A unique blend of creativity, beats, advice, and real life stories bring together a special album from the hood of Detroit, Michigan. With a mix of hip-hop and R&B you’ll find yourself reminiscing over your past relationships and hardships you’ve experienced. Relatable stories and poetic lyrics for everyone wondering why there’s such disconnect in modern relationship as we try and make sense of the hurt and pain that we’ve all experienced.

From a chump to a champ on his purpose, this Mixtape tells the story of a boy becoming a man. Regardless of the type of music you enjoy you’ll find yourself lost in the beats and message behind each rhythm. Emotion and pain hidden under the mask society is allowed to see, expressed in full throughout this mixtape’s giant track list.

This is a reminder that every man has his purpose but only after learning a bit of discipline through adversity. Sticking to the grind and never letting anyone knock you off your square, regardless how attractive they may be, keeping your mind clear of previous toxicity that has been unleashed on you. “My Ghetto Love Stories” by G. Twilight is the playlist you throw on when you need a reminder that everyone has struggles, yet never giving up in pursuit of dreams regardless of the despair.

Follow along as the smooth talking Detroiter remembers what he’s been through and learns the foundation of growth. Expressing himself in a way that opens the door for other young men to find their way, while not getting stuck on the hate and anger associated with “red pill rage”. Each Song is a constant reminder of self-awareness and creativity twisting together in fate regardless of society collapsing in the background.

Overall I think this mixtape is a great creative expression of passion and worth a listen more than a few times. In today’s world of quick fixes where shallowness and stupidity are celebrated, it’s rare to come across someone throwing their heart at a piece of paper with some lyrics for the next generation. I am glad to announce the I had a little chat with the artist who made an unbelievable impression to our team. He is charismatic charming and most importantly of honest about how he sees the world. If you haven’t heard “My Ghetto Love Stories” yet, press play right now HERE and read our conversation with G. Twilight below:

I must say, I am impressed with your “My Ghetto Love Stories” mixtape. It’s quite a story, how did it all come about?

Well, it started with me just recording love songs for a particular young lady. No one else had heard it except her and me.. oh and the session engineer, plus maybe some of her family members and friends. Then, after things went south, I started recording breakup songs about her.. but it still didn’t feel complete, so I went back and recorded songs about events that took place before I met her to build anticipation. Still didn’t feel complete, so then I doubled back with psychoanalysis of both her and myself.. and came to the realization that we were doomed from the start. It was simple math, but unfortunately I didn’t have the tools to make those calculations beforehand.

Out of all the songs you did on here, what is your favorite song?

I don’t have like one favorite, I have several.. “Don’t Hurt Me” was a solid one. I also like “My Type” with ‘Most Wanted’ on the chorus. Shout out to her, she made that song.. umm.. I like “I Just Wanna Fuck You” with Que Da Wiz.. that was the first song I did that had the Roger Troutman talkbox on it.. that one was definitely special.. then there was “Love Me Back” with ‘York Woods’, I like “Liquor Me Down” and “Girls Gon’ Wild”.. oh, and I also like “At The Strip Club” with Mo Master.. he harmonized throughout the whole song.

I noticed a few song were missing from the mixtape, what happened to them and where can I hear them?

Oh, yeah.. audiomack deleted quite a few songs from my profile for copyright claims. And it’s  not allowed to upload certain songs to DatPiff either. So if it’s a cover of a popular industry cut you’ll have to search for me on YouTube to hear it. With compact disc getting phased out it’s harder to do mixtapes properly nowadays.

Do you think you’ll ever do the wife and kids thing or is it a wrap for you?

Well, to be upfront and honest, I’m going to say nope with all the nopes in NopeLand [laughs]. That’s just how I feel. Maybe that’ll change one day, but right now, here in this moment? Naaaw maayne, naaw.. kids maybe, but the wife part is really pressing my luck, you know? Cause after being with ol’ girl for so long, I feel like I’ve already been married.. even though no vows were exchanged. I experienced the downside of marriage that many older married men and divorcees complain about.. the thrill was gone, it eventually became a sexless relationship.. and it was all on her. The old bait-and-switch if you will. Who I thought she was in the beginning and who she actually turned out to be were two completely different people. She would withhold her sex from me as a means of control, even though she enjoyed it and climaxed multiple times when we were in bed. But it was about control. She wanted to emotionally overpower, conquer and dominate me in a  psychologically primitive way. She knew I wasn’t the type that would cheat and she used that to her advantage. Even though she would throw half-hearted cheating accusations around from time to time, she knew the real. I’ve spotted her and her fat friend Patrice following me around Detroit trying to catch me doing something.. and those were just the few times I wised up and was aware that I was being tracked, I’m pretty sure it happened other times.. but I wasn’t doing anything, so there was no dirt for her to find. Now before all of this, I wanted to do the wife and kid thing because I wanted better for my future kids than I had.. if my father walked past me on the street, I wouldn’t know him. That’s one of the many issues that has plagued me my entire life.. I don’t want anyone who comes from me to feel that way about me. Now, it wasn’t all on him though.. he’s a piece of Shit, but it takes two to tango.. but that’s another conversation for another day..

