Killer Mike’s Critique of Wokeness
Killer Mike is a man of contradictions. He has campaigned for Bernie Sanders and rapped about celebrating Ronald Reagan’s death; he also supports gun ownership and speaks warmly about Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Years ago, he renounced the Christian faith he was raised with, but his first solo album in a decade, Michael—whose cover is a childhood photo of Mike, adorned with devil horns and a halo—is laden with gospel choirs and biblical references. “You don’t have to pick a side with me,” the 48-year-old said over Zoom, amid tokes from a joint. “You gonna go to church with me. You gonna go to the Blue Flame with me.”
That flexibility has, at times, invited controversy. Last year, a referred to the rapper as “more politically for those constituents to vote. Though many of his songs envision , he went viral for asking protesters not to burn buildings during the George Floyd protests, leading some commentators to accuse him of . The new album is partly a dispatch from our ever-exhausting culture wars over ideological purity: One groaner labels his critics’ “woke-ass shit” as “broke-ass shit.” But it is far fresher and more interesting as a memoir of a category-scrambler, a radical-by-reputation’s tribute to the “deeply southern, traditional, Black family” he told me he was raised in.
