Apocalypse Now: Muja Messiah
words: Peter S. Scholtes
photo: B-Fresh
(The Liberator Magazine)
Muja Messiah is a badboy wit, a salesman for himself, and probably a reckless voice when it comes to serious issues of the day. But I don't get the feeling that he gives himself a pass when it comes to his wry outlook on life. He admits that his 13-year-old daughter helps pick out all the beats that he uses on songs. "They would all be like DJ Premier 1993, if it was up to me," he says, laughing.
On "Amy Winehouse," his mixtape track flipping Rihanna's "Umbrella," he thanks "the Lord for my devilish eyebrows," and otherwise demonstrates the same mischief and shamelessness of that blatantly attention-grabbing title (which he rhymes with "White House," "dyke out," "my house," "my couch," "iced out," and "Grindhouse"). Do I detect good-humored humility in the willingness to appear desperate?
Being "about to blow up" for many years will have that effect. Muja Messiah (real name Bobby Hedges) first crossed most local hip-hop fans' radars as part of the group Raw Villa, which opened for Rakim at First Avenue in 1998 -- the night the rap god didn't show. Solo, Muja has shared the stage with a dozen national headliners since, and been publicly praised by a couple of them, namely, Black Thought of the Roots and De La Soul. With a raspy flow at once rapid and exact, casual yet catchy, Mu is decipherable and funny live. Without ever releasing a full-length album before 2008, he has peppered local hip-hop acts as cameo king on CDs by Heat, Truthmaze, Guardians of Balance, and The C.O.R.E.
Yet, in the past 12 months, the respect of hundreds has spilled over into internet buzz: Vibe named Muja one of the magazine's "51 Best MySpace Rappers," while "Amy Winehouse" made the blog rounds, along with "Paper Planes," his mixtape-style wholesale jacking/cover/rewrite of M.I.A.'s guerilla-thug hit of the same title -- which itself appropriates The Clash's mournful Vietnam blues, "Straight to Hell." Though Ghanaian-born Minneapolis rapper M.anifest shows up on Muja's version to compare armed robbery to "reparations," the song is blissfully drained of politics. The hilarious video on YouTube finds the local rappers shoplifting from the now-closed To Soho (next to the Skyway Show Lounge) and purse-snatching at the Town Talk Diner, wisely transposing the theme to unarmed theft.
Muja nearly ran away with Atmosphere's download-only posse cut "Crewed Up" last December, his verses arriving partway through the track like a chorus -- "You can tell I'm focused by the look in my eye/You can see I'm dirty by how clean my kicks is" -- and finishing with a Bernie Mac-style "Hello, America." Now Atmosphere's Slug appears on both of Muja Messiah's 2008 CDs: the mixtape MPLS Massacre (which compiles "Amy Winehouse," "Paper Planes," and 25 other tracks) and the debut album Thee Adventures of a B-Boy D-Boy (on Black Corners), which is slated for re-release this fall on Copycats Media with national distribution from Koch. Slug tells me he thinks Muja could do what no Minneapolis rapper has yet done -- introduce a hungry local reality-rap scene to streets around the world.
The biggest surprise, however, is that -- "Paper Planes" aside -- Muja has emerged as one of our finest political rappers. Having ramped up his writing years ago from "Money First" ("pussy come last"), to "For the Babies," he cuts to the core of why so many Americans oppose Bush's wars on "Patriot Act," featuring I-Self Devine, which the duo performed at January's Twin Cities Hip-Hop Awards, in front of a guy in a mask and kafia scarf flying the American flag.
"I never thought ignorance was cool," he says, dipping a spoon into a bowl of granola at the Bad Waitress one Saturday a few months later. "I always wanted smart music."
In person, the lanky rapper with the devilish eyebrows has movie-large brown eyes and a blinding smile framed by scruffy facial hair. Next to him sits Susan Schoen, who describes herself as his "unpaid A&R," and has the Korean characters for "Seoul" tattooed near her eye. "That's where she's from," says Muja. "And this" -- he points to the "#!#@" tattooed on his neck -- "just means love. Love is the ultimate four-letter word."
Schoen is here to make sure Muja doesn't say anything that will get him into trouble. "Like all that Raw Villa shit," Muja says, referring to a topic we've just discussed. "She was tapping my foot the whole time to stop saying that shit."
Raw Villa -- rappers Muja, Naes, Gaza, and Rico -- finished an album (The Way Things Should Be) last year with producer Craig Holliman at his legendary Black Room studio, then never released it. The problem boiled down to "too many cooks," according to Muja. Adding sadness to frustration, Holliman died of natural causes in December. Although Raw Villa toasted him on the closing track of MPLS Massacre, a reconciliation seems distant. (That said, Rico remains Muja's executive producer and best friend.)
