Photo Credit: Drewzski
If Velle Vell has been a little quieter than usual these last few months, there’s good reason for that. Next month the Milwaukee rapper will go to trial on gun charges, so he’s been lying low and putting music on the back burner. But Vell isn’t one to bite his tongue, either, and he’s eager to talk about what happened that night.
This is how he tells the story—and what jurors will hear next month if he takes the stand (his lawyer believes he should, he says, because understanding his actions requires hearing some hard truths about Vell’s neighborhood). Vell and a friend were outside around 1 in the morning when a car swerved down the block so recklessly they assumed it must have been a kid taking a stolen car on a joyride. But then it returned, this time driving smoother. Then the car came back a third time, stalling at the end of the block. The driver cut the headlights, then hit the gas. This was a drive-by.
Vell says he didn’t have any other options. He fired first, sending warning shots at the car and chasing it off. Nobody was hit. His gun was registered and he had a concealed carry permit for it, he says, but he understood he was going to jail. “When I took my classes, they tell you that if you shoot your gun, you’re going to jail,” he says.
When the police came, Vell says he was upfront. “They pulled up and said, ‘You heard shooting?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, it was me,’” he recalls. “I didn’t have no problem telling them because of the simple fact I did it. They were going to find my gun, so it was going to point to me anyway. There was no point in lying.
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“But in this case, I’m not a criminal,” Vell continues. “At the end of the day, I told my attorney there were only two ways you were going to see me: You were going to see me on Fox 6 for being dead, or you were going to see me here for defending myself. That’s why I’m confident that I’m going to beat this case. If I can sit down and explain what happened, we can do what we need to do to take care of this.”
Would it help Vell’s case if the jurors heard his music? Maybe not, but it would help them understand where he comes from. Drawing from the furious drill music of Chicago, where he spent parts of his youth, Vell raps with breathless intensity on his 2018 album Warning Before Destruction, detailing the cutthroat mentality of the streets and the extreme measures that youth will resort to when they’re cut off from other economic opportunities. Part of the power of rap music, especially for listeners cut off from the grimmer realities of city life, is it confronts us with truths we don’t want to hear. And Vell’s music, for all its buoyance and flair, is even more confrontational than most.
Vell describes his rap as a departure from what he calls the “cell phone music” that dominates portions of the city’s rap scene. “Most rappers sell drugs,” Vell says. “But I tell a whole other story, because I don’t use drugs. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do none of that. I’m just a regular person. I’m not saying I’m a perfect person; I’ve got my flaws. But basically I rap about the route that I took.”
Vell says he’s not ashamed of his path—he wouldn’t rap about it if he were—but says he wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It was dangerous. He’s got a real job now and says he’s relieved to be out of that life, since all he wanted was a job to begin with.
“My first route was job applications. It was ‘let me apply for Walgreens,’ and ‘let me apply for McDonald’s,’ and if I’d gotten one of those jobs, I never would have jumped into doing that stuff,” he says. “Now look at me. I got a job. I don’t need to do that shit. At the end of the day, if you can get any of these drug dealers a job, so they can help their family or improve their situation, I guarantee you they’ll stop, at least most of them.
“All the shit that I did, I don’t think anybody wants to do that,” Vell continues. “If I had the money, I’d be buying up houses, trying to get into real estate, or owning a truck company. I’d do that! But my mama and daddy didn’t have money or good enough credit to get a loan so I could start something like that, and yet people wonder why people do what they do. We’re just trying to survive like everybody else.”
Velle Vell’s Warning Before Destruction is streaming on Apple Music and Spotify.
