Killer Mike just dropped his first single after spending nearly a decade away from the studio. And his comeback solo features a lot of heart and surprises, like how his dear friend Dave Chapelle wanted him to run for Georgia’s governor.
The new song and video, “Run,” has Chappelle narrating the beginning. The speech addresses power and the rarity of being a Black man in America.
According to Mike, Chappelle wasn’t always going to be on the track, but somehow, he “wound up” on there. And what almost happened was Mike running for governor, however, it did not.
The rapper broke it all down in an interview with HipHop DX.
“So I go to a Dave Chappelle show — and Dave is someone I consider a friend, very fortunate to be friends with, love him to death — and he literally has a whole crowd laughing at themselves and a bunch of other shit,” he says. Then he described the moment it happened, saying they were joking around smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey because they’re “old school.”
But the cigarette isn’t a cigarette.
“So I’m in the cut, smoking a joint that looks like a cigarette. I’m getting high as fuck. Dave calls me out. He says, ‘Hey man, why don’t you run for governor?’ And I’m like, ‘What? No, no, we got a Black person running for governor. Her name …’ ‘That’s not what the fuck I’m talking about — you. You need to run. You are qualified to lead.’ And I’m like, ‘Dave, I’m a rapper.’ “He said, ‘I don’t give a fuck, you can govern and rap!”
By the end of the conversation, he considered actually running since Chappelle’s words were so “encouraging.”
“I was ready to run after that, even though I know it’s not time for me to run, but what he really told me was that it doesn’t matter if you go to strip clubs and smoke weed and you go with your wife, and we know all your proclivities,” he continues. “What we’re saying is we trust you, not to be perfect, but to be honest and lead.”
Initially, “Run” featured only Young Thug, but Mike admitted it was missing something, then asked Chappelle to repeat his speech so he could use it in the intro.
“We had this long intro that I didn’t want to get rid of, so I asked Dave, ‘Could you recreate that speech on this for me?'” he says. “He was running around finishing some shows, but when he got back home in Ohio, he sent me back gold, and I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’ This is definitely what you said to me and the spirit of what you said to me. It turned out to be something amazing. I have listened to it for motivation.”
