‘The Uniter:’ Black Mikey in SD CityBeat
My feature article on Black Mikey was published in this week’s SD CityBeat. Which is a relief because it was a fairly grueling process appeasing the CityBeat editors and Black Mikey himself without losing too much of my journalistic integrity (just a little, but not too much).
Here’s a healthy grab below, which explains the main point I wanted to get across with the article. I’m just hoping Black Mikey can follow through and blow up pretty major like I believe he’s capable of doing. Click here to read the rest of the article:
Up until now, Ern, Dre and Ridley have never worked together—likely a byproduct of San Diego’s insular hip-hop scene in which artists tend to compete more than collaborate. But now they’ve come together to work with Black Mikey.
In the year since being released from prison—he served seven years for assault—Black Mikey has focused on making a comeback. Last year, he released a full-length, Blackula, and a companion mixtape, Smash, Blackula, Smash. He followed that up with a second mixtape, Smash or Get Smashed On, and he’s set to release Killafornia Infection, an album he worked on with Mr. Ridley.
In the process, he’s trying to unite two spheres of the local rap scene: the more hardcore gangster-rap coming out of Southeast San Diego and the so-called “backpack” rap scene, which looks beyond gangster-rap stereotypes to advance hiphop as an art form. He says that the only way San Diego’s rap scene will grow is if all sides work together.
