MC Zappa: Thank you, I appreciate that. And quite honestly, it was just natural. When I was between 7 and 9 years old, my mother bought me an mp3 player for my birthday. She loaded it with Michael Jackson's greatest hits and a couple of other classics, which I loved, but I also would use the built-in recording feature to record songs from my favorite VGM OSTs (Super Smash Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man etc.) See, this was in the days before everyone and their mama had an iPhone with Apple Music and Spotify; if you wanted 8-bit VGM you had to make special arrangements for it. I remember I always got mocked because 8-bit wasn't "real music." Nevertheless, after I started making music in 2016 after seeing "Straight Outta Compton" with my mother, it was like second nature to use those same 8-bit pieces I grew up listening to in my beats. From the beginning, there was never a question or consideration of any other kind of style.

MC Zappa: Yes. A heck of a lot has happened over the past four years, but I believe it really was a culmination of things that were going on as a teenager. I first started to feel inklings of depression when I was 16, or at least that was when I acquired the language to describe it. Then three years later, one night in late May of 2019, I was brutally beaten over the head by a grown man with a pistol while taking out the trash, in an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. I had a concussion and a TBI, and to be quite honest, I don't even fully know how it's affected me. Anyway, back to more recent times.

In 2022, I was in my second year of living independently as an adult. I had just graduated, was working two low-paying jobs, and was dealing with severe depression and isolation in a backwater town. My family lived 1,000 miles away in NY, and I had no true friends, so I just hung around whoever paid me any attention. But above all, there was just this awful emptiness that I couldn't get away from no matter what. My life, my existence rather, seemed to have a profound lack of meaning. Almost any unhealthy coping mechanism you can think of — I did it. I got drunk, I hung out on porches wasting time, I dabbled in marijuana, I self-harmed constantly, I attempted suicide, I was sexually promiscuous (same-sex attracted), and I developed a particularly egregious shopping addiction. I mean it was so bad to where I was spending copious amounts of money on things that I didn't even really want, just for the feeling I got from ordering things. In hindsight, I believe this was a misguided attempt to obtain a steady supply of dopamine, but back then I wasn't capable of thinking clearly.

I praise God and I cling to Him tightly because He has looked out for me during a season where I was blatantly spitting in His face. Around that time, due to the universalist beliefs I was raised with, I saw no problem with doing tarot readings and burning sage in my house. This laid the foundation for the foolish decision I made to become a Satanist. I bought a Satanic Bible, a pentagram necklace and a set of black candles, and was planning to do rituals. But in April of 2022, I started a new job, and my boss at the time took me under her wing. She always talked to me about God and Jesus, and while I wasn't ready to fully receive any of it yet, I counted her as someone to listen to, because while most people were either manipulative or cruel to me, she always showed me love and kindness. I also had another coworker, AM, who at this point has become a very close family member, who took me under her wing and loved me too. This latter person was a little more "hardcore" with her Christianity than my boss, but it was what I needed to hear. In any case, I still wasn't in the right frame of mind to receive it.

In early 2023, I met a young man at work with whom I ended up entering into a romantic relationship. I was warned several times that what I was doing was offensive to God and was endangering myself greatly, but when all you care about is pleasure, you lose any sense of self-preservation, and you have the audacity to get mad at the only people who try to knock sense into you. Loneliness and love of pleasure are a terrible combination, one that completely distorts your worldview. In any case, all that glitters wasn't gold; my partner was abusive to me and actually got me kicked out of my apartment towards the end of the year. This was very traumatic to me, because I was homeless many times throughout my childhood and adolescence, so therefore it was one of my very worst fears. AM, the same person who had warned me all along that I was doing wrong, was still kind enough to help me get a new apartment. She helped me to see that perhaps what I had gone through was a natural consequence of disobeying God. At this point I was finally receptive, and I started to attend Jehovah's Witness meetings with her, and to take my relationship with God seriously. I closely fellowship with both my old boss and AM, and I still attend meetings (although I am not a Witness), and although I am doing my best to put my sinful past behind me, Satan and his minions are constantly using it to accuse me to this day. I remember what things were like as a godless person in order to encourage myself to keep fighting for my faith, but the past can't hold me anymore. The world may accuse me, but God has forgiven me.

MC Zappa: I don't go actively looking for them, but I do always take note when I come across them. I came across this cat by the name of Charlie Carbone through an ad while I was scrolling on Instagram, and he's nice with it. He spits hard-hitting Christ-centered lyrics without using a single swear word; I really appreciate that. I like his old-school flow, too; I really can't get with this new school flow that all the rappers use today. But I will make an exception for Zauntee; I like his song "Hard Work God First" a whole lot.

