When Killer Mike talks about the grandmother he lost, he can’t help but clutch the double-sided pendant dangling from his gold link chain. Far from the standard issue rapper’s medallion, it contains a palm-sized photo of Bettie Clonts, the woman he credits with inspiring the spiritual turn his music has taken. He holds it up to show me before flipping it over to reveal a picture of his mother, Denise Clonts, who died in 2017, five years after his maternal grandmother.
One instilled in him the virtue of God; the other connected him to the plug when trapping became his vice. Together they represent his own vivid yin and yang. “They’re like my guardians,” he says, a smile spreading across his face even as tears fog up his dark shades.
We’re sitting in a booth inside the unopened Bankhead Seafood — the legendary neighborhood staple he and fellow Westside Atlanta native, rapper T.I., purchased during the pandemic, spending an estimated $2.
3 million to redevelop the restaurant with business partners, including Mike’s enterprising wife Shana Render. It’s part of a larger Nipsey Hussle-styled effort to buy and build up the blocks he and T.I.
ripped and ran through as youngsters. “Tip sold drugs right here,” Mike says, pointing up the street before chewing out the incessant critics of his own burgeoning capitalist endeavors, which include rental units he owns in the nearby Bluff and several barbershops sprinkled throughout the city. “[They] don't understand the.