Tone Glow 155: Mavi

An interview with the Charlotte-based rapper about political organizing, interrogating your god, and his new album 'Shadowbox'

Mavi

All photos by Nathan Bajar

Mavi, born Omavi Minder, is a 24-year-old rapper from Charlotte, North Carolina. After getting his start with the Charlotte-area collective Killswitch, he moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a biology degree at Howard University. There, he recorded his project Let the Sun Talk (2019), gaining wide acclaim while still in his teens for a surrealist style of rap that was as political as it was personal. Since then, he has released the End of the Earth EP (2021) and his sophomore album Laughing so Hard, it Hurts (2022). He’s toured nationally with Jack Harlow and Babyface Ray, and is venturing on his own run of headlining dates next month. Last week, MAVI released his third full-length project Shadowbox (2024). Rae-Aila Crumble spoke with Mavi on August 14th, 2024 via ZOOM to discuss growing up in Charlotte, political organizing, religion, and legacy. 

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Rae-Aila Crumble: Hey! How are you doing today Mavi? 

Mavi: Good! It’s a good day. I’m a little hungover, but I’m pushing.

What were you up to yesterday?

My friend Tyler Bunzey, he’s a professor at Johnson C. Smith, wrote my liner notes. So he cooked me a dinner to celebrate.

That’s nice! Are you living in Charlotte still?

Yeah, I’m living in Charlotte, loving on Charlotte forever! I don’t think I’m ever gonna leave. 

Can you tell me what it was like growing up in Charlotte?

Oh, it was nice. It’s a mix between quiet enough to be out of the way and always something cool going on. On the art side, there aren’t as many resources—not many medium-sized venues or accessible art supplies or studios—so that was annoying. But, you know, I made my way. I was chilling—doing drugs, running around, y’know? 

What are some of the first memories that come to mind?

So, I moved to Charlotte when I was a really small boy. I’m originally from the country in South Carolina, a town called Hopkins. My dad had moved up to Charlotte before us, and he was doing carpentry work. He had just finished working on a house. I guess that there’s a thing when carpenters finish working on a building, they bring their families, wives, and kids to come see the building. So he brought us to one, and I thought it was our house! (laughter). I was crying so hard. I was so fucked up. 

That’s horrible!

It broke my little heart. That’s my first memory of Charlotte. 

You talked about your dad being a carpenter. Your dad was also a computer scientist, right?

Yep, and a music producer. He also runs a little league in the city. He just won community leader of the year for the Little League Baseball Association in the city. He’s everything. He’s a really cool dude.

Was music something he shared with you?  

Yeah. My dad was of the hip-hop generation, born the same year hip-hop was born. He was playing a bunch of fuckin’ Mobb Deep and Ghostface Killah far before I was the age where that was appropriate. Rap music wasn’t even rap music to me in my youth; it was just music to me.

Your dad had a studio where artists would come, right? Do you remember any of these artists?

Yeah, yeah. He had one studio in the city on Hawkins. Because my dad’s in tech, and Charlotte was very slow to have accessible studios, he was really into the hardware side and had really good gear in there. It was a really poppin’ studio for a bunch of years. We kind of fell on a hard time and he ended up closing the studio and moving a bunch of the equipment into the garage. Guys would come…there’s Jay Bricks, Super James, a bunch of local acts that were really good. They would be in my garage, smoking weed, making music with my dad. When I turned sixteen and decided this is what I want to do and this is where I want to be, me and my friends took over that tradition of being in there smoking weed and making music. One of my homies had just moved out of the city, so he would come and sleep in the garage for days at a time. Go rob niggas. Bring what we robbed off of niggas back to the studio. Teenager shit.

Are you still in contact with any of those OG rappers that would record in your garage? 

