MIKE’s Sentimentalism

I first heard of MIKE in an interview with The Fader back in late June. I skimmed the interview looking for specific tracks to play as I ran it back from the top. Soon as I came upon a link to ‘GODS WITH ME’ I was hooked. I had to find more.

There are only a few singular songs scattered on his SoundCloud, the majority of his posted tracks compiled into one-listen projects of varying length. This caught my attention off grip. Personally, I like the aesthetics of this demanding the listener respect his practice to fruition. He wants you to get the whole pie. May God Bless Your Hustle is his most actualized project. About an hour long, with notable features from Wiki and other artists on New York’s underground scene and production handled by himself and sLUMs affiliates Sixpress, Navy Blue, and Tony Seltzer it’s a solid statement as an artist and solidifies his own idiosyncratic style by tapping around his influences and modern cadences, playing around, opening up about his relationship with his mother, his own depressions, the struggles of black teenager traversing NYC’s DIY world. For an 18-year-old, he is fleshed out and developed to a surprisingly delightful degree.

MIKE’s music is refreshing. Spending most of his formative years in and around New York City and the Northeast, those influences stick out. That DOOM-esque matter of fact oddball flow is a good look, that powerful booming confidence he spits seemingly from the throat. May God Bless Your Hustle and By The Water are clear evidence of this. They’re both essentially travelogues of life in New York City. ‘Forever Find Flight’ is Metal Face as fuck. Just spit bars in story form be honest, keep it loose, reminds me of ‘Dead Bent’.

“I see you reaching for that dap, you never reached my hand.”

Yet its usually the songs you hear before a major release that tell of an artist’s potential. There are other subtleties the obvious DOOM shit and the Earl Sweatshirt nods (Earl is a mentor of MIKE’s). In that same interview with The Fader he says back in his childhood in England he would watch Grime videos. He shouts out Skepta more than once in tracks. The way he flows on ‘GODS WITH ME’ for example, the way he uses the spaces between beats is special.

My favorite thing though, is the lack of shitting on other sub-genres of Hip Hop. It’s commonplace and has always been to try to separate yourself from parts of rap that you find unsavory. Backpackers in the early-2000’s rejected Lil Jon’s angsty Crunk music, and this has manifested to today where any artist who considers themselves “woke” or conscious will take jabs at trap artists, claiming that they are what Real Hip Hop should sound like.

But I didn’t catch any of this from MIKE. He is confident in the music he makes; he doesn’t need to compare himself to another artist. He knows what he’s feeling, he knows how to use his music to look at his life objectively. Don’t sleep on him.

Credit: Marcus Scott Williams