The mid-evening sun hangs over a blue rowhouse in Ridgewood, Queens on the longest day of the year, and a throng of teens from all over New York City have been partying since noon. They’ve come to roast hotdogs, rejoice under the light of the summer solstice, and most importantly, to celebrate the release of May God Bless Your Hustle, a mixtape by an 18-year-old named Michael Jordan Bonema, who raps as, simply, MIKE. The house is known as The Cabin, an incubator for a talented young DIY hip-hop scene, helmed by squads of prodigious rappers and producers who met on the internet and endure the long, sleepy train rides between boroughs to visit each other.
May God Bless Your Hustle is a vivid document crammed with biographical details, wizkid observations, and frank confessions about mental health. “Looking for some walls for my fists to scar/Ninth grade hoping I ain’t missed the cars,” Bonema raps on “Rockbottom/Peace to Come,” recalling moments when he would recklessly cross busy streets, his head in a cloud of indifference. The tape showcases his rumbling baritone, which can hit like a concrete block thrown from a rooftop or float featherweight across a beat, and a tape-hiss soul sound inspired by MF DOOM and King Krule that’s as caustic as it is smooth. In the last two years, he’s released a steady flow of tracks on his Bandcamp page, gaining support from rap fans and fellow artists, including his hero, Earl Sweatshirt. Bonema messaged Earl a thank you note for purchasing one of his early mixtapes, and they have since become friends IRL, with Earl helping Bonema navigate the perils of prodigious success. In conversation, Bonema casually refers to his mentor by his real name, Thebe.
Bonema’s been rapping since he was 14, and his talents are now coming into focus. In his raps, he’s an apt chronicler of teen life, and his writing can infuse meaning into the banal social transactions and errant thoughts that occupy the space of a regular day; coming from Bonema’s mind and mouth, a friend’s handshake, subway advertisements, or a dead cellphone are clues to a grander plan.
Bonema was born in South Livingston, New Jersey but he has moved around a lot. He spent a chunk of his childhood in England, because his mother saw better educational opportunities for him there. He grew up between the London neighborhood of Hackney and just outside the city in Essex. It was there, around the age of 10, that he first got interested in rap after encountering a grime music video on TV. Two years later, in 2010, he moved back Stateside to live in Philadelphia with his dad. He spent four years there, listening to Chance the Rapper and gawkily teaching himself to rhyme over MF DOOM beats he found on YouTube. In 2014, he followed his father to Brooklyn before moving to the Bronx a year later.
He’s now part of a crew called the sLUms, formed from friends he made on SoundCloud and in his Brooklyn high school. For someone who is a relative newcomer to the city, his ability to render it in song can be photorealistic, like how he elegantly describes the process of buying a blunt wrapper in a bodega: “I cop a Swisher off Rivington/Watch the center split/Seep like licorice.” Part of this comes from the endless train rides he took from home to school and back, watching silently as people went about their day. And while his powers of observation are impressively mature, the confessional nature of his music makes it even more affecting.
When I meet Bonema for the first time in a Sri Lankan restaurant in the Lower East Side, he is gregarious and forthcoming, eager to dig into his upbringing and his love of Atlanta hip-hop. He’s quick to admit that music isn’t just a career choice, but the only way he can vent about the pressures of his life. Since moving back to the States seven years ago, he’s only been able see his mother once, due to paperwork issues. (She currently lives in Nigeria.) “May God bless your hustle” is a comment she often leaves on his Instagram pictures and tells him over the phone.
At the party in Ridgewood, it’s closing in on midnight when Bonema steps into the center of the living room to perform his new tape live. For some of the kids who’ve trekked here to see him, a school day awaits in the morning. When I ask people in the crowd why they like him, they point to how he talks about problems they all deal with: depression, having no money in your pocket, parents not getting you. The speakers sputter to life, and the conversation quiets. Bonema says how grateful he is for everyone making it out, and his deep voice cracks a little bit. Everyone smiles, including him.
MIKE: I didn’t really start till I was 13, but I got interested around 10. I used to live in England, and my sister would put on Channel U, where they show a lot of grime. One day I heard this dude who was just rapping his ass off, and I went upstairs to try to rap like him to my sister. From there, I was writing one liners and a lot of stupid shit. When I was like 14, I started taking it seriously and trying to figure out how I was going to make this work. When I came back to America, I was really on Drake and Lil Wayne. I was rapping over a lot of MF DOOM’s shit just because I didn’t know to make beats. I wasn’t cool at all!
Yung Gleesh, SahBabii, Slimesito, and our friends in ECW. I’m really into weird sounds, and [King Krule’s] Archy Marshall is all about that, so him too. The way he writes about things is also very, very emotional. It doesn’t have to be as detailed; the simple shit will hit you the hardest with him. That’s like a lot of real life. Sade and Thebe [Earl Sweatshirt] are people like that too. Producing and writing can be hard for me, so listening to them helped me say what I wanted.
I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Punkzilla by Adam Rapp. In terms of writing lyrics, those were the books that really taught me how to express myself.
Trying to figure out who I am and also leaving one place and going to another mentally and physically; I left the Bronx and moved to Brooklyn. But it was also about figuring out what self-worth and confidence meant, especially when I felt like I didn’t understand it last year. Even just going from playing other people’s games to trying to play your own game, a lot of shit like that. Lots of people I don’t know have been hitting me up and telling me my music is helping them deal with things and get out of a dark place, and that means so much to me. To be able to tell my story and the stories of people I know in order to help somebody else is an achievement all its own.
The first time I ever dealt with depression was when I was 14. Around that time, I basically got my own crib and was taking care of myself, feeling alone and shit. My pops was moving between New York and Philly a lot to visit his girlfriend. Every now and then, my sister would come over and stay with me. Some nights, my sister let me come with her to work and she’d give me food. It was a really weird time. I didn’t know much about self-worth then. I didn’t give a fuck at all.
Me and my pops got evicted out his crib so we couldn’t go back inside and use the bathroom. We had to walk to the mall and use the bathroom over there. He was like, “Yo, don’t tell your mom about anything that’s happening.” Especially when I’m around my pops, I’m not able to really talk about a lot of shit I’m going through, so I try to express it through the music. One thing I’ve thought about is working on saying how I feel and letting people know: This is me. It’s being 100 with people, skipping past all the fake and weird shit. Things would be so much easier if there wasn’t all these weird fake barriers. Those barriers are mostly the things that get me mad. And performing it for people—just telling a bunch of people how you’re feeling—is a powerful thing.
It’s crazy. He was my favorite rapper for a very long time, and I used to study his form. He influenced me so much. I’m not really a person that’s good at expressing themselves in normal situations, and people like Thebe taught me how to do that better. He’s also very young and he understands how we express ourselves and he’s spent a lot of time telling me about life. He gives good advice, putting words to the shit in the world and helping us keep it straight with the music. Nobody out here’s putting money in our pockets other than people really supporting us, and he’s one of them. He was once in a similar predicament as a young black boy in America, and I understand that I will one day have to be a mentor to somebody else. He’s teaching me how to mentor that person. It just keeps on going.
