Open Mike Eagle is one of rap’s greatest abstract thinkers, but he’s more pragmatist than galaxy-brained rambler. When I ask him about how creative outlets like podcasting and streaming help keep him balanced, he eschews the dramatics to get a much more immediate truth: “They pay me.” He’ll get into the spiritual benefits of his online communities later, but for now, I’m enjoying his blunt honesty. If I want poetry, I’ll burrow into any one of the incredible albums he’s released the last 15 years.
Armed with wry wit, syntactical dexterity, and inescapable self-awareness, the multi-hyphenate has used ambitious concept albums to find humanity in the mundane. He continues the tradition on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, a new LP that only reaffirms his penchant for nuance and layered storytelling. Here, his meditations turn a shattered phone screen into a mirror for his soul. On another track, he laments the idea that he — or another man — has to buy pieces of himself back from a drug dealer. It’s all pretty deep stuff, and you can see how Mike uses music to sort through his own personal disarray. He’s got other ways to handle that stuff, but he’s pretty straight up when listing the biggest help for his own mental health.
“I think therapy is great because those people train to be good at that very thing and to sort of be objective and to be as helpful as possible to understand their own biases and understand the sensitivities of the stuff that they’re dealing with,” he tells OKP. “We all need help, but to me, the best help I found was professional help, literally.”
Chopping it up with Okayplayer for Pursuit of Happiness, Mike talks about his own self-help mechanisms for proper mental health maintenance.
Open Mike Eagle: To get away from negativity, I stay with my head buried in old and new comic books. It’s this mountain of content that I can never finish. I’ll always have that. I also like to take walks. A lot of times, having my list of favorite songs is the key to it. For me to just hear a certain song drastically improves my mood. Those sensory things can take me out of the cerebral information processing part of my brain and put me back in my body. I also make it a point to try to avoid going places where I’m going to see stuff I don’t want to know. I don’t rush to the news and I like to stay aware. With clickbait culture, people are going to try to grab your eyes with a headline that a lot of times might be out of context on purpose.
I used to be a lot more optimistic. I’ve gotten a lot more cynical as time has passed — mostly because I like to understand how things work. I pay attention to our society and how it interacts with our government and how our government interacts with corporations and I see how corporations don’t care about people at all. Our government is an institution that’s supposed to keep us safe. They’re supposed to be creating the best living conditions for all of the people within it. It just doesn’t do that. And we’re being kept apart from the power that we should have because we’re constantly being pushed in a direction to not see each other as all being human beings. Capitalism doesn’t function well that way because let us fuck around and get some class consciousness and see what changes take place.
All I can really do is try to connect with like-minded people and like-hearted people. That’s been one of the great benefits for me streaming on Twitch. It’s like we have a community there. We don’t all completely agree about everything, but we’re all sort of aligned. We’re all humanists. We all want everybody to win. They inspire me. They let me know I’m not alone in feeling all these feelings. I think ultimately we’d love to be able to turn that into being some sort of actionable, mutual aid. The first step has been setting up these communities, and I’ve been really proud of the one that I’ve been able to set up around my work. But the next step is to start putting some things into action. Right now we do a lot of just sharing information and sharing artistic recommendations and sharing music and sharing our opinions, but that next step is trying to come up with actionable change. The only way to combat any of this is to have like-minded people on the same page doing any sort of collective actions.