What did you learn from this whole experience?

Women of today can be as unpredictable and dangerous as a hair triggered sawn-off shotgun.. you can do almost everything right in a situation.. you know, like.. pay her bills, buy her nice things, make her cum on the regular, never raise your voice at her, listen to her and adjust to whatever it is she says she wants.. but it won’t be enough.. it wasn’t enough.. I wasn’t enough. We have an entire generation who grew up in single parent households and never saw a healthy functioning relationship between a man and women. How can we duplicate something we never saw? How can a woman teach a boy how to be a man? I mean, these are tough question that Black Baby Boomers don’t want to answer or think about. But they’re the ones who made this gotdamn mess. Them and their irresponsible sexual habits are a big part of the reason why us people born in the 1980’s are so dysfunctional. When your father is missing, you’ll grow up and be less masculine. Hyper-masculinity in many ways is a front to cover up inadequacies.. it’s not real.. not at all. And in the end, all the blame will get placed on you as a man, for not being whatever it is you’re supposed to be, but how can you be that when no one showed you?.. Same applies to the young ladies. They needed (but didn’t get) examples too. The entitlement in the Black American community has gone unchecked for so long, that as a response there’s now a movement called “Passport Bros.”.. which in my opinion is a temporary solution, because there are no quick fixes in life. But I understand the frustration.. cause when it comes to accountability, the women of today are bobbing and weaving like a boxer who don’t want to get hit, you dig? And to top it off they’ll drag your name through the mud as if they’re the victim and you did them wrong some kind of way. The goal is to get everybody on their side and turnt against you. One of the things she did to me was told her friends and family that I was gay.. like, I legit got people who barely know me walking around thinking I’m a homosexual and shit. How sway? Now, I don’t have a problem with the LGBTQ community or whatever, but that’s not me.. don’t put me in a category that doesn’t apply to me.. that’s bogus as fuck, but I guess that’s how it goes, you know? But some of these women from ’round the way will set you up to get killed or file a false case on you and get you jammed up in the system if you make them mad enough.. so I can’t complain.. it could’ve turned out much worse.

Towards the end of the mixtape I got a really bitter vibe from you, do you regret it all?

Hell fucking yeah. This whole situation was a big waste of time.. but then again, maybe it wasn’t.. I did learn some valuable lessons. It all depends on how I look at it. I gave up a lot just to give this situation the attention that I felt like it needed. But for the most part, I was the only one sacrificing and compromising. She wasn’t giving up shit. Living her best life on my dime, while whipping up lies like pies.. because she knew that no man wants to be faithful to a single woman.. hell naw, she had to lie to make her shit pop the way she wanted it and that some fraud ass shit. I had so many missed opportunities fucking around with her. I can’t remember what track number it is, but on the song “Who Is He? What Is He To You?” I said: “..if I chose the game Bishop Juan would’ve been giving me a player’s trophy, but I chose love and now I’m paying for it”. That was much more than just lyrical artistry.. with the right mentorship, I really could’ve done it.. but I gave up on it.. because of all stuff I grew up listening to in church, but now yo, I wish I kept mashing.. I could’ve been a giant in the game.”

What mainstream artist(s) influenced you while writing and recording this mixtape?

‘K. Michelle’ was definitely a big influence with this as well as other projects that required more emotional dept from me as an artist. That “Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart?” album was fire.. especially track six and track nine. Those would be on repeat while I was writing. I also listened to ‘LL Cool J’ and ‘Drake’ a lot during this same time period. It paid off cause I think this project came together quite nicely. I could’ve done a better job as a session engineer, but that aside, musically speaking it came out good.

What artist influenced you overall?

That’s a hard one to pinpoint.. to give a broad answer, I’d say anybody who was anybody during the DeathRow/BadBoy beef had some influence on my style.. whether they were in the middle of the beef or not.. it was just that era.. I think that music was top tier. But now, to specify it as to who was the most influential, I’d say it was Tupac, Nas, Biggie and Snoop. But like I said there are a whole lot of artists that fuck with.. and forcing me to narrow it down is like backing me in to a corner with a Mac-10 [laughs]. Locally, Blade Icewood was my biggest influence.. Detroit went crazy when he dropped “Ride On Me”. RIP Blade. Also, Jeezy, T.I. and Gucci Mane were major influences.. I don’t think I would’ve ever thought about writing anything if not for those last three I just mentioned.

Are there any new artists out now that you like?

