Album Of The Week: Killer Mike R.A.P. Music

In the years I've been writing about music, I've done a whole ton of interviews -- some great, some painfully awkward. But my favorite one happened a little more than four years ago at a Brazilian steakhouse in Manhattan, where I sat down with the firebrand Atlanta rapper Killer Mike. Mike's publicist was friends with the restaurant's publicist, so we both got to eat for free. And so I got to go in on these gigantic chunks of meat while Mike, one of the most incisive and enthusiastic minds in all of rap music, held forth for a couple of hours, displaying extreme candor and holding nothing back. I left with the impression that Mike was a ridiculously pleasant guy with a whole lot to say, and then I went back to my office and typed until my hands hurt. I had a couple of cassettes of him talking, and nothing seemed insubstantial enough to delete from the Q&A. In this line of work, experiences like that don't happen too often, and Mike impressed me in a way that no other musician had, before or since. He seemed like such a furiously smart and genuine human being, then, that I had to wonder how he hadn't managed to translate that depth and intensity of vision to an entire full-length album; he seemed to only be going full-bore for a song or two at a time. Back then, he'd just started releasing his series of I Pledge Allegiance To The Grind albums, which got stronger with every installment and grew to become something majestic. But now it's happened: He's translated all his passion and ideas into one single album, and it's a monster.