Yeah. I’m popping in a lot of places, right? But the place that I’m the most popping is my parents’ fucking Facebooks. All of their friends are always watching me, coming to the shows to cheer me on. At every show on the Laughing so Hard, it Hurts tour, there was an older cousin, or mom’s homegirl, or dad’s homegirl from college. So that was really nice.

Like taking a piece of Charlotte with you everywhere you go.

Every single place. And that’s so important. I tour major cities, but not every city has the smallness and slowness that Charlotte has. Being able to be reminded and re-grounded is huge for me when I’m on the road.

You have this lyric on “Kujichagulia” where you say something about having to read Elijah Muhammad before you could go to bed. I’m curious about how your family fostered Black radical politics in your upbringing.

That was huge. The line was “My daddy heard what I said I learned from school, and he whooped my ass / I read Elijah Muhammad back cover to go to bed.” (laughter). It was true! I was the “not saying the Pledge of Allegiance” kid. My dad was very, “Black people are God! What are you? A God!” Like, that kind of guy. Kwanzaa celebrations every year at the house. Very “I came into adulthood in the ’90s, Hotep, listening to the Fugees.” That’s me minimizing it a little bit. Their Black politic is really substantial and malleable—loving your Blackness in all the different ways it appears and loving on your community.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for that being what my childhood was made of until I got to college. Then I got to Howard and all these rich Black kids coming from white suburbs are trying to overcompensate for their lack of a Black identity and lack of a Black politic. And I was just thinking, “Yeah, but that’s just what Black people do, right?” (laughter). I grew to appreciate that more—that it wasn’t the norm for everybody.

How did you choose Howard?

I was a really good student. 98th percentile ACT/SAT type. I was in a program called Campus Connections in Charlotte. For $600, they will take your child on admissions tours to every HBCU between Florida A&M and Delaware State. I got full rides to most places I went. 

It’s so embarrassing now that I understand the class and political implications of Howard as an institution. Because originally, I was like, “Okay, if I have the best grades and the best test scores, I just need to go to the best Black school.” So I went on the list, and it said Spellman, Howard, and Morehouse. And I wanted to go to school with girls, so I went to Howard (laughter). It was really arbitrary for me. My parents come from poverty, so it was a class marker for them to be able to send me there. When I got there, I realized why they felt cool about me going there. But I also instantly felt alienated in certain ways. Howard is a school where Black professionals send their children to become the Black elite, and the Black elite send their children to meet the other Black elite, and I wasn’t either of those.

If not there, do you think there are safe spaces for Black people in higher institutions?

Yeah, I do. With Howard in particular, it’s so heavily branded through “Black excellence” and “Black exceptionalism” that’s also sold to brands like Jordan, Nike, NCAA, even the FBI. I seen an NPR Tiny Desk, it was either Chaka Khan or Young Jeezy, and they brought hella Howard students just to come watch it. When you want impressive Black kids, you think of Howard. I think that’s a really counterproductive way of understanding your own Blackness—based on how impressive you are. Blackness epistemologically is just not impressive. And I understand that we’re trying to flip that on its head as an expression of self-love, but it ultimately becomes trying to win a game that we need to forfeit. 

I think a lot of smaller state institutions do a better job of that and addressing the class issue and achievement gap in Black students. There are HBCUs that have scholarships for students that have poor grades or test scores, or who come from certain backgrounds, in ways that Howard doesn’t support. But a lot of those schools are in smaller towns in the South, so while they may have a more progressive class-economic politic, their identity politic is super Judeo-Christian, crime and punishment, very stiff.

Yeah, for sure. I had similar thought processes when I was thinking about going to college. I’m from PG County, so—

Oh, nice! What part? 

Bowie.

I love Bowie. And I love Bowie State, too. I used to live in Hyattsville. 

Did you feel a culture shock going from Charlotte to D.C.?