Naw, not really.. I think rap, as I know it, started losing its direction around the mid-2010’s.  It’s oversaturated with all this gotdamn mumble rap and auto-tune singing. I think if most of these niggas couldn’t mumble off-beat or sing their way through the song.. if they couldn’t make songs about popping pills and committing egregious acts of violence.. or if modern femcees couldn’t overly sexualize themselves.. they’d have absolutely nothing to talk about.. and that’s the real..

How long did it take you to put together this mixtape and do you plan on improving it or making a new album in the future?

Jesus Christ almighty, how much time you got? This actually started out as just a song here, a song there.. but I wasn’t expecting it to turn into a project though.. I think “Hey You” and “DownSouth Guttah Chick” were the first songs I recorded from this mixtape. This was before I started recording myself.. I was recording at Mo Master Studio at the time.. I think that was either late 2010 or early 2011.. but at the time the music was only supposed to be for her ears only. By “her” I mean, the woman who the bulk of the songs on this project was about. These songs were a romantic gesture. It was an audio representation of the love I had for her at that particular time. I was also recording the “College Boy Turned TrapStar”, “First-Time Felon” and “Another Detroit Gangster Story” mixtapes at Mo’s during those sessions and the love songs were just something I did on the side.  I’m not going to mention her name because she got one of those weird names that African-American parents gave their daughters in the 1980’s and it’s not my intention to embarrass or humiliate her.. even though she deserves it, but that’s that not what I intend to do. So for the duration of this interview I’ll refer to her as “Lil’ Mama” just to stay on the cool side, you dig? I want to have some dignity and class about the situation, you know? Remaining as gentlemanly as possible, given the circumstances. But to finish answering the question, I’d say it took me about five and a half to six years off and on to finish this project. I didn’t decide to actually make it a mixtape until late 2015 when it was clear that her and I had no future together. At this point I don’t plan on tampering with the final product, even though it wasn’t my best as far as mix quality. I did it all myself, but my mixing skills were not as good back then as they are now. However, I still hope that I can get my point across to listeners, without the uneven vocal-to-instrumental ratio being too much of a problem. I hope.. I really do.. but honestly, this is my old work.. my tapes since then have gotten clearer as far as mix quality. I’ve released various singles on Spotify, iTunes, Deezer, etc. and I’m planning on dropping my debut album “The TrapStar Diaries” as soon as I connect with a few artist I’d like to collaborate with for features.

I know you said it’s a wrap on the marriage thing, but have you given up on relationships completely? If so at what point did it happen? How many women burned you before you dropped the blue pill in favor of the red pill?