Muja isn't one for nostalgia, particularly about his own work. He's disdainful of conscious hip-hop's abstract period, including his own extended '90s crew Faculty Of Speech, or FOS. "That really stood for 'Full Of Shit,'" says Muja. "In '93, '94 you could just rhyme words, and that's how I used to rap. But after Pac and Biggie, it got to the point where it wasn't how you were saying it, but what you were saying."
He'd immersed himself in hip-hop from Rakim's "My Melody" onward, and finished high school in '95 after attending South High in Minneapolis and Park Center High in Brooklyn Park. "They used to call it Dark Center, because the school was like 14 percent black and they thought that was too many," he says. "Now you drive around, man, you see little black kids and white kids kicking it. Hip-Hop and skateboarding has really brought them together."
Muja calls himself "mulatto" in his lyrics, and says his black mother raised him after his white father stepped out of the picture. The track "Growing Pains" describes "growing up middle class 'till mom and dad filed for divorce." His music outlines other losses: the shooting death of his older brother, and drowning death of his older sister. Bobby Hedges began answering to the nickname Mujahid (Arabic for "soldier" or "struggler") after joining the Five-Percent Nation -- and you can imagine the appeal of an organization that called black men their own Gods.
"I remember being 12 years old and walking past these cops and they were like, 'Nigger,'" says Muja. "I kind of thought I was black, but that's when I knew I was black."
His songs gingerly describe a young life of crime, recently purchasing a "house just like the ones I used to break into," and building the foundations for a rap career out of bricks. But Muja is more guarded in interview. "My life, that's what the album's for," he says. However "dirty" Muja is, or isn't, Raw Villa's "Toast It Up" suggests he has friends in the life who never got out:
"Remember FOS?/ We was fresh off the bus/ But now this summer we in hummers while you all is crushed/ And for what?/ When we was broke at the same time, living in the same hood, throwing different gang signs/ Same frame of mind, we just changed the grind, and now we spend time writing rhymes about our life of crime instead of getting time like a few friends of mine, who would have been fine but got caught before we got signed/ Now they ain't going to see the streets until 2009."
Back in 1999, Raw Villa seemed to arrive out of a cloud of weed smoke and Wu-Tang fandom, with open 40s and gangster poses merely the richest provocation to an increasingly white and liberal hip-hop scene. By the time Muja Messiah had gone solo, he had a manager, Electric Fetus record-store-clerk-turned-aspiring-music-mogul Jon Jon Scott, who (full disclosure) assigned this article, which I'm writing for free. Scott's Black Corners label with former St. Paul musician Martin "Doc" McKinney brought Muja connections in New York and Toronto, collaborations with R&B singer Res, and brushes with fame. In 2005, the Roots invited him out to Philadelphia to take part in sessions for what would become Game Theory.
"Jill Scott was there, all the Philly people," says Muja. "It was cool. But, you know, there were a lot of strippers, a lot of drugs. That's why all that conscious rapper shit is bullshit: Conscious rappers party more than Dr. Dre."
No recordings came out of Muja's studio time in Philly, but Black Thought eventually returned the favor with a guest spot on Thee Adventures of a B-Boy D-Boy, and the association brought Muja to Los Angeles, where much of the new album was recorded with Eminem producer Che Vicious. Muja recalls, with self-deprecation, how the paparazzi cameras went silent as he walked past on the red carpet into the Roots' 2006 Key Club jam session, hosted by Dave Chappelle and Don Cheadle. "I'm sitting with Bushwick Bill, like five seats from Jay-Z and Beyonce, and I got my CD in my hand," says Muja. "And I'm thinking, '[I'll] just give my CD to Jay-Z.' And Doc's telling me, 'Man, you cannot give Jay-Z a CD. That's corny as hell."
By that time, Muja Messiah had been "conscious" for a decade. "Growing Pains" depicts a man who "never gave a damn unless I had to, until I had two babies that I had to look after," and the grown father is eager to credit his shift toward social relevance to his children. If there's still the edge of a class clown in his songs, all the better. He might be the lightest-hearted conspiracist and doomsayer in hip-hop: "If you listen close, you can hear the fat lady hummin'," he prophesizes on "True Lies." "It's a wrap/ Where Jesus at?/ I don't think he comin'."
Muja even campaigned for Kerry: "We got on this flatbed truck and went to the 'hood, rapped and talked to everybody," he says. And as of this writing, he hopes to do the same for Obama. "Soldier Savior" Muja Messiah isn't waiting around for anyone to save him. Not with a rap career to see to, pro-war patriots to infuriate, and the commercial vision to see how those two agendas might combine.
"That's not just my edge," he says. "That's my life. I give a fuck."