The GRAMMY Museum welcomed Killer Mike of Run the Jewels to the Museum’s Clive Davis Theater for a p conversation about his creative process, career, and to celebrate his album, MICHAEL.

Killer Mike gets recognized for many things - being an Outkast protege, a member of rap powerhouse Run The Jewels, one of Atlanta’s biggest advocates, a Bernie Sanders whisperer, and, perhaps most importantly, a voice of reason in an increasingly insane world. Some might know one or two of those sides of Mike, but with his new album MICHAEL he has finally introduced the world to the totality of Michael Render, a lifelong rap fiend whose consciousness is seeped in the sounds of the family and community that raised him - multiple eras of southern rap flows, Sunday church service, and barbershop discourse. MICHAEL is Mike’s first batch of solo material since his breakout solo album R.A.P. Music in 2012 and the most comprehensively autobiographical work he’s presented to date musically and personally.

In the decade since his solo album, Mike has exploded in public consciousness through his tenure in Run The Jewels, his burgeoning presence in televised media (from his own shows Love and Respect and Trigger Warning, to cameos on Ozark and Billions, to regular appearances on Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Real Time with Bill Maher), to his widely lauded advocacy work on political and social causes (which yielded him Billboard’s inaugural 2020 Change Maker Award). His album MICAHEL marks his first opportunity to catalog and synthesize that journey, from a young hustling rap fiend to a successful musical entrepreneur and has been met with accolades spanning from New York Times to Billboard to Complex to NPR to Rolling Stone to The Atlantic and many, many more. "