I'm always on the lookout for Christian hip-hop cats to collab with, because I'ma be real, I do get tired of being on tracks all by myself sometimes. I've been in this game for a decade, and I can count on one hand how many (released) collabs I've done.

MC Zappa: This is one of the few advantages I'd say my upbringing has given me in regards to faith. We had a very cavalier attitude towards Christianity; it was cool to make fun of God and Jesus, and church was just a boring place that you only went to for funerals. That said, I wasn't in it and wasn't raised in it, so I had no motivation to put blinders or rose-colored shades on regarding the issues that plague the Church, or the evil that people have wrought while bearing the name of Christ. This is why when I was 19, I had no problem writing the song "No Preacher" or organizing the disingenuous promotional campaign around it. Of course, I am now remorseful of my profound ignorance, but at the time I genuinely thought I was doing a service.

But now that I am a member of the Body of Christ, I see firsthand that accountability is crucial, both on an individual and a collective level. You absolutely are your brother's keeper. Why are the prosperity pimps allowed to bleed my people dry without a gun while simultaneously teaching a false gospel that damns people's souls? Why are gossips and talebearers tolerated within the Church? Why is abuse, both domestic and of children, so commonly covered up? The reason is simple: somebody, usually several somebodies, knows what's going on but refuses to speak up or hold their brothers and sisters accountable. Let me be very clear: protecting the abuser and condemning the victim is something that's absolutely disgusting to God [PROVERBS 17:15], and if you're complicit, then by no means will you escape judgment unless you repent. Is it not written "do not partake in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead expose them"? [EPHESIANS 5:11] And does the Scripture not say "you shall not go along with a multitude to do evil"? [EXODUS 23:2]

When a company finds out that someone is unlawfully using copyrighted material, they immediately take action to stop the offender. Why? One, because of money, of course. But also, because the brand is being misrepresented. So if the world is so protective over names and marks, how much more should the Church be of the name of Jesus, and take immediate action when a believer is misrepresenting Him?

I have worked with some of the nastiest people you could imagine. Abusive, malevolent, jealous, lying, slanderous, traitorous, ungrateful, blasphemous, sexually immoral and the list goes on. The funny thing is that these selfsame people claim to be "Christians," and talk about church, Jesus and God. Whose God? The god of this world perhaps, but not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob! If you are a disciple of Jesus, called by the Father and empowered by the Holy Spirit, then you are bound and OBLIGED to love God and your neighbor. So why would you not only make fun of His holy Name, JEHOVAH, but hate, slander and throw stumbling blocks in the path of those who zealously serve Him? Moreover, why do you think God Almighty actually smiles upon you doing these things? The fact is, the word "Christian" is almost completely devoid of meaning at this point, and we as the Church have a part to blame in that because we have failed to judge correctly. We took the first two words from Matthew 7:1 and just decided to discard everything else. At one point, I worked with a man who seemed nice, humble and quiet. He'd always give me a hug whenever he saw me, and he had given me a ride home from work in his truck at least once. One of his most distinctive features was the large silver cross he always wore. But at one point, he was arrested for committing a horrible sexual crime against a very vulnerable person (which was swept under the rug by "Christians", but that's something else all over again) All I could register was shock and disgust, but the whole time, that big silver cross was in the front of my mind. I reckoned he probably was wearing it when he did the awful deed.

All these things coalesced in my mind as I was first starting to work on the "Critical Times" album. Then too, AM, who is an older black woman, always exclaims things like "help me understand!" and "where they do this at?", and I just decided to sample her vocals into a track. I decided to voice my disturbance with these things in the form of rhetorical questions, combine it with said instrumental, and the rest is history in the making!

MC Zappa: Well if it's God's will, I will be releasing "Critical Times", the world's first Christian Bit-Hop album, later this year. I'm really excited about it. I mean, I always have fun making my albums, but on this particular project, I get to draw on my gaming and pop culture knowledge and apply it to preaching the Gospel, which requires creativity and is therefore intellectually stimulating. It's like how St. Paul was able to quote from secular works in order to make points about Jesus, but on a bigger scale. In any case, this album is deeply personal. I want my people, the Body of Christ, to be the best we can be, including myself. So I aim to exhort, warn and encourage with the messages on this album.

The next full-length Christian album I plan on doing after "Critical Times" is called "Rage Of The Nations". I had a whole bunch of ideas for tracks about the experience of walking with Christ, but I knew I had to cut it off at some point and save some material for another LP because otherwise, "Critical Times" would have like 40 or 45 songs on it.

