I got kicked on my ass when I listened to that prosecutor. You motherfuckers got me today, I knew it was coming … when Eric Holder decided to resign. … You motherfuckers got me today. You kicked me on my ass today, because I have a 20-year-old son and a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them today. … It is not about race, it is not about class, it is not about color. It is about what they killed him for: It is about poverty, it is about greed, and it is about a war machine. It is us against the motherfucking machine.

The show began, and by night’s end, a fan had posted online a video of Killer Mike’s speech; it went viral. Pitchfork, Spin, Mother Jones, Deadspin, Slate, and The Huffington Post all covered his remarks, as did a wide array of rap blogs and web sites. The New York Times framed Killer Mike as an example of African American rappers distancing themselves from Jay Z-esque financial boasts in favor of “laying bare their innermost struggles.” The Times compared Killer Mike to Kanye West, who in 2005 famously reacted to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy by saying George W. Bush didn’t care about black people.

Killer Mike speaks after Ferguson decision

Killer Mike, 40, was not an unknown figure in the rap world. He had been performing, on his own and in different groups, since he was a teenager. His father was a police officer and his mother a florist until “she got into selling a little coke on the side,” as Killer Mike put it to the Portland Mercury, and he got his start as a member of an Atlanta rap group called the Slumlordz. After a yearlong stint at Morehouse College, where he studied religion and philosophy before dropping out, Killer Mike focused on the group. He got his first big break in 1994, when he befriended Big Boi, from the rap group Outkast. After signing with Outkast’s record imprint, Aquemini, in 2000, Killer Mike appeared on Outkast’s Grammy-winning album, Stankonia, and Speakerboxxx/ The Love Below, the group’s 2003 genre-changing hit.



Killer Mike’s work has always, at least in part, taken on political themes. (It is also fun. And funny. Killer Mike does dick jokes better than almost anyone, and in October, Run the Jewels released Meow the Jewels, a rerecording of their second album, Run the Jewels 2, made entirely with cat noises. Proceeds from the album will go to a foundation to benefit families who have lost members to police violence.) His first two solo albums, Monster (2003) and I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind (2006), addressed police brutality, particularly the killing of Sean Bell, who was shot by police at his bachelor party in Queens, New York. Yet few people would have called Killer Mike a “political rapper” or even a particularly socially conscious one, even though his songs, playful and strange, often took on current events—on “That’s Life,” from Grind, he raps about how he “dissed Oprah,” lamenting that he never got to “Cruise like Tom through the slums / Where the education’s poor and the children growing dumb.” It’s just that he was a relatively peripheral figure in rap, well-known, perhaps, but certainly not an icon worthy of mention in the same hyped breath as Kanye West.

That changed after St. Louis. People outside of the rap world began to notice that the depth of Killer Mike’s thoughts weren’t limited to rhymes. He wrote op-eds on police brutality and the legitimacy of protest in Baltimore for Billboard. He gave interviews to NPR and PBS, lectured to students at NYU, MIT, and the University of Cincinnati, and made an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. (On the show, he called Bill O’Reilly “more full of shit than an outhouse.”) He joined Arianna Huffington as her guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In one BBC interview, he compared the uprising in Ferguson to the Boston Tea Party: “Riots work,” he said. “I’m an American because of that riot.” Killer Mike had achieved a new level of fame, one reached not because of musical talent so much as a profound willingness to engage with contemporary unrest.