I don’t really like the terms “red pill” and “blue pill”, the shit just sounds corny, you feel me? Just like the phrase “simp”. The word “simp” is at least a hundred years old. But the way these YouTubers misuse the phrase you’d think it was a new slang term. But dig this, the word “simp” was first used to describe a mackman who was not pimping correctly. It literally means to “mis-pimp”. So by quintessential definition only pimps can “simp”, right? But the problem is squares get ahold of street terminology and try to make it apply to whatever it is there doing.. but I digress.. that’s another conversation for another time. Anyway, to answer your question.. the typical “boyfriend/girlfriend” situationships of modern times are just not for me. In my opinion, they just don’t serve me.. at times, with the world we live in today, I feel as if I was born twenty-five years too late and I missed out, you know? My grandfather, Lawrence Washington Sr. didn’t have as much education as I have, but he had more respect in his time in the Black community.. and he lived in Donalds, SC during the Jim Crow era. I think that says a lot about the times we live in. So yeah, I give up. I gave up years ago actually. The easier it became to get sex, the harder it became to find love. Low-key, I think that’s true on both sides. I’d say two. I got played twice before I really began to understand fully. I mean, I always knew there were double standards and games being played, but those two women really helped me see the light. Of course that was not their intention, but shout-out to them never the less. They are MVP’s in my game of life.. but like I said, the game playing has always been there and I was always aware of it, but I just never connected the dots all the way. I’m not sure how old you are and if you’re old enough to remember, but when TLC dropped “No Scrubs” that shit wasn’t just a song, it was a movement. Like, for real though.. that and “Bills, Bills, Bills” by Destiny’s Child. This became a larger than life, epic movement. It was like gasoline on a simmering fire. No warning, but shots fired.. and a lot of the nice young men in the Black community got caught in the crossfire, quit similar to how kids often get caught in the middle of a gang war in urban areas. Let’s be for real, in my late teens, early twenties where was I supposed to get all this money that these songs said I was suppose to have, legally? Working at McDonalds? Working at Ponderosa Steakhouse? C’mon, those places don’t pay enough for all that. Unless you have parents who are well off or family that can plug you in with a job at one of the automotive plants, then you’re probably not going to start seeing anything that resembles decent money until after you graduate from college.. saddled with a shit-ton of student loan debt. The shit’s crazy. So now, because I didn’t have it at the time I’m pre-judged, labeled, and thrown into a pile of “dusties”.. and it was all because I was just “average looking”. While the pretty-boys, thug niggas, and varsity athletes get the pick of the litter with no money down.. and these were the niggas in the hood who was cumming in pussy and making them girls single mothers.. and then they doubled down on the entitlement. That’s when I first started hearing the phrase “me and my kids is a package deal”.. and to be fully honest, when I was younger, I wanted no part of that shit. That’s why I wound up staying with “Lil’ Mama” as long as I did, because despite all of her fuckery.. at least she was kid-free. I don’t have any children, but I’m in my thirties now, so I feel a little bit differently now.. people in my age bracket typically come with kids, so I guess it’s slim pickings.. either that or go after young ladies in their twenties. I don’t really have any answers, like I hinted at on the mixtape I kinda gave up. As far as, as you put it, “dropping the bluepill” that never really happened.. cause see, I don’t really consider myself “redpill” or  “MGTOW”, but I do agree with a few talking points here and there. If I had to pick a position.. and that’s only if I had to choose, I’d say I lean more towards the philosophy of “blackpill”, if anything. Looks are genetically predetermined, and women choose sexual partners based mainly on physical features.. especially for niggas who workout and chisel their body up. Dick size is another predetermined factor that works in a man’s favor if he’s on the larger side of the spectrum. These chicks try to act like it doesn’t matter, but it does.. even if she can’t really handle it all, it’s still somewhat of a status symbol. They be lying to little dick niggas who got bread, so I think the biggest mistake a lot of niggas be out here making is believe the shit that becoming out these women’s mouths.. naw, bruh.. don’t listen to that [laughs]. Genetics play a big part in our sexual desires and reproductive patterns as human being.. but the problem is people don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, millennials grew up getting trophy for participations and not having to get down and dirty to compete. People try to pretend that genes don’t matter and that everyone is created equal and have the same opportunities in life, relationships, economics, or whatever else, but it’s all fake. Lets’ call an ace and ace and a spade a spade, women have a very hypergamous nature.. and to tie it all in, that’s how drug dealers and pimps get the actions that we get from women in urban environments. It’s a combination of the “bad-boy privilege” with the “rich man’s privilege”.. and really, them guys only be “hood rich” but it works never the less. It is what is it is, I’m not mad about how the culture has become.. and that’s how I know I’m not really MGTOW, because I can adapt to it all. I can’t really talk about how it is for other men who are apart of other communities, I can only speak on my personal experience.. and my experience is being Black, male, and born after 1980 in an urban environment. I also must say that my opinion does not represent everyone.. I can only speak from my viewpoint and from the view point of niggas that I know personally, you dig? But I say, the way it is.. and has been now for maybe that last fifty years or so in the African-American community, is that the average looking men are sexually and economically at the mercy of a woman’s desires. That’s partially what this mixtape embodies. Now.. there are many, many, many reasons for it being that way.. I mean, for starters the systematic removal of the Black father from most Black households did not help us very much. White liberal pseudo-feminazi ideologies and the sexual revolution of the 1970’s did big damage too. However, what I think hurt us the most was the CIA-sponsored crack epidemic, followed by those not one, not two, but three crime bills Joe Biden wrote and campaigned for on the Senate floor. Those crime bills he wrote and ultimately got passed into law and crippled our community. While his son Hunter Biden is a whole fucking crackhead.. ain’t that some shit? Hey maayne, say maayne, I’m sorry for talking your head off.. you asked me some simple shit and I gave you a whole essay [laughs]. I’ll try to keep my answers short and sweet from here on out.. but I can’t make no promises though [laughs].

Hey, I really don’t mind G, not at all. I’m here for it. I’d rather have too much than not enough, but okay, here we go again. What was the final straw that led you to finally putting your thoughts and emotions on paper? How old were you when it happened?

