Milwaukee is filled right now with rappers who do everything right, at least on paper. They play the right shows, run in the trendiest circles, spend big on videos and marketing and know how to charm local media. Their social media feeds look like marketing students designed them. And yet at the end of the day, most of these artists don’t have all that much to show for their best practices. They hardly sell any music and remain virtually unknown outside of the city.
But there’s a whole other world of rappers on the city’s North Side who, at least by conventional wisdom, do everything wrong. A prodigal 19-year-old whose fierce raps disguise his effortless melodic instincts, Lil Axion is one of those artists who’s made the success that he’s achieved so far look almost too easy. Numbers wise, he’s not quite in the city’s top tier yet—he’s young, so he’s got time—but he’s got a couple YouTube videos with more than 100,000 views, and about a dozen others in the 25k-80k range. He’s built a real following, despite business practices that would make any self-respecting artist manager wince.
“I ain’t gonna lie: I built my audience on my own,” Axion says. “I ain’t have nobody promoting me or nobody managing me. I still don’t have no promoter or anything like that.” For a long time, he admits, his music didn’t even sound right. “I was working with this older guy, and he was charging me $20 to record and $20 to mix it. But I didn’t know what mixing was,” he laughs. “My song weren’t really mixed, because I didn’t know what any of that shit was!”
That’s all in the past, though. Axion’s recent releases have been much more polished. Produced by the rapper’s go-to collaborator Tay Love, his new mixtape, Hands In Hands Out, is a standout example of Milwaukee street rap circa this very moment: trap drums, slapping bass, hard raps and no gimmicks. It includes guest spots from several of the buzziest acts on the city’s North Side, including Weupnexxt Fresh, MT Twins and Looney Baby, and features a prime single candidate in “LifeStyle,” one of Axion’s catchiest, most buoyant tracks yet.
Axion says he feels like he’s playing catch up. He spent four months in jail last year, and it cost him. “I missed out on a lot of stuff,” he says. “I was hearing my name on the radio but I was in jail. I had three shows that I missed. I was supposed to play with Lil Baby. And Money Man. I was supposed to open for him, too.” Hands In Hands Out includes Axion’s addition to the ever-growing canon of first-day-out songs, “Ain’t Safe,” an incensed track about life under a parole officer’s microscope.
Axion credits club shows for helping him build an audience. He says he’s been playing them since he was 16 or 17, when he was way too young to be in the club (“Everybody knew I wasn’t supposed to be there,” he laughs, “so of course they all wanted to know who I was.”) But his success has also come at least in part because he understands something that some of his peers have been slow to pick up on: The audience for Milwaukee rap extends far beyond Milwaukee.
“I get a lot of messages from people from weird places, places I’ve never even heard of, and I get a lot of streams from outside the city,” Axion says. “There are a lot of cities that are listening to Milwaukee right now. Detroit loves us. Ohio loves us. So it’s important to move around. Since I’ve been out, I did a show in Indiana. I went to Detroit, and went to Phoenix. A lot of people say you’ve got to make a name in your city before you go somewhere. But that’s a myth to me. It’s good to do it, but sometimes your own city isn’t going to give that to you.”
Axion says his recording process has been evolving. He used to write his raps, he says, “but I ain’t been writing since I got out of jail. I just want to perfect my craft freestyling.” It’s a handier skill than writing, he explains. “Sometimes a big artist will show you songs, and if they want you on them you’ve got to be ready to just knock a song out. You can’t be writing! They’re going to be looking at you like, ‘You ready?’ So I’m focusing on freestyling. I can write, but it’s important to be able to do both.”
Lil Axion’s Hands In Hands Out is streaming now on Apple Music.