Yeah. I lived in the city proper of Charlotte, but there’s a thing we say in Charlotte. Charlotte is like a city for white people, but a town for niggas. You know? Also, Charlotte’s economy is very newly-established. There’s this white billionaire guy named Hugh McColl. Charlotte is built on banking. He brought all the banks here in like the ’80s, so our downtown has Bank of America’s center office and all of these things, which are all brand fucking new. It’s like ten blocks total! So it was a culture shock going to D.C., for sure.

It wasn’t a culture shock in certain ways. I came up around certain types of niggas, and those types of niggas that I encountered, I understood in ways that a lot of my classmates didn’t. D.C. is a super walkable city, and not a super drivable city, which I love but didn’t understand at the time. You know, just the cold. The accents. The very surface level culture-shock things. And D.C.’s faster.

I know you were part of [music collective] Killswitch out in Charlotte. Were you involved with a scene out in D.C.?  

Definitely. When I went to college, Messiah! came with me, and we were roommates. He ended up leaving after the first semester, so there were years when I was the only homie in college. But the homies would come stay in my dorm, and we would still move around and whatever. But in D.C., there was a lot of stuff I did. There was a thing called Sesh, there was Only Vibes. Basically the beginning of my career was built around opening mic showcases all around D.C. Any opportunity there was to rap, I was there doing it.

The first night that I moved on campus, they had an open mic in front of Ira Aldridge Theater, Howard’s theater space. I got a really strong response and reaction every time I did! Which I was surprised at, ’cause I hadn’t had opportunities to perform that much, and I felt like my music was kind of niche. But that shit really imbued me with confidence and a community. I met a bunch of cool people, producers, DJs, other artists, photographers. Basically, the entire making of Let the Sun Talk (2019) was operated just off my email—’cause my name was growing and people were sending cool stuff—and stuff that my classmates could do for me. You go down on my Instagram and all the photos, at some point, start becoming photos that were all taken by Howard kids, or D.C. homies. D.C. was huge for me in terms of community. There was an end-of-the-year list in 2019 that had me as the top DMV artist! Which is like, I’m not even from here, but okay (laughter).

That’s great. Who are some of these artists you met when you were in D.C.? 

I met the homie Nova Blu on campus. I met the homie Spencer Greens. The guys at The Factory. The people at Only Vibes. I met the homie Lil Polo, the son of Polo from TCB, one of the big go-go bands. Also, I built community from other shit. For example, the day I met Earl Sweatshirt, we had our first long phone call. I was at MIKE’s house and had just got to New York from being in D.C. the week before. The week prior, Thebe’s dad passed, right? I was a leader of a hostile takeover of our administrative building. We got locked in with SNCC. We did a dual talk about student action and politics, and they flashed a big picture of Thebe’s dad ’cause he had did sit-ins with SNCC when he first came to America. So I met a ton of excellent people. And I met some weirdos, too! I was deep in the communist waters, which I don’t regret, ’cause I’m still a lefty, but I definitely got familiarized with the more dogmatic and damn near religious, weird social capital part of it too. I met a lot of cool people, I met a lot of weird people, I met a lot of people I needed to meet.

That’s how it goes, yeah. Could you talk more about the hostile takeover? I’m interested in your history as a student political organizer. 

Okay. So when Trump first got elected, he got into a beef with the head of the FBI at the time, James Comey, which kind of made him a torch-bearer and symbol for Democrats, just because he was beefing with Trump. Because he was hot, Howard University decided to have him speak at our convocation. There’s a video you can watch of the convocation of us shouting him down the entire time. He did a series of four talks around the campus, and every time, we would shout him down and harass him. So that was the beginning. We did a big petition that was like, “These niggas are bringing the FBI to our school, that’s lame.” That was the first thing. 

We did mentorship programs at Cardozo Education Campus. We did a bi-weekly food and resource drive. We did political education, housing, education, and Title IX shit ’cause it’s college and niggas are weird. We were organizing around those issues all year. Then there were two scandals back to back. There was a big housing shortage, where, like—

Oh, niggas were sleeping in tents, right? 

