Killer Mike gets out from Outkast's shadow

[Elano]

Ladies and ghetto-men, Killack Obama. "If you have a boss, and you don't like your boss," Killer Mike began, "fire your boss, and be a boss! If you don't have an idea, lay down, develop a dream, wake up, have a vision, get to the money. Feed your immediate family; provide jobs in your community. Do something instead of doing nothing. I do not pledge my allegiance to dope. I do not pledge my allegiance to some funky job. I do not pledge my allegiance to waiting on the government to feed me. I pledge my allegiance to getting rich independently.

"You have people out there who work all their life and people who hustle all their life," he continued. "If you take 50 percent of work and 50 percent of hustle and marry those things, you got something unstoppable. You got a hustler's spirit, but you have the skill and determination to work a 9-to-5 every day. Or if you treat your hustle like a 9-to-5, you will never fall. 'Grind' means to get rich independently."

Killer Mike is on his own now. Clearly, his days as Outkast's protégé are long gone. All it took was one shelved album (Ghetto Extraordinary) and a physical altercation (in 2006).

"I don't know why the album never came out," he said of his would-be sophomore LP for Big Boi's Purple Ribbon label. "I don't know what happened between Purple Ribbon and Sony. I just know around that time, I got tired of sitting on the shelf. I got up, dusted myself off and got right back in action. I think it's tough for a lot of artists not to be complacent. It's easy to be complacent when you're eating, but when you're starving, it's not hard to get motivated. I got to the point where nobody around there was eating. I had to go somewhere and eat."

Mike is not only cooking his own meals now, but he's taking the orders and serving up the plates with his Grind Time Official records, an independent label with distribution through SMC/Fontana.

"Doing this has made me a lot more sympathetic to what Big Boi was going through," he said of running the show as a CEO and artist. "It can be suffocating, overwhelming. You have to find a certain peace within yourself and dedicate a part of yourself to the music and the business. My goal is not to run my company. My goal is to be an artist that does great things [with] my company and set a certain vision for my company. But I want somebody that's qualified to run my company to run my company. That's just a wise move."

After this LP, Mike said to expect the third in his Pledge series soon, followed by an album he has been working on under the tutelage of No I.D., DJ Toomp, L-Rock and record executive Kyambo "Hip-Hop" Joshua.

Joints To Check For:

» "God in the Building." "I feel the people on the bottom are closer to God," Mike sermonizes. "When I say the people on the bottom, I mean the people who are working every day, standing on the corner, people who are grinding. It's a famous story in the Bible where priests send Jesus his disciples. In your case, it would be like the police sending your homeboys over to you, and they saying 'Why is he over there with the hustlers and thieves and lowlifes?' To me, rappers, athletes, D-Boys with some consciousness, we are Jesuses of our day. It's our job to bring some light in the midst of the dark. ... When I walk in the building, when I walk in the club, when I walk in my kids nursery, the doctors' office ... everybody better wake up like God is in the building."

» "Two Sides." "If you're watching Atlanta on TV, you might think it's all about swagger. I'm from that real Atlanta, fresh off MLK [Boulevard]. If you don't know what it is, after you listen to this, you will know what it is. One time for all the A-town cats putting it down for real. Everybody who's lying, I know you lying. They know you lying. One time for [Shawty Lo], one time for Tip, one time for Jeezy, one time for Luda and everybody who's been holding Atlanta down the right way. Lot of love for [Gorilla] Zo, Boyz in the Hood. Must be two sides, 'cause either you on the right side or the wrong side. Are you from Atlanta or black Hollywood? I'm from Atlanta."

» "Alphabet Boys." "A lot of times, when you hear records about 'I was hustling' or doing this and that, you hear exciting stories, but they really don't make sense after you finish listening to them. I tell you stories with a moral to them. In 'Alphabet Boys,' I tell you how not to go to jail. In the first verse, I'm talking about what to do when them old heads get out of jail, and they want to get up under you and talk about what the price is. In the third verse, I'm talking about them girls that's dancing and working for the feds. I'm just saying, when you listen to my music, please believe it's a real message in there. And the message, it might just keep your black ass out of jail."