoever they’re of, all share one thing: getting across a sense of what it was like to meet that person on that day. What interviewees have to say is of course important (and the official business of being there), but a sense of the person is much more interesting to both the writer and the reader. Take Trump: although the extreme example of a windbag of void words even when he’s talking about people eating their pets, we’re fascinated with the experience of meeting such an improbable maniac. Who cares what obscene rhetoric will froth out of his thin lips next; tell me if the lifts in his shoes are visible, how shifty his eyes are when they dart around the room, does he shuffle or stride? How route one are his conversational power plays? Did he make you sit in a smaller chair than his? Does he smell of grease?
Not operating in the world of Strong Men and monsters, as a music journalist I’ve always attempted to deconstruct the person as much as possible without going overboard. I’m not in the game of gotchas, and have been lucky enough to always interview artists I’m a true fan of or am deeply interested in, knowing that they’re artists and treating them as such, with the respect I think they deserve. So there’s a line of some sort: get across who this person is and why it relates to the music they’ve made, but don’t take the piss with your armchair psychology, and never needlessly dispel the myth of an artist. No one will thank you for that, unless they’re a massive prick.
Killer Mike is a not a prick, but there was one moment in our 2 days together that wobbled the myth ever so slightly. That’s partly why it didn’t make it into my finished article, although I’d be lying if I didn’t say that structure and what I felt was a natural ending without it didn’t play their parts too.
Day 1 of my trip was on the set of Mike’s music video of his then forthcoming single ‘Motherless’. We were 40 minutes outside of Atlanta at a house location, shooting in a garden that simply can’t exist in the UK, in terms of size, condition of lawn and terrain, which included woodland, streams and an enclosed field out back just for a laugh. America’s got a lot of space, and this was a particularly beautiful bit of it. It basically looked like the relatively nearby Augusta, if you’ve ever watched the golf Masters on TV.
The crew was big but very welcoming to a stranger who’d just arrived from London and was hanging around like a cobweb all day. After a while, Mike came and introduced himself to me between a couple of takes. It was instantly a buzz, partly because “the talent” approaching me made me look good, but also because this was Killer Mike, all of a sudden just there. This (underrated, in my eyes) rap legend and giant of a man who was warm and appeared to operate in 2 passionate modes: talking softly and sincerely, like when he was remembering his mother and grandmother to me, and roaring with cartoonishly deep laughter when cued to do so, even by the shittest of jokes. Other than that quick hello, I gave Mike a wide birth on Day 1, as did everyone else. ‘Motherless’ was a very emotional track about the loss of the two women that raised him and everyone was respectful of giving the man space. In that brief introduction though, Mike did tell me the plan for the following day. He had a compound in south Atlanta that he was developing. We’d meet there for lunch and the interview. I specifically remembered him saying lunch, ok?!