Well, I’ve always been expressive.. even in the later days of grade school, all my English teachers, Social Studies teachers, hell even my Art teachers would gas me up because of the passion behind my pen. I think that when something (or someone) is bothering me is when I am my most creative. With this situation though, it was the constant lying that just caught up to her.. she lied so damn much she couldn’t keep track of all her own bullshit [laughs]. Another thing that caused a lot of problems was money. Her ass was a gotdamn spendthrift. She wanted to live the champaign life with water bottle money. She was a feminist only when it was convenient. She loved to get me straight and tell me what “she ain’t gon’ do”, right? But when I tell her to go get a job or go down to Wayne County Community College on Outer Drive Rd. and re-enroll to finish becoming an LPN, that’s when she’d start mumbling some shit about how it’s “a man’s job to provide” or the infamous “what you won’t do another nigga will” quote [laugh]. I’m gone now and ain’t nobody filled my shoes yet, so she really had her shit mixed up. Dang, I said I wasn’t going to be longwinded, but I feel it coming [laughs]. Anyway, at the time I was a dope boy, but I changed.. or I was changing, I should say.. I didn’t want to partake in the street lifestyle anymore.. and she said she didn’t want that for me either, but that’s just what her mouth said. It wasn’t the truth. The truth is that although she herself was a work in progress, she wanted someone who was already put together.. and you know what? That would’ve been fine if she was just honest about it. If she kept it one-hundred, we could’ve both went our separate ways and no time or money would been wasted.. but what she wanted to do, was hold on to me in the meantime and use whatever available resources I had to keep herself afloat as well as use my money to attract someone new and con him into thinking she was some type of independent chick or whatever and that way he’d let his guard down in get suckered in by her feminine wiles. She was doing “soft girl era” back in 2009, so that whole little fraudulent movement is nothing new to me.. but back then there was no name for it. Before I met her and the “Libra” chick, who I also mentioned on the mixtape, I thought games were only played on “channel three” [laughs].. only old heads will get that joke [laughs]. Look, I’m not slow.. I mean we all know limited money causes problems.. and I wanted to be responsible, while she wanted to be an idiot and show off, trying to impress people who had no real value. There were a bunch of red flags and other annoying ass behaviors I didn’t pay attention to.. and to be fully honest, this entire situation is my fault.. I had the power to stop this mess before it’s started, but I didn’t know then what I know now. For instance, she was always talking about ex’s. Specifically this one ex named Jason who she moved to Chicago with. Him and this rapper nigga in Atlanta named ‘Stadic Jones’. It was always “Jason this, Jason that” or she would play one that Stadic nigga’s songs and wanna dance to it. Like, I’ont wanna here that shit.. you know what I’m saying? Then talking about how the ‘Boys II Men’ song “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” was about her and Stadic’s relationship.. like, that’s really not something to brag about.. that song didn’t make her sound good at all.. but again, that was another red flag I ignored. Indirectly, she kept giving me reasons to stop fucking with her, but my dumb ass mind goofed on the warning signs. That wasn’t the whole part either, she was always trying to recreate relationships with ex’s through me, right? There was this once situation she would always talk about, I didn’t rhyme about it on the mixtape, but it’s still in the peripheral of my mind, where her and her ex, Jason, got into a fight with some dude and his girlfriend shortly after moving to Chicago. It was in their apartment. Fighting all in the living room and shit.. and she would squeal with glee talking about it. “We beat they asses!” is what she would say.. and I’m listening like, the only reason her dumb ass is still alive after that is by the grace of God. C’mon, who starts a fight with people that they just met? And in your own house? Her and her ex rolling around on the floor of their new apartment squabbling with locals, but you a out-of-towner. That was dangerous as fuck. I mean, it’d be dangerous  to do that anywhere, but it’s especially dangerous on the Westside of Chicago, you know what I mean? Cause Chi-Town is mob city. You got “Gangster Disciples”, “Black Disciples”, “Black P. Stones”, “New Breeds”, “Mickey Cobras”, “Vice Lords”, “4 Corner Hustlers” and a bunch of other shit you have to be worried about.. especially if you not from there. I asked her once what if after that fight, if them people y’all beat up came back with some cousins that was Breeds or GD’s or Souls? With guns? She sat there dumbfounded with no answer [laughs]. But then, she tried to recreate that scenario with me. She had another more recent ex-boyfried, who was supposedly stalking her or whatever, right? Yeah, him and his new girl was both stalking her, or so she said. But I really ain’t believe that shit, because stuff would always happen when I wasn’t there. He would always pop up twenty minutes after I left her house or whatever.. and his girl was allegedly playing on her phone from a blocked number. But then when I started asking serious questions like, where he sold his drugs at? Or where his mother lived, she would clam up. That’s how I knew she was full of shit, cause if he was really a threat like she said he was she would’ve gave up the information pronto. See, me personally.. I don’t believe in being sloppy. I would’ve got my guys and a couple of straps and we would’ve ran up in his trap and made everybody get on the floor and empty their gotdamn pockets.. you know what I’m saying? But that would’ve all been a cover, cause he would’ve been the real target. The plan would’ve been to blaze that nigga and make the whole thing just look like a drug-house robbery that went wrong.. but she wouldn’t give me the information I needed to get down on him. She was protecting the nigga. What she really wanted was to stir the pot and somehow get us both in the same room at the same time and watch two men fight over her, with her ridiculous ass [laughs]. Who got time for that? She’s slick but not smart.

This all sounds like a lot. What is the rhyme or reason?

Looking back on it now, I really don’t know what was going on in my head.. I really don’t.. I have no answers and can’t explain myself at all. I don’t how or why I put up with it any of it.. the game playing, the poor communication skills.. one thing she use to do, when we’d get into it over the phone was in the middle of argument, hang up while I was in the middle of a sentence and start texting. That shit was annoying.