On the secular side, I have a (mostly) instrumental album called "Mind Your Business!!" coming out later this year, which is a sequel to my 2021 album "Do You Mind?!". It has a subplot of a former tax collector leaving the IRS, starting a highly successful fried chicken restaurant and becoming drunk with power. At some point, I'm going to springboard off the momentum from my "Mind" series of albums and do a Christian beat tape in the same vein. It's called "CAPITAL VICE (Sinny Sin Sin)", and all the tracks are themed after the so-called Seven Deadly Sins (I say "so-called" because all unrepented sin leads to death). Then finally, I have an idea for a project called "VANITY". Due to my experiences, before conversion, with feeling that life was absolutely pointless, the book of Ecclesiastes has very strong significance to me, and is in fact my favorite book out of the 66. So I want to do an album or EP (haven't decided which yet) paying homage to Ecclesiastes. There are tracks such as "Time And Place" and "Conscious Of Nothing". But then again, the Scripture says that it's foolish to boast about tomorrow; who knows if I'll even see the rest of this day. I am grateful to God that He has allowed and empowered me to make all the music I've made up to today.

MC Zappa: Let me tell you something. I grew up on artists like KRS-ONE, Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy. Their beats were varied, hard and in your face, and their message was meant to educate, uplift, question and encourage the community to do better. So from childhood, this is the context and the framework from which I see hip-hop. I despise modern rap music (it's rap, but it can never be called hip-hop!) with a passion, because at this point it is derivative, derogatory and degrading. Why just the other day, I heard one of my coworkers playing a song with the lyrics "I can't wait to mistreat her". And everyone was bopping like it was cool. How disgusting!

With that being said, it is written that we must "submit our members as instruments of righteousness" and "Honor YHWH with the firstfruits". My mind, my musical talent and my creativity are all gifts from God. So it is meet that I should use the gifts He has given me in order to share His Word. Of course in my everyday life I preach the Gospel in season and out of season, but since my platform as a public figure was built on my music, I must specifically use it to glorify God, whether it be rapping, singing or even instrumentals. When these puppets of corporate devils get on the mic and start talking about recreational drug use, abuse of alcohol, gang warfare, and sexual immorality, ain't they advertising for Satan the devil? So I'm going to advertise for Christ.

MC Zappa: Yes, several in fact. Number one: check yourself before you wreck yourself, because idolaters don't go to heaven. If your God and your Jesus are perfectly fine with you being lawless and showing cruel disdain and apathy for the people that Christ went to the cross to save, saying the most vile and hateful things to people with a Bible verse in your bio, you have made up another God and "another Christ" [2 CORINTHIANS 11:4] in your head rather than following the God of the Bible, and are therefore guilty of idolatry. His will is for all people to be saved and come to an accurate knowledge of the Truth. He takes absolutely no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and in fact He said through Solomon not to rejoice when bad things happen to them, lest He become angry at you instead. [PROVERBS 24:17-18] So why do we think it's okay to be so cavalier about the misfortune and death of people we don't like?

Number two, your Christianity ought to supersede your liberalism or your conservatism, not fit within the bounds of it. Would you contain God Almighty within two party lines? And is it not written that "no one can serve two masters? When they tried to make Jesus king, He fled and ran away, because His mission was to establish the Kingdom of God, not to assume earthly political power. So what makes you think His will is for His followers to take over the earth in political positions? Read Daniel 2:44 and stay on the mission.

Finally, I am begging the Church, especially the black Church, to pay attention to mental health and remove the stigma from it. I feel like there is a very unhealthy habit of downplaying, misattributing or straight up denying mental health within Christendom. I myself suffer from severe clinical depression (including suicidal tendencies), and while the Holy Spirit keepeth me afloat, I must say that prior to my conversion, during my worst moments, the Christian response was simply not helpful. Plenty of "I'll pray for you" and "suicide is a sin, you know", but never "hey man, you really need to seek treatment". First of all, the curse that the world is under due to Adam's sin includes physical deformities, hormonal imbalances, physical deterioration during the aging process etc. So why is it so hard to grasp that mental health problems are a part of that? But I hear some certain "Christians" quick to dismiss every case as either demons or laziness, which is simply not universally true. Secondly, is it not written that faith without works is dead? In other words, yes you pray without ceasing, but your actions need to align with said prayers. And if Jesus clearly said that the sick need doctors [MATTHEW 9:12], then who are you to shame His children for seeking mental health treatment?