So that was the second time! The first, a whole bunch of students couldn’t get housing, and immediately after, there was a huge embezzlement scandal where one of the law students working in the financial aid office was taking lavish trips and shit. Anyways, we organized this little thing where we all acted like we were going to the financial aid office, which is what you do at Howard ’cause it costs sixty thousand dollars. So we were all lined up, waiting at different spots, and then there was a march that was led from the flag to the aid building, which was supposed to be a demonstration. Then, we threw open the doors, and like, three hundred, four hundred kids just flooded in.

For 12 days, we lived in there. Certain really cool professors would come and do teach-ins so students wouldn’t miss their material. The local restaurants donated big-ass meals, so we fed the students. We had talent shows, parties every other night. There were four floors in our administrative building, so we made hand signs based on which floor we slept on. We had step battles. We had an art gallery. It was beautiful. I was in the organization that organized it, so they made me the conflict resolution guy. It’s so crazy, cause I’m like 5’6” (laughter). But I had to be the guy going up to niggas, like, “Hey, we know you’re a weirdo around campus, you gotta leave, nigga.” It was a lot of that, but it was cool. 

It ended up being a weird Invisible Man type of situation where I realized a lot of these kids come from really, really, really nice backgrounds. I stopped working with this organization the next summer. We had won a bunch of things, like concessions and shit. They had installed me directly into the financial aid oversight committee on student government straight off of that, which I thought was kind of strange, but okay. We come back from the summer, and some of the homegirls in the organization lived in D.C., ’cause for some people, where they move to school is cooler than where they’re from. So they continue to do the bi-weekly drives and stuff. There was another group of students that didn’t stay on campus for the summer, and they kind of felt jealous that the homegirls continued to do the work, which is WEIRD ’cause we’re trying to help poor people, but okay! So there was a small power struggle where people felt excluded from being the face of the work, which was pretty disgusting. In the midst of a back-and-forth, one of the girls shouts, “Well, not all of us are poor, I’m sorry!” And, I’m like, whoa… I literally got up, and I’m like, “You guys are breaking my fucking heart and I’m never coming back to this.” And I just never came back. 

Yeah. I guess the people who are most willing to put their bodies on the line to face state violence during this kind of activism are the people who come from money. Shit means nothing to them.

Right! There were no stakes. I realized a lot of people weren’t doing it because the stakes were so high. The urgency came from a more insidious place, involved with personal glory and shit like that.

How do you go about balancing your radical politics and rap stardom? Your ideas of community care feel at war with what outsiders might see as an individualistic, capitalist industry. Do you get any cognitive dissonance?

Yeah. I think I just feel cognitive dissonance from movement building in general. It kind of pushes me into a thing that looks like political inaction and I feel really guilty and gross about that. But I’m scared, and I don’t really know how to do it anymore.

How so?

When I was so sure about what the right thing and what the wrong thing to do was, I did everything. But then, when I seen the underbelly of organizing, it kind of scared me off. My dad was a “Jesus is a white man that you tryna worship” ass nigga. And it was a lot of cognitive dissonance to make Karl Marx my new Jesus Christ. And then when I took Karl Marx off of my new Jesus Christ, I’m keeping the ideas of community care in movement building that they try to put his name on, but that’s really [from] pre-colonial Africa and the Indigenous peoples around the world. I felt good about that. And that’s where I am right now. I’m trying to be there for my people the way Black people be there for other Black people historically, the good ways. But there’s no real “these are the pillars of this and this and this!” It makes it difficult to represent, but that’s actually how things should be, I think. We have tenets of course, but there’s no manifesto, which feels futuristic. And then it’s like, how do I represent something without a name? By living my life? So I try to live my life that way.

I love that answer. 

Yeah.

To me, one of the things that make you distinct as a rapper is your willingness to rap succinctly about protecting Black women and fostering those communities. It’s something that’s pretty easy to do, but not often touched upon in rap. I want to know where those actions come from, and if you find it challenging to be an advocate.