If you had to sum it all up, what do you think her problem was?

Well, I talked about it briefly in a song on the tape called “What We Never Had”.. her mother was a crackhead, been a crackhead for over thirty years and her father tried to overcompensate for her mother’s antic by spoiling her rotten.. so rotten, nobody else can deal with her. All her relationships end bitterly.. and the common denominator is her. She grew up in a suburb, so I didn’t see it at first, because she put up a nice front.. but she was really a just a high-class hoodrat. A wolf disguised as a sheep. The shit’s crazy. See nowadays, ratchet chicks that were blessed with pretty faces and big booties develop all these wild expectations after dating a bunch of niggas who cater to them.. it’s usually an ugly nigga, or a overly fat nigga, or a nigga with a little dick, or a nigga that’s fifteen or maybe twenty years older than her who is compensating for his inadequacies by buying her everything she wants. So her expectations go unchecked like a forest fire and she continuously wants more and more. That’s a generalization and all, but it definitely applies in this case. Also, in these modern times, in the hood, the mothers of Black millennial women put these wild ideas of what a man should be in their heads.. and their moms be bitter and washed up with no husband, so how the fuck would she know what a “real man” is? Some shit they done came up with from reading a bullshit erotic fiction novel or watching a movie. Some type of superhuman nigga with no human frailties.. he’s got to have a house in Gross Pointe, drive a Mercedes Benz, annual income of $200,000 or more, with washboard abs and a ten-inch dick… but the only thing she’s expected to bring to the table is a pretty face, some big titties and a big booty.. oh, how could I forget, offspring that she made with some other nigga. This is not an uncommon thing in today’s Africa America [laughs].

That sounds really awful, why did you stay in this situation as long as you did?

I believe it was Joan Crawford who once said “Love is like a flame.. but whether it warms your hearth or burn down your house down, you’ll never know.” Or something like that. I may have misquoted that shit, but you smart and you get what I’m trying to say. No relationship is perfect.. that’s just not possible. There are always going to be compromises.. you’re going have to bend in some way.. giving something up so that you can gain something better. That’s what I thought I was doing. At the time, I was a work in progress and so was she. I saw the possibility of what it could grow to be and thought that eventually she’d outgrow a lot of the dumb stuff she was doing. I shook the dice and crapped out. But you got to understand that was a really vulnerable time for me. Even though I grew up in the church, even though my mom was an engineer, something had changed within me after submitting myself to the criminal ethic. I was so use to fast money and running the streets all day. Getting readjusted socially, with a felony on my résumé, was extremely difficult.. I was working low-wage temp jobs and I re-enrolled at Wayne State University, but I wanted to give up several times. Building with her gave me something to hope for. I know it sounds stupid now, but that’s how I felt at the time. But the things is, while I was progressing and moving forward in life, she was at a standstill.. and blaming her lack of motivation on me. Within the same time period I graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State, started a holding company with various businesses, but her? She’s in the exact same position in life that she was fifteen years ago. She’s still broke, in the hood, on Section 8 Housing, and blaming someone else for her problems. She learned the hard way that grass wasn’t greener on the other side. It’s comical and sad at the same time.

You said your mom was an engineer? How do you wind up in the streets?

Yeah, my mom was a civil engineer. She was one of the first Black females to graduate from Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI in the late 1970’s. She use to work for MichCon before the DTE Energy buyout and Michigan Bell/Ameritech. She leveled up to management positions by the late 1980’s. However, in 1993 the company wanted to cut its cost so they downsized their top-heavy management and brought in people with less experience to do the same jobs for a fraction of the cost. My mother took the buyout package and went back to school. First she attended and got a theology degree from William Tyndale College and later she got a teaching certificate from University of Detroit Mercy. That’s just a brief background on her. Now, how I wound up in the streets is very difficult question to answer.. that is an interview in and of itself. We’ll be here all day if I try to answer that off the top of head. You should probably check out the “Bentler Ave Street Star” mixtape and get back to me with another set of question about this.

Have you gotten any backlash from the women you tell stories about on your mixtape? (Or women in general).

