Vic Mensa opens up about how this next project is a departure from his last, and what the power of music is capable of doing.
"It’s not necessarily a departure from things before," he told Billboard, "as much as it is an accumulation of everything I've done before. The best part and pieces, and really going back to why I started to make music. I came into this inspired by people like 'Pac and Common. These are the artists that really made me want to sit down and write a rhyme. The album was me being able to look at the past couple years, and from some of the times, I went astray.
There were a lot of things people are going through all over this world -- that I was going through very personally. You know? [Everything] from drug addiction, to mental health issues, to violent shit [is featured on the album]. Everybody reads the f---ing news about Chicago, the feds are coming in, and opioid epidemics end up being … a whirlwind of social issues in America. I was just growing up in it, and living in a hot seat of it, too, in Chicago. I had to learn from it, and be able to move past it, to be objective, and make this album about all those things."
Take a look at the entire interview here.