Twenty years ago, Killer Mike was the upstart landing I’m-up-next spots on Jay-Z and Outkast records. His verse on Big Boi’s “Flip Flop Rock,” which features Jay, casts Mike’s good fortune as both salvation and destiny. “I foregoed the crime and I focused on rhyme/Focused on every word and line/Like a young Cassius Clay in his prime/I was born to talk shit and prove mine,” he raps with brio. This sense of deliverance has remained a fixture of his work, from the hopeful “gospel music for the ghetto” of his mixtape days, to the rowdy agitprop of R.A.P. Music and Run the Jewels, through last year’s ponderous bildungsroman Michael. He often likens music to a religious experience, zooming in on the ways his career has transported him mentally and materially to a better life.
Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints continues this tradition. Part remix album, part somber coda to the gospel-influenced Michael, it burrows further into Mike’s formative memories, beliefs, and sounds. Backed by his touring band the Mighty Midnight Revival, and producers and guests from the many eras of his career, Killer Mike cycles through trap, gospel, and Memphis rap as he extols the virtues of staying the course. “I’m bearin’ witness,” he says on the intro, invoking the custom of Southern Black church testimonies. This is rap as outreach.
The album comes six months after a whirlwind Grammy night during which Killer Mike won three awards and got arrested for an altercation with a security guard. He describes the evening’s whiplash on the bluesy “Humble Me,” likening his booking to the biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den and boasting that he was proud to be handcuffed because he shares the experience with his civil rights heroes. After spending the night praying, he’s seemingly rewarded when the next day, his son is confirmed for a kidney transplant. Like many Killer Mike stories, the tale is dramatic and a bit self-aggrandizing—is getting cuffed at the Grammys really the same as being targeted by the FBI?—but Mike’s faith powers his performance. He raps with the conviction of someone who has been touched by the divine and feels newly attuned to its power.
The production, mostly helmed by Cuz Lightyear, plays up the feeling of spiritual awakening. The slow, open arrangements use jubilant choir fills, warm keyboard and organ melodies, and swinging rhythms to channel gospel uplift. While a few songs boom and rattle, most sway with relief. “Slummer 4 Junkies” combines the Michael tracks “Slummer” and “Something for Junkies” into a slow-burning epic that swells with the Mighty Midnight Revival’s joyful harmonies and then contracts into a penitent elegy. The songs felt episodic on Michael, but combined they evoke the haze of memory, the narratives blurring together.
Mike is still an unabashed Black capitalist preaching a queasy prosperity gospel, but compared to Michael, Songs for Sinners and Saints prioritizes gratitude. Mike dials back the hater screeds and straw man-bashing to revisit his own battles and count his blessings. The shift loosens his rapping, which was somewhat stiff on Michael. On “Had to Go Get It,” he casually transitions from hitting the downbeat to chopping: “Used to sell grams of that white coke on Ponce de Leon to white folk/Knew to do better, but I wanted cheddar, so dance with the devil/Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did it.” Over a slick flip of Trillville’s crunk anthem “Neva Eva” on the bouncy standout “Higher Level,” Mike thanks his wife for confronting him about cheating. “I had a wife, girlfriend, and mistress, good fella like I was Henry/’Til I woke up with that trey-eight to my face held by my missus,” he raps.
Songs for Sinners and Saints doesn’t cover as much ground as Michael, which offered the rich multi-genre sprawl of a classic Dungeon Family release. But the narrower palette and lower stakes of the project restore the focus and play of his “Snappin’ & Trappin” days, when he approached rap as a calling rather than a pulpit. “’97 3-6 Freestyle,” produced by DJ Paul and TWhy, delivers all the hallmarks of a Killer Mike song: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King; Memphis-inspired triplets; sneers about elitists and broke people. But even the familiar beats exist in service of his relentless soul-searching. He sounds like a believer—in his God, in his talent, and in rap as a hallowed art.
Correction: A previous version of this review included a reference to Killer Mike’s previous album that mischaracterized its content; it has been removed.