Well, I cut most of them off.. cause they really weren’t important. I haven’t seen Jam since maybe the later part of 2009. I really just wanted to fuck her cause she was the plug’s baby mama. I didn’t fully realize that until years had passed and I did some serious reflection on all that happened. I mean, she was beautiful and all, but she wasn’t really my type.. or maybe she was just too young for me. we were like six years apart and a lot of the crazy stuff she would do would annoy me if I had to be her dude. That was an emotional affair, but I had enough self control at the time not to let it go too far. If I could go back in time, she’d get the business, you dig? Nut all in that pussy [laughs]. Now umm.. the “Libra” chick added me of Facebook a few years back.. and I accepted to see what she had to say, but she had nothing to say. Sent me a damn friend request so she could be nosey. I inboxed her to test her and see if she would act dumb and stuck-up. She did. Ignored the message, so I deleted and blocked her. I haven’t seen Chase in years either, but if she showed up at my front door with a million dollars and nude under a mink coat, I wouldn’t turn her away. Now as far as “Lil’ Mama” even after I disconnected from her, I can still fuck. I know she heard the shit, like the whole thing where I told the whole story and all, but I really got no real pushback, cause the shit was true and she knows it was true. In summer of 2021 she tried to get mad and called herself cussing me out about this one song she heard called “It Wasn’t Love” from the “Detroit WestSide 1983” mixtape, right.. but all she really did was cuss my voicemail out [laughs].. I made it halfway through the message and hit the delete button.. and what did it matter? I fucked her again later that year. So to answer the question, no I’ve gotten no backlash from the women mentioned [laughs]. In all seriousness though, her life is all one big trauma response. As entertaining as this mixtape is, it’s equally heartbreaking. I hope she gets the help she needs one day. She’s doing fine today but if it’s not fixed, when she doesn’t have these “outlets” i.e. another dick to sit on, she could implode. Now as far as women in general, I’d also say no. In all actuality, women are the ones who compliment the tape the most. This project had so much emotional depth and the ladies appreciated it the most.

I noticed you have a few phone skits on this project. Two of those skit featured adult film stars ‘Diamond Monroe’ and ‘Nona Malone’, how exactly did that come about?

That was me upping the ante. Like, if you notice on the mixtape, the prequel songs I did about the situation with the “Libra” woman ended with me displaced and detached. On the song “Pinky, Cherokee, Jada Fire” I talked about visiting an adult film shop, buying x-rated DVD’s and having a “self pleasuring” experience.. to put it mildly, but I wanted to take it a step further. I had done the song “At The Strip Club” and “Butt Naked” about young ladies I’d met at ‘Ace of Spades Detroit’ and ‘King of Diamonds’ on 8 Mile. However by the time I was ready to release the tape neither of them were dancers anymore. So to protect their privacy, I re-wrote both songs to make them seem as if it was about someone else. Now, both Nona and Diamond have shot scenes for PinkyXXX, but they’re both from Detroit and both of them are exotic dancers. I’m from Detroit too and it’s not hard to get in contact with anyone because everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, you see what I’m saying? Prime example, this may seem off subject but it’s not.. I went to trade school with a guy named Alan, right.. he had a little brother named Carlos. I would go to Al’s house for school projects and what not and his little brother was there.. but guess what? Carlos would eventually become ‘HaHa Davis’.. you see what I mean? Crazy ain’t it? Now.. in regards to this project, the way I set that whole thing up was to show that this time around I wasn’t about to sit in a room with girlie movie and lotion, I went outside this time and participate in what local night life had to offer, you feel me?! And honestly, I get along better with women that are in the sport-life than I do with women who are squares. I get them, they make sense to me. The stripper, the escort, the dominatrix, the porn star, the erotic masseuse, or whatever it is the woman may be doing, I get them, I understand them. Being promiscuous for money makes a whole lot more sense to me than being promiscuous for attention or being promiscuous to prove that you can be careless about sex the way men are.. which is what seems to be the trend in modern square society. Running up their body counts just for the sake of it. These chicks be having a wet ass pussy, with a dry ass purse [laughs]. That dumb as hell. I can’t wrap my brain around that square logic, you know? I got the idea to start an adult entertainment blog called ‘BlackDimez Dot Com’ cause of my affiliation with Diamond and Nona, so now I’m leaning more towards this side than ever before because dollars make sense. I hope you understand.

Most definitely, that was a very solid expiation that was easy to follow. No follow up questions needed. Next I’d like to shift focus a little bit and find out more about what it was like growing up in Detroit and watching the city slowly fall apart as car manufacturing jobs moved overseas?

