Down for skating on multiple levels, Killer Mike’s latest album R.A.P Music is ideal fuel for the session, and it is only a matter of time before you hear one of his tracks cut to some high-speed lines. This is the extended version of his interview from our March issue.
Killer Mike performing at the Skate park of Tampa’s 20 year anniversary party. PHOTO/MERONEK
Where are you from? What was your debut appearance in the rap circle?I’m from Atlanta, Georgia and I’m from a neighborhood called Adamsville. I made my debut with Outkast on a song called “The Whole World”, that’s what most people know me for. Then I left the majors. My career has kind of been like a parallel to what happened with skate culture. I was a kid in the 80’s and I remember when skate culture first rolled to prominence on my side of things, which was basically young black kids. It kind of came in and leapt out like a fad because big corporations were behind it and we got tired of it and we walked away. That’s kind of how rappers careers get dead. After my first album went gold, at that time going gold wasn’t like today, where the biggest rapper in the world, Rick Ross is a gold artist today, gold means something again, but at that time it just didn’t mean as much, so for me it just made more sense to walk away and just go independent the way a lot skaters and skate companies did. I just kind of forced my own way with a company called Grim Time, put out a series called Pledge that with each one that dropped the audience grew and last year dropped an album called “R.A.P Music” with the underground legend El-P of Company Flow, and it’s been hailed as one of the three best albums of the year, all genres so, I’m very happy and thankful to people like Time magazine, Rolling Stone, and Spin. It’s just a cool to be mentioned in those publications in their list.
Were there skateboarders in your neighborhood growing up?Yeah, it was something we got watched and when we were really little kids in the mid-eighties. By the time the late eighties, ‘92, ‘93 came along, kids that I had gone to elementary school with were skating, one in particular was my man Lawrence Johnson, he was one of the first kids that skated. There was a movement you know in Atlanta in that time called the prep movement where kids would just kind of emulate stuff they saw in other places of the culture, so kids, the preppy look they saw on TV, the kids would pick that up, you know some kids were into b-boying cause that was already just hip hop. But the skateboarding popped up and kids just took an infatuation with it. Ya there were a group of kids who were down hard about it. Lawrence Johnson was a friend of mine and he was one of those.Five points has always been a skate haven, Stratosphere (skateshop), shouts out to Thomas and his son. Stratosphere‘s been a store that’s been down there that kids been supporting the culture they’ve been supporting the store forever so you know black kids have been skating in Atlanta a long time, at least 20 years that I know of.
You’ve recently performed at the SPoT 20th anniversary party. Is there a noticeable difference between doing a show like that and a general audience show?Our audiences have been wildly enthusiastic. I toured all year with El-P. The hip-hop audiences that I’m used to rocking it in front of really give it to you, they really do. But I can honestly tell you I’ve never encountered an experience like at that event. I knew when you hit a bad-ass move on a ramp or something they hit the deck to let you know, “We f—k with you,” you know, “Good job.” But I didn’t know that at shows they did that. Kids’ hands were red from hitting the edge of the stage. I pushed my son into the crowd like, “Hey, he belongs with y’all. This is y’all scene.” They caught him. I will gladly rock any skate crowd, any skatepark, anywhere because of the overwhelming enthusiasm I’ve gotten from the skate events I’ve done.
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