Photo by Skretts via Wikimedia Commons
MIKE
MIKE
It is often a red flag when rappers try to flood the market with their songs. Many such performers seem to forget that there is a fine line between being generous with your material and giving in to the belief that everything you record must be released. The law of diminishing returns comes to the fore here; each extraneous release tragically suggests that the performer is running out of clever ideas.
Thankfully, this has not been the case with New York-based rapper MIKE, performing in Milwaukee at the Vivarium on April 26. 2023 began with the release of Beware of the Monkey, his tenth (!) album. By that fall of that year, he had released Faith is a Rock, a collaboration with Wiki and Kid Alchemist, along with the 24-track album Burning Desire. In March 2024 came Pinball, a joint effort with producer Tony Seltzer. All these records not only sound good—they also sound necessary.
For MIKE, there is an urgency to this sense of necessity. “I feel like when I was younger, I was pretty shy,” he explains. “Or maybe not as talkative as I am today. Writing became a way to gain understanding of things I didn’t understand before … It’s my tool to kind of figure out life.” In MIKE’s strongest material, one can hear the rapper working through his problems in real time, or in his words “breaking down things in a way that’s easier for me to understand.” This approach is evident on Burning Desire’s “Snake Charm,” as MIKE realizes that he is “On the coast of repenting, I almost could swim,” but by the end of the track he realizes he can’t yet reach that shore.
Hard on Himself
As one might expect from such verses, there is a weariness in much of MIKE’s material, and he is quick to admit that he is “a little hard on myself.” Yet there is value in letting his listeners know what he has experienced. “I think as I get older, I feel like one thing I think I’ve figured out is that maybe this is part of my calling or my purpose,” notes MIKE. “Maybe the type of music I make is my contribution to the world is to help people feel what they feel. To do that I have to share the stories of what I’ve been through.”
Helping MIKE flesh out such stories is a rotating cast of collaborators. What is most noteworthy about MIKE’s collaborative approach to album making is the fact that it feels organic. This, according to MIKE, is intentional. As he explains, “With most of my collaborators, they are usually friends first, and then eventually we see how a collaboration would work. But I’m very keen on getting to know people as people … before going straight into the studio.” Such relationships make tracks like Pinball’s “On God”—which features verses by MIKE in addition to fellow rappers Earl Sweatshirt and Tony Shhnow—sound less like a standard hip-hop song and more like a conversation between close friends. It is that feeling of intimacy that continues to make MIKE’s output so unique within the hip-hop scene and ultimately so compelling.
