The Charlotte raised MESSIAH! is a 1 of 1 rapper in the Alternative Hip-Hop scene. He sat down with us following his brand-new release ‘our latest bread’. Get familiar with him via this VIPER Presents interview…

What five words define your sound? 

Southern, imaginative, melodic, versatile, introspective.

Tell me something unique about your creative process  

People describe me as a lyrical rapper, I pay a lot of attention to my lyrics. But when I’m in the process of creating, I’m focused on the melody and the rhythm, and lyrics come second. I’ll come up with a hook melody first, or even for something like “our daily bread,” I come up with the rhythm first before the words themselves. It’s some kind of spirit or something, but somehow it always makes sense. I start off with gibberish and then the words fall into place. Recently I’ve been doing a lot more punching in and actually for a while, last year specifically, I was super depressed and I didn’t have the patience or attention span to write, so pretty much every song I made last year was punched in, so that’s a good percentage of this project too –– just raw emotion. But I been back in my writing bag a little more lately, now that I’m a little more settled.

Which song of yours would you like people to hear first? 

I think right now, the first song I’d want people to hear first is “my eyes.” It’s the introduction to my new project the villain wins!, but it also captures a lot of different elements of me as an artist. It brings you into my world and what I was going through when I made it.

What inspired you to make that song? 

Basically, like I said last year, I was going through a lot of depression, I had just got off the ‘Laughing So Hard, It Hurts Tour’. I had the highest high of my life, and the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve ever felt, and then I had to go back to regular life and get an 8:00–5:00 office job for a second. I was doing super regular things, but I was also doing super not regular things at the same time, so people were looking at me, expecting things from me and a certain image –– it fucked me up for a while. And last year, like I said, I was doing a lot of punching in, so I would start my studio sessions off with like, a 15-minute song as soon as I got there. That’s how ‘my eyes’ came together –– I came in, fucked up, I think I just got off work or something, and I just punched in the whole shit in like 15 minutes. I damn near cried after I made it, it all spilled out of me. It’s one of those songs I couldn’t have written down, you know? 

What’s the most vulnerable you’ve allowed yourself to be when writing/making music? 

Forcing myself to get good at punching in, because there was a time where I was good at punching in, but all of my punching in songs turned out to be talking shit songs, fun rap songs. I was like, “damn I wanna be able to punch in and actually say something, talk about something.” So I started challenging myself to do it with actual substance, and that forced me to stop overthinking. The things I would usually spend hours, maybe days on writing, just to get this one idea of an emotion out, I started being able to do in 15-30 minutes. I’m not hindering my thought process, just going with my raw emotion. That helped me with writing on the spot too, just being able to be in touch with where my heart lies.

What’s the best/worst experience you’ve had on stage?  

The best experience so far was probably Paris, that was the first overseas tour I did on the ‘Laughing So Hard, It Hurts Tour’ and I was super nervous because I’m like, “damn bro, I’m in France, I don’t even know if they’re gonna understand my lyrics.” I kept saying that to people, that I was so nervous about it, but then I got out there and I did a deep cut song from Thru the WInter and they started latching on and singing along to it, so just going from questioning if they would know my lyrics to them singing them back to me, was fucking crazy. After that, me and MAVI performed “N****s In Paris” so that was a crazy experience. 

As for the worst, my parents were friends with a club promoter and he actually passed away, but basically, I was like 15 and me and my homie were rapping, learning how to make beats and all of this shit, so my parents somehow got the homie club promoter to let us perform at the club. But we were 15, so that shit was awful, I’m not gonna lie. I had no stage presence, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. But even then, I remember I had a little more stage presence than my homie. It was basically like a group of grown ass adults that came there to get drunk, just dead silent, looking at 15 year-olds on the stage like, “what the fuck?” I know I was up there in some terrible drip too — this probably around 2014. Honestly, 15 might’ve been a stretch, I might’ve actually been even younger than that. 