I mean, Detroit has always been rough for as long as I’ve been alive. Before I got here, actually.. things really started going downhill in the 1960’s.. things started brewing earlier than that even. In 1943, shortly after Black people started migrating from the southern States to escape Jim Crow laws and pursue more economic opportunities for themselves, Detroit had it first race riot. The conflict started bubbling when Irish plant worker decided to go on strike. Big shots in the auto industry used newly arrived Black men who were eager to work as pawns against the Irishmen striking by offering them the jobs that were held by the striking plant workers. One thing lead to anther a rumor got spread, then the fighting, looting, and arson started. When the smoke cleared, about a thousand people got arrested and thirty-four people were dead. Fast-forward to July of 1967 after continuous trigger-happy policing another riot broke out. A real bloody one too. It left a lot of blight throughout the city. Devil’s Night didn’t help much either. Long story short.. or should I say short story long, with my longwinded ass, Detroit got its first Black mayor after that in 1974. His name was Coleman Young and during his campaign he promised to get rid of a vicious and aggressive unit within the Detroit police called S.T.R.E.S.S. (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets). Mayor Young kept his promise and stayed in power for twenty years afterwards. He was unapologetically Black. He was not going to be the token Negro who accepted a pat on the head from the good ol’ boys in the dominant society. So, because he wouldn’t let them punk him, they decided to play hardball with Detroiters, by relocated their factories to suburban areas. It didn’t stop with factories either. All while I was growing up it seemed as if any place of value was in the suburbs. It was a way for the rich White muckety-mucks to stick it to Black Detroiters. They relocated plants as far as Wixom, MI if I’m not mistaken.. and also, they changed their hiring procedure. Once upona time Black Baby Boomers walked in off the streets, with a high school diploma and was able to get jobs at Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler with little to no effort. You just had to show up and do the work. But by the time of was of legal working age, you needed a referral from somebody who was already on the plant floor to get a job at one of those places.  I don’t think the moves overseas didn’t start happening until the mid-1990’s, I could be wrong, but that’s when I think it happened. I was still a kid at the time. But what really led to the urban decay was Reganomics and the Iran/Contra Affair. The Regan administration needed money to fund their secret war in Nicaragua because Congress wouldn’t give it to them so they secretly distributed metric tons of cocaine that was eventually freebased into crack to dealers in South Central Los Angeles who then re-distributed to other majority Black towns all across The United States. Here in Detroit it was everywhere. We had these Shakespearean type drug lords who could easily be characters in an epic crime drama.. you had guys like ‘Maserati Rick’, ‘Big Ed Hanserd’, ‘Demetris Holloway’, ‘The Curry Boys’, ‘White Boy Rick’.. then later on you had guys like ‘Six-Mile Chuck’, ‘Schoolcraft Stank’, and a few other cats who’s names I can’t think of at the moment. I mean very colorful and charismatic individuals, you know? But see, when the need for Black drug dealer cash was no longer needed with such urgency, the government passed legislation to mass incarcerate niggas who unknowingly did their dirty work for them. See, everybody wants to put the blame on niggas when it’s our government who reaps the biggest reward from the dope game. Niggas be hood rich for a little while from it, but eventually them lawyer fees, asset forfeitures and jail time catch up to them. Either that or they get murdered. That’s the game.

If there was one thing you could express to everyone that listens to your album what would it be?

The one thing I hope I conveyed through this project is to never settle for someone who has no respect for you. Get rid of them as soon as possible because life is too damn short for that nonsense. The one thing that clicked for me personally after watching the fallout from this situation is once they leave, they don’t get better. How you get them, is how you’ll lose them. I wish I realized that a long time ago when she was talking about all the dumb stuff that she’d done in previous relationships. That dummy told me, inadvertently of course, that she had absolutely no respect for Black men as people.. and truth be told, it started with her father. I don’t know if she does it on purpose or not, but the pattern that I noticed is she finds calm, laidback, and responsible men like her father, slowly gets her hooks in them, and then starts acting like her mother. The level of disrespect I dealt with from her doesn’t happen overnight. It was habitual. She’s been disrespecting boyfriends for years in the street, at the grocery store or wherever they went. Always had multiple situations going and the left hand didn’t know about what the right hand was doing. The fact that she could be putting the next man in a dangerous scenario is just incredibly stupid, but she didn’t care.. and in the hood, there are many women who think just like her. There are many women in relationships or even married who are out there living single, like they Khadijah [laughs]. To the brothas out there who are having issues with their girlfriends or wives.. if she’s constantly disrespecting you, just keep in mind, your replacement is waiting in her DMs. That’s just how it is nowadays.

Right now, what is most important to you?

Most important? I’d say getting returns on investments. Not just financial, but whatever it is. My health is my main priority. Health is wealth. You can have a trillion dollars in cash at your disposal, blocks of gold from Fort Knox, a seat on Wall Street and real estate all over the globe but if your health is in the toilet, that money is useless. I’m in my thirties and I have to start being more careful. There are certain things I can’t eat anymore, I can’t stay up pass a certain time anymore, and more importantly there are certain people I just can’t kept around me anymore. What you do in your younger years will tell on you in your older years, you know? Coronavirus and its multiple vaccines were cooked up in a lab years before the pandemic hit . I hate the term “anti-vaxxer” cause it makes me sound crazy for questioning and not trusting the United States government.. but why should I trust them? These are the same people who brought crack to my neighborhood. Anyway, the virus was design to attack those who are the least healthiest.. and a lot of people didn’t make it. I had a friend who died from it, my mom almost died from it… I almost died from it. So now, going forward and being given a second chance, I have a new outlook on life. I’ve been going to the gym regularly, reading more, and doing whatever I can to enrich myself. That’s what’s most important to me.