Vic Mensa, Poet And Musician, Dreams Of Wild Peace

As a rapper, Vic Mensa continues to contribute to some of the most important tracks of our age, and he will do so well into eternity as his influences resound against time. He’s worked with The Internet, Chance the Rapper, Snoh Aalegra, BJ The Chicago Kid, KAYTRANADA, Juicy J, Flume, Joey Purp, Asher Roth, and Chief Keef. His collaborations with many of which will play for people for as long as they have access to the songs of us and our days.

The literary connections to the contemporary poet run deep as rivers can carve sandstone. He quoted prolific poet and philosopher Bell Hooks on The Breakfast Club, the show pop-idol, declared future presidential candidate, Forbes 30 Under 30 inductee, and comedian Ziwe called, “the most iconic Black radio station.” And he is a published writer with the Rolling Stone.

He’s delivered clean water systems, jamboree, and Dave Chappelle to Ghana. The latter two of which were for his Black Star Line festival. As an activist, his personality and compassion and the human core that makes us all better are evident below questioning.

Vic – after a successful performance, in the midst of a successful trip and a virtuous venture – fell asleep. And sleep, as it and life often do, gave way to dreaming.

In this story, interview is blended with outlandish fantasy and hyper-saturated theme, in the temperamental sands of literature.

Vic, in his dreaming, met a down man in down country.

He introduced himself as Fingal O’Flahertie, and his dark hair was wild and vast and parted in the middle. In Vic’s dream, memories of O’Flahertie’s hair when it was slicked against his scalp like a gentleman’s stuck around as if a maple vapor or a pack of French gnats circled his head. Fingal O’Flahertie had once been the man to be. Lost, the two found each other in what was then a threadbare dream.

Fingal wore a fur lined coat that was tattered and burned like pink neon at its bottom. There were splashes of paint about his whole character, pink and green and grey. His hands were the only part of his flesh without life. The rest of him was on the quick cart to death, where nothing is more alive. His cuticles, though, his knuckles and the skin where palm meets palm shined like sepia pearls – angelic, perfect, and settled.

Fingal was in exile, with not much time left for the world. Before grief is a clarity, he said. “I have a sister I have not seen in a long time,” he said. “I look forward to being surrounded by blue China and theatre again. Prison makes stones of man’s heart and mockeries of memories and finances and relationships.”

“You’ve been to prison?” asked Vic.

Fingal said, “the sentence is not finished, though I am let away.”

And in his silence, he made it clear he had nothing left to say. The truth poured out of Vic, then, for his dreaming was sewed with honesty the way waking lives are sewed with time.

“When I was in jail,” said Vic. “I was meditating. I was physically in a cell, but mentally – I was so far from incarceration. I was, I was free as f***.”

“Instead of freaking out from the uncertainty or the many reasons of the situation,” said Vic, “I just immediately accepted. I started to thank God for the blessing of it. I, my whole thing was – I thank God for this blessing in the form of whatever this becomes. And I was locked in on the meditation to the point where I wasn’t stressed.”

“For young birds, all flights find new heights. An old bird does not feel the wind and prays to fly on light,” said Fingal.

“No, I just keep telling myself every day, I’m no longer consumed with where I should be or the way things should be,” said Vic. “I’m in acceptance of the way things are right now. And so, I’m excited about that because I have this that I love that I’m excited to share with the world.”

“My time in the music industry or as an active creator has been so focused on fun, but I realize that fun and joy are not synonymous,” said Vic. “What I really desire in my life is joy. So many of the things that I’ve done for fun have actually been antithetical to the conservation of joy in my life. I’m passing up on fun for joy.”

Fingal O’Flahertie said, “each man kills the thing he loves. Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.”

The pair walked through France, away from a dreary France, the France of a turn of exile and century. Sepia was as colorful as the France of the dreaming grew. And that was only at the end of when France sighed beneath their feet, Vic’s sleep too. For a long time, there was no shine to anything. The vineyards were ages abandoned. The country roads were full of low, biting winds.

He said, “some kill their love when they are young and some when they are old; some strangle with the hands of lust, some with the hands of gold. The kindest use a knife because the dead so soon grow cold.”

Vic took some time to settle silence and think in answer. Then he said, “about a year and a half ago I was, I was working on the Kanye album, I think Donda one.”

“Kanye was doing the listening event in Chicago. I was going to party afterwards. I was going to a Juke party afterwards; it’s called Juke in Chicago,” said Vic. “It’s like footwork music, but it’s also innocent like high school parties. It’s grinding basically.”

“The party and then the night started off. Somebody put a big piece of Molly in my hand. I took the big piece of Molly,” said Vic. “The whole time I’m at the Kanye event, I probably drank a whole bottle of henny. I was so turnt, and by the time I even made it to my party, everyone was already rocking. And I was really too drunk to make any type of good decision.”

“I had just entered a new relationship, the one I’m in now,” said Vic. “I found myself drunk driving this Range Rover speeding down Lake Shore Drive, trying to go apologize to my girlfriend for doing something disrespectful.”

“And then I ran off the road – totaled this $120,000 car, had a dirty pistol in the back seat,” said Vic.

“What we focus our attention on and our energy towards comes into reality,” said Vic, “down to beneath the electrons. It is non-material; it is particular. And it is energy.”

“A week prior to that, or a few days prior to that, I had been in the mosque for the first time in my life. I was praying; I was going through so much at the time,” said Vic. “Somebody that used to be a friend of mine was trying to kill me ‘cause I had whooped him ‘cause he stole from me ‘cause I was trapping with people I wasn’t even supposed to be involved with.”

