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The first time I listen to any new MIKE album, there’s always a moment when I think, “Huh, this sounds a lot like the last MIKE album.” Showbiz! — the New York-based rapper-producer’s newest loose, dreamy, 24-track opus (out this Friday, January 31) — follows Burning Desire, the loose, dreamy, 24-track opus he released in late 2023. On first rotation, the new album feels like an extension of Burning Desire, with the freewheeling spring 2024 Tony Seltzer collab Pinball serving as a breezy 20-minute interlude between the two projects. But repeat spins uncover many subtle shifts: in sample selection, chopping style, and lyrical themes, focusing on an area he’s never lingered on till now: the day-to-day life of a working artist.
As an MC and producer (under the alias dj blackpower), MIKE brings a raw creative process and an openness with which he addresses the most painful, intimate details of his personal life, his mic a conduit through which complex emotions and awe-striking insights flow. He’s become a Rosetta Stone of independent hip-hop, a global paragon whose music translates wherever there’s an underground rap scene. In that light, it’s no wonder that Showbiz!, which details MIKE finding purpose and power on tour, is his most cohesive album since 2019’s Tears of Joy, an album built around his struggle to find happiness in the aftermath of his mother’s passing.
MIKE’s friends are more visible as production collaborators on Showbiz! than they have been in the past. He frequently walks away from the decks, making room for other beatmakers — Harrison (of Surf Gang), ShunGu, and Salami Rose Joe Louis, among others — to put their stamps on his work. Notably, though, there are only two traditional features on the record, from frequent collaborators 454 and duendita. It stands to reason: It takes a village to produce a tour, a show, a magic moment on stage. When it’s showtime in a faraway city, though — in Perth, in Tilburg, in Tokyo, where, on the way to a party after his performance at Frame Gallery last October, he was arrested with a gram of weed and incarcerated for 10 days — it’s just MIKE and his DJ up there.
On opening track “Bear Trap,” it’s freezing cold, but MIKE is ready to push through dismal weather to pursue the dream he’s sustained since his early adolescence. “My future is music,” says a sampled voice from the past when MIKE finishes rapping halfway through the song. “I like music, and I’m not gonna stop. I’m gonna keep on with music because I like music.” Another vocal sample finishes the following track, this one more like a sleep demon than a comforting past self. “I can see it all,” a woman’s voice says, cracking into a scream. “While some of us are out here working… And this is not working! Work harder!”
Throughout Showbiz!, how MIKE says things is just as important as what he’s saying. Many of the epiphanies the mid-20s MC relates after his first mega tour have been had by other, more seasoned artists before him. Somehow, though, nothing here comes off as trite; it’s simply not in MIKE’s nature to speak in cliches, even when the larger ideas he’s presenting aren’t entirely original. “That sour taste, bitter, how I mourn best / I’m down to take a trip, but I’m a tour vet,” he raps on “Bear Trap.” On “Belly 1”: “22, how was death my concern? / How I move with my bread? How I earned it?”
These lines are about steeling oneself, playing through the pain, but there’s no feigned bravado to be found. “Through the mid-life blues, I just wish high,” he begins on “You’re the only one watching.” “Every midnight, moody under dim light / Try on big MIKE shoes, they don’t fit right.” On the surface it sounds like a flex, but it’s actually a resigned invitation, delivered as plainly as it might be in a conversation with an old friend who’s still soldiering through some toxic habits.
Later, on “Pieces of a Dream,” he reveals he’s held onto some of those habits himself. “Nah, I ain’t sober yet / All this smoke finna break my lungs,” he starts. “Couldn’t grow from the way we was / I don’t know if you could save me, love / This life get cold and wet / Now I know that the rain ain’t done.”
“Artist of the Century” is another apparent flex delivered over a cheeky jazz flute loop. But at the end of the song’s rapped portion, he switches gears to deliver what is perhaps the album’s central thesis: “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant.” Immediately, the track’s title is presented in a new light: Maybe MIKE isn’t proclaiming himself the best rapper since Biggie. Perhaps, instead, he’s saying that he’s every artist — every poet who’s slept on the floor of a train station, every musician whose gear breaks down or is stolen at the worst possible time, every performer who gets on stage night after night and puts it all out there for a room full of strangers, then jumps back into a smelly van for a few hours of half sleep.