— Multidisciplinary rapper Open Mike Eagle releases his new album Neighborhood Gods Unlimited via his own label, Auto Reverse Records.
Currently performing on his headline North American tour featuring special guests Cavalier and Rhys Langston, the latest studio album from the polymath, screenwriter, comedian includes his previously released singles “my co-worker clark kent’s secret black box,” produced by K-Nite13 and “contraband (the plud has bags of me)” produced by Kenny Segal.
Beyond his career as a musician, Mike has developed a number of television projects including his Comedy Central show The New Negroes. Speaking about that process, Mike reflects “One project I always come back to is a concept called Dark Comedy Television. It’s a show about a cable network that can only afford to be on the air for an hour a week so it has to fit its entire slate of programs in that hour.” Inspired by dramas like Get Out or Sorry to Bother You, which are stories that engage in big conversations around the trauma of marginalized peoples, and later by the surrealism of Boots Riley’s I’m A Virgo, Mike began to develop Neighborhood Gods Unlimited.
Mike continues,
“The trauma at the center of ‘Neighborhood Gods Unlimited’ is mine. I was shattered as a young person and I spent the majority of my life not knowing it. In my ignorance I would go on to shatter myself even further because it was all I knew. This is a story about how people who are trying to find themselves get confused when they encounter things that remind them of themselves.”
In light of the harsh realities that new series often face in the television industry, Mike decided to transform his concept into music, partly as a cathartic process. As Mike says, “It felt good to make and sometimes TV forces you to abandon things you’ve put your heart into. If that had happened with a project around this particular subject matter, it would have been bad for my mental health.”
The ensuing album contains an opening theme, flashbacks, a climax and even some commercials.
Just this week, Mike launched his headline tour in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, CA, before traversing the country and culminating in an August 16th show in Washington, DC. Full routing is available below and tickets can be purchased at Open Mike Eagle’s official Tumblr page. Following that run, OME picks up additional dates in support of Phantogram from August 31st to September 15th.
