Release date: October 27, 2014 | Doomtree Records | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Bandcamp
The Midwest doesn’t get enough love in rap. We got St. Louis and Kansas City always doing big things, Chicago and Detroit are unassailable, but what else? You’d be hard-pressed to think of a better name than Minneapolis group Doomtree when it comes to marrying a weirdo aesthetic to deft technicality and acerbic writing. Mike Mictlan is an especially powerful piece of that puzzle and his last (as of this writing) LP was a perfect example of why.
David Rodriguez (that’s me)
This pick of an album for our illustrious ASIR feature was one of the most selfish picks I could’ve made. While I know others on the team have heard Mike Mictlan, at least through his work with Minneapolis’ premier rap group Doomtree, my connection to his work is pretty personal. Like, show me another Chicano rapper that was or is doing it like he was at any point in time. No? Case closed.
Even though our lives have been very different (I will never front like I had it exceptionally hard in life aside from being poor for most of it), there’s a mind meld present when I throw on Mictlan’s SNAXXX or HELLA FRREAL albums. Not only are they just fun projects to run in the background of your life, but his work is profoundly real, candidly tackling street life, drugs, building community, and overcoming the throes of systemic and societal struggle. Dude’s also got bars for real – hella frreal.
I wouldn’t expect anything else from the dude who named himself after the Aztec nine-tiered underworld. That’s just one way he holds close to his roots though. You never have to question his origin whether it’s Minneapolis or his Mexican descent – the two are, however unlikely, forever entwined. There’s also a West Coastian feel to many of these tracks which speaks to his birthplace of Los Angeles which influenced the track “MID-WEST-COAST” (‘I was born in CA but I’m reppin’ the Midwest, still throwing up LA, sellin’ out both coasts‘) which has a knocking-ass beat produced by 1990. It has a particular 2010s swag to it, but in a weird way – the only way a Doomtree alum knows how to be. It’s packed with Minnesotan references, most of which allude me, but I love the hook especially: ‘Laketown brown, river life crown/Three-finger Doomtree rings and it’s still No Kings/No Queens, we in the city of Prince/Bumpin’ I Self “Ice Cold” feelin’ ourselves‘. This is the kind of shit that Mike just skates on, his voice bold, lyrics enunciated, he just runs it with ease.
When Mike gets personal though, it hits even harder. Album opener “benicio DEL TORSO” is hard-bodied Midwest gloom courtesy of RedVelvet Beats with Mike lacing the production with his own life, referring to his 72-hour psychiatric hold in 2013 related to drug issues and get it out the mud off of music, though just barely (‘I’m barely livin’ on this rap shit‘). Some of the most impressive, technical rhyming is entrenched here, flanked by those confessionals and full-chested statements of intent (‘one hundred and eighty-seven on any cop who wanna put me in jail‘) and while I could quote just about any part of the song and it’ll go hard, the first part of the second verse is especially cool complete with references to GWAR:
‘Linked up like Cubans, wrapped in a crocodile
And I ain’t from Culiacán but I’ll cut your head off, fool
In a pool of blood to the god Mictlan
Now 15 of them and they closest
Die alone, no one noticed
They totem pole has a hole at the very lowest
They modus operandus is bogus
My zone is Oderus Urungus, get the BalZac, Jizmak
Beefcake nuts humungous, mug we Maximus
Practice raps in plastic wrapped packages
Not a sack of crack around us
C-c-c-cookin’ up classic tracks’
HELLA FRREAL has a kind heart at its core too. “THA BRINK” is a reflective track about being acutely aware of your limits and making a decision to push them to get where you want. It’s got a pensive beat and warm bass line, making for the first introspective, tidy moment on the album. “LESS’TALK” does that as well this time with a pal in Aby Wolf who has a solid array of solo work to her name and done some stuff with Doomtree, mostly Dessa in their early years. Mike shows more of his vulnerabilities, talking about the art of ‘making it’ (‘end up being hated by people mad that I haven’t made it, quote-unquote locally famous‘), past transgressions against friends, and simply being there for each other, only wishing to be and do better and wanting the same in return. Philosophically, it’s the easiest song to get on board with, equitably appliable to just about anyone who listens to HELLA FRREAL (you should in case that wasn’t clear yet) unless you’re an irredeemable dickhole or a narcissist, but hey, even narcissists are capable of breaking the habit sometimes.
I think the most powerful moment on this album is easily the album closer “CLAPP’D”. It has the most menacing beat, laced with trap-esque horns on the hook, a synth buzz that feels prophetic, big band drum rolls that build an anticipatory edge, and an overall atmosphere of battle readiness. It’s a song about how street life is commodified (‘They shootin’, but nobody made ’em look/They got a ghetto life fetish/Middle class circus at a lower class zoo‘) that masquerades like a hype song made for sports stadiums and likely could be that if it weren’t for the overt references to hood violence and brutal honesty of it all. But that’s what makes it real – a contending with a dirty, bloody reality that’s no game and ends people’s (usually kids’) lives everyday the world over, and how it’s sensationalized and politicized through mainstream media and news.
‘Not everybody from the hood is a killer or a dealer or a villain
Everybody in the hood wanna do something better
For they life and they children
Anybody ever tell you different
They probably lyin’ tryna sell you somethin’
Ain’t nobody tryna hear that woofin’
Not a motherfucker in this world tell me nothin”
I love the hand clapping that happens after the first chorus and into the second verse, further muddying the metaphor of getting clapped (shot) with an applause from people seemingly cheering this on from their suburban homes and city highrises where the most destructive decisions are made. But, perhaps more positively, it’s also a desire for applause directed toward those who are surviving this abject urban hell manifested by a racist ‘war on drugs’, as if to say ‘this is the only clapping we should be hearing’. The last line of the hook – ‘so give the man a hand ’cause he might get clapped‘ – can also be literal and tie back to the tenets of “LESS’TALK” in the sense that we all need to be helping each other in order to survive. This song is one of my favorite closing tracks ever made, up there with Run The Jewels‘ “A Christmas Fucking Miracle” in terms of mixing sobering atmosphere with some of the hardest truth-to-power bars I’ve heard, so passionately delivered by Mike as a survivor of it all (‘quarter-life conflict, we all drug war veterans‘).
It’s a harrowing end to an album that’s replete with different moods and tones, ten songs of sonic brilliance and just enough weirdness to limbo the mainstream but also appeal to people like me who walk that line between whatever’s being pushed on TikTok and the underground. I didn’t even talk about the lighthearted bump-in-the-whip appeal of “SUPER’MERICA” that inspired my EIN group chat name for the week (‘call me Foolio Iglesias, Worldstar Messican‘) or the empowering message of being yourself on “so so STRAYNGE”. For my money, Mike Mictlan is just one of the realest to touch a mic and I’m forever glad that my pal Rodney showed me him through this album when it dropped ten years ago.
Mike Mictlan has since stepped back a bit from the underground music spotlight. A Doomtree album came out a year after HELLA FRREAL – it’s pretty good – a single in 2020, and the group is still considered active, but Mike has been dealing with some serious health issues, the loss of the elders in his family, and raising a family of his own. He pops up here and there to update fans (either seriously or irreverently, we welcome both), but other than that it seems like he lives a humble, understated life – he deserves it. He deserves the peace. I hope he knows how much his music’s meant to people like me who may not have walked a similar path to him, but still saw themselves in him, found representation in his voice and features, and felt comfort and power from what he’s put out there in the world. In all his own personal woes of growing older, I hope he also has his own Mike Mictlan to center him and turn to in need. He deserves that as well. We all do.
