Jenkins got hooked on poetry in late 2007, during his junior year, through a school drama group called Controversy. Today I get dressed and I’m like, ‘I am different,’ but back then I was trying to be different.” I was trying to be distinctive from everybody else, always, in what I wore, on purpose. I was always doing something different, putting my collar up on my Polo or rolling my pants up. “People were looking at me crazy for that shit. “I think I was the first person in my group of friends and the people I hung out with to don some skinny jeans,” he says. Jenkins got some flak at Hirsch Metropolitan High School for the way he talked and dressed-at least until he hit a growth spurt that took him to six foot five. For the most part he kept his nose clean, but at 16 he ran afoul of his mother’s rules. He credits this time wandering through neighborhoods beyond his block with helping him develop the broad perspective and observational acumen in his lyrics. You just assimilate.”Īt his mother’s encouragement, Jenkins began exploring the city on his own in his early teens. “Coming to an all-black neighborhood and going to an all-black school-that was different, and I was different. “We came on a Greyhound, and I remember looking up at the buildings kind of in awe,” Jenkins says. His mother moved him and his younger sister to the south side of Chicago when he was ten, after she was diagnosed with lupus Jenkins’s parents had split, and his mother’s family in Chicago could provide her with the help she needed.
Jenkins, 23, grew up a Seventh-day Adventist in Huntsville, Alabama. “The EP was kind of like a break-a time to recoup.” “Very singable choruses-it’s more fun.” He compares it to “Comfortable,” a breezy Noname Gypsy collaboration on The Water with birdsong wafting in and out of it. Jenkins’s new ten-track EP, Wave, is due to drop any day now, and it’s much lighter material. Playing back ’11’ and really evaluating it, it was just like, ‘I’m not about to do this 12 more times.’ I couldn’t keep writing about shit like that. “I listen to my music more than anybody else-I play my songs back all the time. “I have to live with this shit and listen to it,” he says. Its outrage, frustration, and despair convey the weight of the burden Jenkins feels himself carrying-and share some of it with his audience.īy the time “11” came out, though, Jenkins was ready to shift gears for his next release. For those shows, he performed lots of material from The Water, and the gnawing, minimalist “11” picks up where that mixtape left off. Smoker’s Club cofounder Jonny Shipes, who also runs management company and label Cinematic Music Group, has been working with Jenkins since last winter the Cinematic roster also includes hit makers Big K.R.I.T. Jenkins wrote and recorded “11” after a 36-show run on the fifth annual Smoker’s Club Tour, traveling with Taylor Gang rapper Berner, Cypress Hill’s B-Real, and the duo of Method Man and Redman. He’s always done him-he’s done what he wanted to do.” “As much as people like to that having purpose or a message in your music is lame and people don’t care, they actually do,” says Andrew Barber, founder of Chicago-based hip-hop site Fake Shore Drive. It uses water as a metaphor for knowledge, and his ambitious, sure-footed rhymes confront the cycle of poverty and violence that he sees trapping his south-side community. His breakthrough mixtape, The Water, which came out in August, addresses those issues on almost every one of its 15 soul-steeped tracks.
When “11” came out, Jenkins had already been rapping about racism, classism, and hip-hop politics for years.
“And everybody wanna be a nigga,” he sing-speaks in the bridge, “But don’t nobody wanna be a nigga.” As the song ends, he repeats “I can’t breathe” 11 times-the same number of times Garner did as he died. Partway through the track Jenkins climbs from his usual self-possessed baritone into a half scream burning with anger and disillusionment. The south-side MC decries the way corporations and celebrities (“From ComEd to Converse to Kanye to Complex”) profit from black youth culture while the communities that create it are forced to do without almost everything (“Potholes fill faster than our needs”). Released on December 28, Jenkins’s haunting single “11” would sound dystopian if it were fiction. Garner’s cry for help while trapped by Pantaleo’s illegal chokehold-”I can’t breathe”-became a cry of protest all over the country, and few used it as effectively as Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins. It had hardly been a week since a grand jury in Missouri did the same for Darren Wilson, who’d killed Michael Brown. On December 3, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.
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