“So, I got somebody who wants to kill me. My money’s all fu***d up. Emotionally, I’m a wreck,” said Vic. “I was praying, and I was praying that I was praying to God. It was my first time in earnest being in a house of God.”

“By the grace of God, my friend was able to come in time and remove the gun from the scene, got the car fixed up to the point where I didn’t have to pay the price for this sh**. I didn’t have to sit in prison ‘cause I had two guns charges already,” said Vic. “It’s like I can’t explain this one away. That one was something that I can’t explain why I’m really a good guy. My prayer was answered. And I didn’t even realize what I was praying for yet.”

“Neither milk-white rose nor red may bloom in prison-air,” said Fingal O’Flahertie.

Vic said, “I’ve been sober for a year and a half. I just cut out so many things. I went through all of my favorite songs with my therapist and realized that the majority of them, I made ’em sober.”

“Nothing in the whole world is meaningless,” said Fingal O’Flahertie, “and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best.”

Fingal asked Vic how capitalism affected craft. “Positively negative,” said Vic. “I think capitalism is absolutely inseparable with pretty much everything that we create that exists in our American sphere of reference – whether or not you are subscribed to it or you are an opposition of it or a mixture of both, as I would say, most of us probably are.”

“I am fundamentally ideologically opposed to capitalism because capitalism is inseparable from slavery and white supremacy and is the primary motivation for the ubiquitous spread of those ideologies and forms of control,” said Vic. “And I’m an African, so I’ve been the victim of capitalism.”

“Now as far as the music that we make in the music industry, being in the rap game. Rap is so deeply capitalistic, to the lyrics,” said Vic. “I talked about this with a friend. This friend was born in federal, has been in and out of prison his whole life. He’s an active gang member, drug dealer, murderer, the whole nine – also a really good guy.”

“I love him. This has been his situation in life. When you’re born in federal prison, it’s not like you have the most fu****g options, you know?” asked Vic. “People are a product of their environment. And we were having a conversation about capitalism, man, in a way, because he was telling me, he was like, fentanyl is the best sh** ever. And I was like, did you fu****g hear yourself?”

“For man’s grim justice goes its way and will not swerve aside,” said Fingal. “It slays the weak. It slays the strong; it has a deadly stride. With iron heal it slays the strong, the monstrous parricide!”

“Fingal O’Flahertie spits at justice,” said Fingal O’Flahertie with humors and with, maybe, a bit of lost fire back. He spit, too. And Vic thought he saw purple lightening smiling in the distance by the way they were heading.

“Fentanyl is murdering so many people,” said Vic. “There’s this balance where fiends don’t want dope cut without fentanyl ‘cause it doesn’t hit the same. Drug dealers love fentanyl because it’s given them the ability to stretch their dope in a way like they’ve never had the possibility before.”

“We’re already dealing in greed, but there’s this fine line of excess. You cross that line, and now you kill everybody that comes in contact with your sh**,” said Vic. “And he’s saying, hey, these people got a choice, man. They’re choosing to do drugs. I’m like, but if you chose to take a Xanax for your anxiety and it’s cut with fentanyl, that’s not a choice.”

“He’s expressing a deeply capitalistic mindset. That’s profit over people,” said Vic. “Capital over everything. And that is the same sentiment that you hear echoed in pretty much every rap song.”

“The most basic rap slogan is money over bit***s. On a base level, that’s saying that dollar bills are more significant than women,” said Vic. “Words have so much power. You are saying that money is more important than the source of life.”

“The same thing we subscribe to is responsible for our destruction,” said Vic. “We’re black people. We’ve been, we continue to be the victim of capitalism, whether or not we have some Jay-Z’s and some Tyler Perry’s and some LeBron James’. Whether or not we have some exceptional black characters and Oprah Winfrey’s who break through and become billionaires, you got $1 or $0 of wealth in the average black family compared to a hundred for the average white family. We’re still living as the victims of capitalism.”

“Still the resources of Africa are extracted by South African and British and Dutch and Portuguese companies – still, our gold, our diamonds. Capitalism is killing us, but still we subscribe,” said Vic.

“Biblical characters are not permitted on the British stage,” said O’Flahertie, hushed.

“My grandfather, who I never met – his official religion was the original Voodoo that was transported through the middle passage to Louisiana to become Voodoo as it’s known now,” said Vic. “And I’ve just been having this calling. You know. I’ve been feeling this calling for years now. It’s like energy’s transmitted from the sky telling me much of what you deal with on Earth in this lifetime is not yours. Come home; we can help you.”

“Which was a big catalyst for me going and starting to spend a lot of time in Ghana,” said Vic. “I keep stumbling across Mami Wata – the Voodoo goddess of water.”

“I got in touch with this Mami Wata priestess, an author. The borders were closed though, so I snuck through Ghana, into Togo, into Benin, snuck through one border checkpoint on the back of a motorcycle. Then another one. I walked around a large trash field and through a beach, and then got in a car, made it back across.”

“It definitely just made me think all of these arbitrary lines have been placed between people of the same ethnic backgrounds. My manager in Ghana speaks Ewe, the same language as in Togo and Benin. It’s some bullsh**,” said Vic.

France was long gone from their feet. Sepia gave way to gay nature’s greatest tones. Tomes of bio- and luminesent diversity sang at their feet, and the wind lifted the light burdens of their walking.

“California to Mexico, Texas to Mexico,” said Vic, “that sh** is Mexico, man. And y’all ni***s just put a border on it and try to keep people out. Doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make any sense. I don’t agree with manifest destiny here. I don’t agree with manifest destiny anywhere.”

And he woke up without getting to say goodbye to Fingal O’Flahertie, who was in a better place.

You can follow Vic on Instagram here, on twitter here, and access his merchandise, music, and music videos here.