On December 3, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. It had hardly been a week since a grand jury in Missouri did the same for Darren Wilson, who’d killed Michael Brown. 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.
“As much as people like to [say] 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. “People care, but it has to be good. I think that’s what Mick did. He didn’t compromise himself. He’s always done him—he’s done what he wanted to do.”
“Coming to an all-black neighborhood and going to an all-black school—that was different, and I was different. And it was pointed out,” he says. “I got used to it—jokes stopped. You just assimilate.”
Jenkins decided to look for ways to perform without pretending to be older than he was. His senior year he found the community of writers and performers at local nonprofit Young Chicago Authors. YCA artistic director director Kevin Coval remembers first seeing Jenkins at the organization’s Tuesday open-mike series, WordPlay. “He was stoic and a really good writer, so I was struck by him,” Koval says. “I feel like at the time him and Saba and Noname [Gypsy] were all hanging out in that space—they would come on Tuesdays, participate in the workshop, and build a collective fan base. They met in this space and are now helping, along with others, transform the landscape.”
“That was when I was first like, ‘OK, I’m in, I can rap at this level,’” Jenkins says. “I just continued to get better.”
One of the people who saw the “Martyrs” video was Cinematic president Jonny Shipes. He caught a snippet of it a couple months after it came out, when he was about to fly to Atlanta to take care of some business with Big K.R.I.T. and his manager, Steve-O. “I landed in Atlanta that night and I’m sitting with Steve-O before we go to meet K.R.I.T., and he’s playing the same video,” Shipes says. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ So I look at it again and it’s just amazing music.” Shipes was hooked. “I just saw him and was like, ‘Yo, this kid is fucking awesome. I want to work with him,’” he says.
