Vic Mensa
On family trips and vacations, I remember walking around with my little sister and making funny songs on the spot.Collection: Funny
They say depression is just anger turned inward. Sometimes I turn it outwards, sometimes I turn it inward, but I know it's about self-worth.Collection: Anger
I came from a two-parent household and my father is a PhD from west Africa, but at the same time I grew up five blocks from where Obama lived and five blocks from the projects.
My mother was from upstate New York; she's of Irish and German descent. My father was from Ghana.
Traffic' was an album that had a significant amount of songs. It was not complete and I felt didn't fully represent me as a person or as the artist I want to be and so when I started the writing process for 'The Autobiography' I was really turning a corner in my life.
You can go into a psychiatrist sometimes and just feel that this person's only role and their only desire is to write you a prescription, get a check and send you out the door.
Hip-hop has always been speaking about the way your brain is manipulated by stress and struggle because hip-hop is borne from struggle.
My body is what? Like 99 percent water or something. But I drink all of my water out of, like, plastic containers. You know what I mean? What is plastic? My body is not one percent plastic, but the way that I ingest the water that runs through all of my veins is almost strictly out of plastic. There's something wrong with that.
A lot of the most prolific painters died broke and weren't appreciated in their time. I'm trying to remember who exactly I was thinking of - like Rembrandt, van Gogh or Gauguin. Some of those guys, they got whole floors of museums to themselves but weren't really appreciated in their time at all.
Thinking about the artists I've loved through the years, my favorites are the ones who've made music with cultural, societal and political significance.
The Clash is pretty much my favorite band, and their songs like 'Rock the Casbah' are political dance tracks.
The disparity between the haves and have-nots was always blatantly obvious to me, and it's that exact gap that drove me to start writing and pick up a pen. I wanted to explain and understand the world around me because it was easy to see it was corrupted.
People think I'm angry and they're right. There's a lot to be angry about. But I'm also empathetic and ambitious and hopeful and happy at times.
Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.
I collaborated with so many people from Chicago - so many Black people, young Black women organizations like BYP100 and Assata's Daughters. Just being out there, I saw what a community mobilizing can accomplish in terms of freedom and how music and my words in my music can play a significant part in that.
I was raised by a woman and I'm the middle child of two sisters who are young Black women.
I think first of all my purpose is to be me. I didn't come here to specifically be a role model or anything.
I feel that my purpose is to shed light on some of the darker sides of our world, and to lend a hand and a voice to people struggling.
Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.
I'm one of the only people I know that often sleeps in boots.
I've been combing through the Wolverine archives and advertisements from the sixties and seventies. I'm looking to take inspiration from designs of the past and bring them into the future.
My foundation mainly works in Chicago, and the city needs a lot of help. I'm glad that was able to be incorporated into what I'm doing with Wolverine. It's important to keep one foot firmly planted at home and try to benefit my people well.
I just stand by the things I believe in and if that upsets people, which it often does, then we got a situation on our hands. Everybody is okay and safe. I'm just blessed to be awake.
There's always somebody telling you what you're not supposed to like. But that's not the way I grew up.
So much of my life and my style and sensibility are influenced by skateboarding. It's counter-culture and skateboarding is my introduction to counter-culture.
Being someone that grew up in a biracial household I never really felt accepted by black people when I was a little kid, I didn't feel fully accepted by black kids and I definitely didn't feel fully accepted by white kids cause I just felt like I could never be neither one.
I used to print out lyrics from Nas songs and write my own lyrics in the same syllable count but with different words and different rhymes.
I might have 'couch syndrome.' I'm always sleeping on the couch at home, even when I have a comfortable bed. I'm used to it.
As an artist, I try not to sound the same as others. Or even as myself.
There's a lot of times when I feel nihilistic, and lose hope, like I'm just lost in the world. But there's a lot of times when I can kinda be in control of destiny.
I'm still alive to change the world and to do things that are significant. I don't know what they all may be, but I was put on this earth for a reason.
I've been harassed by police my whole life and seen people who looked like me treated like animals at the hands of law enforcement.
I never look at it as if any of my successes were given to me through fate. Getting record deals, making the songs I've made, having fans and working with the people I work with aren't chance. I know that dedication and work have gotten me to where I am and will get me to where I wanna go.
I really make music from the heart.
From a musical standpoint, I was inspired by '90s hip hop, with a lot of drums and the tempos. I'm always inspired by David Bowie and Prince.
I'm from a family of educators. I grew up with books in my house and in my hands and my parents in my life.
But I think your biggest crime as a citizen of society or America or the world is to be ignorant by choice. There's no excuse for that. I feel, when the information is at my fingertips, I could never choose to be ignorant.
I have the kind of conscience that it doesn't feel right if I watch other people suffer and I do nothing about it.
Anybody who's dealt with addiction and depression knows that sometimes they can make you forget who you are and kind of bring out a different person, somebody you don't know as well.
That's one thing I can't lose: I can't lose the realness in my music.
We're not able to hide behind myths of this being a post-racial society because Donald Trump has outlined exactly how a large portion of America feels.
I always try to take performances as an opportunity to implant my spirit into the hearts and minds of anyone in a hundred-yard vicinity.
Coming from Chicago, Lollapalooza is the one weekend of the summer when actual Chicagoans are kept out.
I mean, Common was and is like my favorite rapper.
Because many people deny the Palestinian struggle. They deny them everything. They deny them humanity, they deny them the right to be on the land they were born in. They deny them the right to return to the homes that were stolen from them, to build Israel.
And being that my father is gone in immigrant and I have you know - that I owe my existence to immigration, I think that the fear of immigration that has existed in American history from the first day, I just find it to be wrong.
I wanted to go to a place with my first album that was just to the root, to the heart of emotion, and just unbridled by anything that wasn't truly in my heart.
I can remember being a young kid, twelve, thirteen years old just with my headphones on, on the train, listening to rappers paint these vivid pictures. Listening to Mobb Deep and feeling like I was in Queensbridge even though I'm on the Southside of Chicago.
No I.D. helped me to just identify certain energies that I might not have really represented yet in the music that he picked up on just in my personality, or in the person he perceived me to be.
Prince is one of my biggest idols of all time, and he's the real King of Pop.