Mike Stud is the stage name of Michael Francis Seander Jr, a rapper hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, USA who was born on the 30th of October 1988. A former baseball player at college, Stud made his musical debut in 2010, and has released two studio albums since then.
Maybe we’re just getting better at multi-tasking as time goes on. There was once a time when musicians were musicians and artists stuck to what they were good at. When any artist getting involved in something like acting or, heaven forbid it, an actor getting involved in music would have been ridiculed as a poser of the highest order. However that’s beginning to change, we have musicians who actually can act and actors who actually can write music, and weirdest of all, we have sportsmen who don’t embarrass everyone in the known world when they get involved with music. Rest assured I’m not talking about Wayne Rooney’s karaoke take on Valerie.
In this particular case I’m talking about Mike Stud, one of the hip-hop world’s most promising newcomers who didn’t start writing and releasing music on the internet until he was twenty two years old. Practically ancient in these post-Lorde years, and that’s because his first passion was sports. A prodigy his whole life, by the time he graduated high school he’d made his school’s baseball and basketball varsity teams, a sports scholarship to Durham, North Carolina’s Duke University followed where he was on the fast track to a professional career before disaster struck.
Following his second year there, Stud was struck down with chronic arm issues that required surgery that took him out of commission for his entire 2009 season. While recuperating, he turned to making music to pass the time and eventually it became his main focus, spurred on by how a track of his, a joke song created for his baseball team called “College Humour”, became a viral hit soon after he posted it. His second song posted “In This Life” was another viral hit, viewed over 1.7 million times in short order. The following year, his first three hits were all featured on his first mixtape “A Toast To Tommy”, which hit the top three of the iTunes hip-hop charts while still being released completely independently.
Since then, he’s become a true star on YouTube, with his total channel views reaching 37 million views by July 2014. It’s translated into two studio albums and a string of sold out tours all over his home country, and the only way is up from here. He’s proved himself as a talent that can get through any challenge put in his way, and a very bright future beckons as a result. Highly recommended.
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