When Killer Mike woke up 4 February this year, he never imagined what the next 24 hours had in store. Later that night, the American rapper and activist – protégé of fellow Atlantans, Outkast; veteran of the noughties mixtape era; one half of boisterous rap duo Run The Jewels – won three Grammys: Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance for his track “Scientists & Engineers”, and Best Rap Album for Michael . His first solo record in 11 years was a self-affirming, vulnerable, spiritual back story of how the man born Michael Render navigated an emotionally complex childhood in the black South.
It crowned a 25-year journey from rap underdog to the very top table. But absurdity soon followed. In the immediate aftermath of his Grammys clean sweep Render was arrested on-site at the Crypto.
com arena in Los Angeles : he spent three-and-a-half hours in two different jails after being booked on a misdemeanour battery charge. “It was a citizen’s arrest; nothing proven,” he says about what turned out to be some over-zealousness from a security guard. Render, now 49, was quickly cleared of any wrongdoing.
“But it was ‘let’s lock the big black man up until we get it figured out’.” Talking now, jet-lagged, from his hotel room in Finland, he is visibly still annoyed. “What happened to me was a travesty,” he says, his voice starting to race.
“It was stupid, it was idiotic. It robbed me of an opportunity to fully enjoy that moment.” He says going through the a.