Killer Mike is the latest rapper to collaborate with the NSO

Before he was Killer Mike — Outkast collaborator, half of hip-hop dynamic duo Run the Jewels, Grammy Award winner — he was Michael Render, a kid from Atlanta who attended Frederick Douglass High School. While there, he was taught and mentored by Nancy Bishop, a former opera singer who headed the school’s arts talent center.

“Her only mission was to make sure that we were cultured and understood the importance of arts and music in our life, and to send our little butts to some postsecondary school on art and music scholarships,” Mike says.

When Mike told her he wanted to pursue a career as a rapper — and pass on those scholarships — Ms. Bishop was not impressed.

“She said, ‘You too talented, boy — rappers come a dime a dozen,’” he recalls. “When I dropped my first album just over 20 years ago, I went back to the school and spoke to her class to encourage those kids. She said, ‘Well, I guess I owe your rapping a-- a dozen dimes.’”

This week, Ms. Bishop might owe Mike another $1.20 as he becomes the latest rapper — following luminaries such as Nas and Kendrick Lamar — to collaborate with the National Symphony Orchestra for a performance at the Kennedy Center, an experience that he expects to be a highlight of his life.

“My discipline in music has brought me to somewhere [Ms. Bishop] would be very proud,” he says. “As a Black girl running around the world singing opera because of talent and her discipline allowed, I’m proud that I made her proud.”

How does a rapper get to the Kennedy Center? It takes more than practice, practice, practice. For Mike, it started by holding his own on a pair of mid-period Outkast songs, his forceful voice delivering violence with vigor: “Raw with the rhyme, I’m slick with the slime,” he rapped on the Grammy-winning “The Whole World,” “My words are diamonds dug out a mine.” His ’Kast-assisted debut album followed, and — to paraphrase the title of his next few projects — he spent years pledging allegiance to the grind.

Mike leveled up on 2012’s “R.A.P. Music,” an album entirely soundtracked by the space-age boom-bap of producer and underground rap fixture El-P. That album and a subsequent tour were the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and the two teamed up as Run the Jewels. The pair spent the better part of a decade trading bars and building an alt-rap version of the X-Men where rockers Zack de la Rocha and Josh Homme, pioneering female rappers Gangsta Boo and Trina, and even gospel legend Mavis Staples were welcome.

Run the Jewels released its fourth album in June 2020, as the world grappled with the pandemic and protests over police brutality. The moment caused Mike to reckon with his own mortality, as many of us did. He realized that, before he died, he needed the world to see the human being behind the superhero he portrayed in Run the Jewels: the “bada--, swaggering, motherf---er.”

“I needed people to see Michael, Michael Render, the 9-year-old bucktooth kid with pointed eyebrows who was determined to be an MC,” he says. “At first, he was just a Black kid who grew up in a Black city with a dream of being a part of this Black working-class creative culture we call hip-hop.”

As Mike and his collaborators worked to figure out what a solo Killer Mike record should sound like more than a decade since the last one, he relied on advice from Rico Wade and Ray Murray, two-thirds of pioneering Southern rap production crew Organized Noize. The pair advised Mike to keep things “distinctly Southern” and not “get so fancy that you forget that your people created the blues and jazz,” he says.

That advice informed an album heavy with booming drums, trunk-rattling bass, soul-satiating peals of organ, keyboard and horns, and background singers seemingly borrowed from gospel choirs. Mike is as assertive as ever, still socially aware and outspoken about his politics, even when they don’t conform to hip-hop heterodoxy, but more focused on his own story and how it elucidates truths about the Black experience in America.

“I shed tears every morning in the bathroom mirror/ Face to face with fate, had to face my fears,” he raps on “Tears.” “I heard my ancestors’ voices, now they speakin’ through me.”

Along with Mike’s revelatory lyrics, “Michael” tells its story through a monologue about persisting through Black struggle by Dave Chappelle and a sample from “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” a prescient 1973 satire about race and power in America. It also leans on a guest list of rap and R&B talent, including a handful of spots that constitute a lineage of Atlanta rap, from Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green and Outkast’s André 3000 to Future and Young Thug.

But it’s not Mike or those pioneering rappers who open the proceedings. Wade’s voice is the first one heard on “Michael,” as it was on Outkast’s debut single “Player’s Ball,” a song that helped kick off the first wave of Southern hip-hop 30 years earlier. “Michael” is also the last album on which Wade is featured: The cornerstone of Organized Noize, the Dungeon Family collective and Atlanta rap in general died April 13 at 52.

“I’m hugely honored that we marched it all the way to the Grammys and honored that I got a chance to get Rico his flowers, onstage and off,” Mike says of a mentor who was like a “big brother” to him.

In February, “Michael” won the Grammy for best rap album, an award that didn’t exist for nearly half of hip-hop’s history. But the ceremony hasn’t handed the album of the year honor to a rap album since Outkast’s 2003 swan song “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” even in the era of Kanye and Kendrick. The Grammys — like many old White institutions — move slowly.

The National Symphony Orchestra has been trying to do its part for at least a decade, since teaming with Nas to bring his iconic album “Illmatic” to the Kennedy Center. The NSO’s concert with Mike, led by Principal Pops Conductor Steven Reineke, will feature new arrangements of songs from “Michael” and marks the orchestra’s first self-produced collaboration with a rapper since teaming with Common in 2017.

“Michael,” with its soulful sweep and narrative arc, makes it a good fit for orchestral adaptation. Rap is “artistic expression of poetry over music,” Mike says, or, as the D.O.C. explained via backronym back in ’89, “rhythmic American poetry.” For his part, Mike is proud to continue to elevate a relatively young art form — hip-hop celebrated its 50th birthday last year — alongside the other programming audiences are accustomed to hearing at hallowed halls such as the Kennedy Center.

“When you look at culture and art in this country, we could just do a better job of bringing everyone together,” Mike says, promising, “We’re gonna bring the church to the symphony.”

Killer Mike & The Mighty Midnight Revival, May 21 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. kennedy-center.org

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