What is your favorite song to perform? 

RIght now, I love performing ‘can’t stand it!!‘ I got a few favourites honestly –– I also love performing ‘CLOUD WALKER’ because I always have the crowd sing the sample and it feels like I’ve got a background choir. I also love performing ‘PANEL 26’ because there’s a beat switch half way through, and everybody always thinks the song’s over, but then I come back with the second half and it goes outta here. I get chills performing that song so I can only imagine being in the audience for it. 

Which artist/song/album made you want to make music? 

There’s a few –– basically, I feel like I gravitated towards more later on but the first people who made me feel like rapping was a cool job were JAY Z –– ‘The Blueprint,’ the first one. 50 Cent –– ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. Lil Wayne –– ‘Tha Carter 2’, ‘Tha Carter 3’. And then also I had straight back cornrows my whole childhood, so everybody said I looked like Bow Wow, which I didn’t, but it was a running thing, so ‘Wanted’ by Bow Wow was the first album I ever bought with my own money. All of them made me think being a rapper was cool. 50 Cent made me feel like getting shot was cool as a kid. The influences definitely grew from there, but those are the initial ones for sure. 

What’s the meaning behind your name? 

It comes from my actual name, Micah, which kinda means something similar, but basically the deeper meaning behind it is me being my own saviour. Especially back to the influences, when I was a kid, I literally wanted to be those guys, but you know how Kendrick said “J. Cole is not your saviour” and all of that? It was kinda the idea of, I’m my own saviour, and Micah is Micah’s saviour –– tryna give my community the inspiration that you can also be your own saviour and you don’t gotta wait on nobody. MESSIAH! is an idea or a concept more than just being like, “I am the Messiah!” 

If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing instead? 

I’ve always been a writer, so in a world where I wasn’t musically inclined, I probably would be an author or a poet, honestly. I think I’ll get into those when I’m older, but rap has always been a young man’s game so I gotta give my best years to the league. Sometimes I still get left field ideations of being an architect or something like that, but those are probably the main things. 

What’s success to you? 

Freedom for me and my people. As broad of a topic that is, freedom is really the answer for me. I think everything else is pretty arbitrary or temporary, I can only really measure success in terms of how free from the cause of oppression and stress my people are on a daily basis 

What moment in your life/career forced you to change direction?  

I’m lowkey going through one right now that I’ll probably talk about in a few years, but honestly up to this point, I got into an accident in 2018 where I didn’t almost die, but I could’ve died, and it kinda made no sense that I didn’t. Basically, I was driving straight and I left the stop sign too early, so this big ass truck came and T-boned me and I’m in a work van, so shit flips all the way over in the air but it landed back on its wheels, so I had to jump out the window ‘cause the door was jammed shut. It felt like a movie –– I had dropped a project called ‘Dead Man’ earlier that year and I had stickers with the skull on it, and so I had them in my backpack, and I’m jumping out the window, and there’s Dad Man stickers flying out the window everywhere. I left unscathed completely, it made no sense. I didn’t have a scratch on my body. That was really when I started trying to rebrand, when I came up with the MESSIAH! name and all of that. It was just like, I’m actually here for a reason. I think before that I didn’t care if I lived or died, I kinda just had this passive attitude towards life. That shit made me really lock in. This was summer of 2018, I was working this pool cleaning job, I had to drive around the city cleaning pools at different apartment complexes and shit like that. I literally got into the wreck in the work van. I started getting worker’s comp after that and they were pissed. It really made no sense. I went to the doctor and everything, I had slight pain in my back but they did X-Rays and they were like, “bro, nothing is wrong.” I think they gave me muscle relaxers to deal with the pain that I did have, but that was it. 

Where can people keep in touch with you? 

@1of1messiah on everything. Mr Most High on YouTube, and then if they really fuck with me, they can come see me on the road on the Shadowbox tour this fall with MAVI.