A rising chorus of noise fills the inside of Harlem soul food staple Amy Ruth’s on a rainy mid-March afternoon. Sitting across from me with bantu knots preserved under a pristine black durag is Smino, a 25-year-old rapper from Missouri. Worried that I wouldn’t be able to hear his voice over the radio and the other guest’s buzzing conversations, I ask if he thought it would be cool to switch to a quieter table. “We can do whatever we want,” he says in his genial drawl, which sounds equal doses southern and midwestern.

Born Christopher Smith Jr., Smino’s cooly attentive character roots back to North St. Louis, where he was raised by his mom, dad, and four big sisters. His schools were in Ferguson County, and so was his grandfather’s house, where he spent a lot of time growing up. Smino describes Ferguson’s disproportionate sectioning — the majority of black residents live in underserved areas in low-income housing, while white residents live in more comfortable environs on the other side of town — as de facto segregation.

Over big platters of chicken, catfish, and yams, Smino talks about the racist pillars on which Ferguson was, and is, governed. “We were walking down the street with our book bags on and the police officers pulled up on me and three boys,” he said of the first time he encountered the city’s police department, as a fourth grader. “I was nine years old. They run up on us, put us on the car, search our bags, go through our shit, and just leave. I’m like, What's the point of this? There was no point. It’s conditioning.” Sometimes, he said of Ferguson, he can sense the palpable strain that decades of injustice have left behind. Sometimes he can feel it in the air.

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Still, a young Smino remained undeterred. At 11, he wrote and recorded his first rap, which was dedicated to a cousin he lost to gun violence. He had a bond with the mic, and when his father bought him Fruity Loops three years later, Smino also showed an innate acuity for production. Just three years later, at 14, the multi-talented teen met a local rapper named Bari after someone suggested the two neighborhood amateurs collaborate. By 2012 they were best friends, eventually forming a rap duo called Young Dumb and Out of Control. They dropped a mixtape named Retail, but then Smino set out on his own.