No, I don’t find it challenging to be an advocate at all. While I was making Let the Sun Talk, some weird shit happened to me. Let’s just leave it at that, some weird shit. I don’t like weird shit, you know? I’m a man. I’m a pretty good fighter. Let me see (looks around the room). It’s somewhere in here. I own a firearm. You know? I’m pretty tough, and I got a lot of gangster homies. With that shit it’s like stop being weird to the homegirls. And if you want to continue to be weird to the homegirls, the question becomes: “Nigga, what do you want to do? Do you want to fight? Do you want to shoot?” (laughter).

Black femmes are human—my favorite brand of human. My life is a love letter to Black women, period. Without insulting the humanity of Black femmes by being patronizing about it, I’m kind of like the homie with the gun that’s gon’ pull up and get shit together. If I love you and can do something about it to help keep you safe… maybe you feel less safe about it if I’m super white-knight about it, ’cause then it becomes, “Do you want to keep me safe or do you want to save me?” Very different things. But yeah, niggas know. And shit done popped up before, and we got niggas out the way, and shit happened to them niggas, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

Earlier, you were talking about religion. I know a main theme of Shadowbox (2024) is the dynamic between faith and the believer. I want you to tell me about your relationship with the church and how it’s developed over time.

Oof! Jesus Christ! These questions! (laughs) You are doing a tremendous job! 

Thank you so much!

So, my dad is from the Nation of Gods and Earths, Five Percenter tradition. He was super disillusioned with the church. He was disillusioned with a lot of ways of his lifestyle because he was raised by poor people who ate themselves into disease and continued to pray to a God that he felt was unanswering. So he raised us very, very “Jesus Christ is fake.” When I grew up I started to be like, okay, if I’ve established in my psyche that Jesus Christ is fake… I got into mythmaking a lot.

While my dad is super Five Percented out, it’s kind of bullshit, and it was made by teenagers in Harlem. I started to realize everything is mythmaking, so what is the myth about? What is the myth trying to say? I think the Old Testament of the Bible is part allegory of how humanity came from being humanity with a lowercase h to Humanity with an uppercase H. Documenting coming into consciousness and the expansion of the written word. Also, partially just establishing cisheteropatriarchy and male hegemony, like, God is a vengeful, angry, jealous dude, ’cause that’s how dudes are and that’s cool (laughter). When I started to look at how the Bible operates and what it established instead of what it says, I got really interested in it. Not just the Bible, I have the Bible and the Quran. I’m just interested in how we design our gods. I even got really deep into Ifá and Shango. 

One thing I like about religion is submission. I’m a very agreeable person. I like and appreciate being given direction and purpose. I empathize with devoutly religious people and even envy them a little bit. They’re giving all of the explainable parts of themselves to something unexplainable, and I want to be like that with something in my life. I just don’t really know what it is yet. 

The Black church is definitely very unique. The love is tied to desperation, you know?  

That is it! You literally just said it. A desperate plea. Falling to your knees is like what making this album made me do. The framework for being in that place in my family history is the church, and that’s why it became an allegory for this. If I pass out drunk, and if I pass out from the Holy Ghost, am I doing a similar thing? If I’m kneeling from drunkenness or if I’m kneeling for prostration, are they similar? Yeah. There was a tweet that was like, “Jesus Christ and crack cocaine, I don’t know which one is stronger.” And that’s the framework for the whole album.

You seem interested in this idea of God being in the nature of everything, rather than “this bad thing happened because of God.” This is the framework a lot of Black people operate within, wondering why God allowed things like slavery to happen, versus seeing God as natural events and their causalities.

Literally. God is literally causality. When things happen, other things happen. Ions are attracted to their negative ions. They build bonds, they break bonds. Energy is generated, released. Entropy continues to increase. Planets continue to spin. God is the rules. God’s not a guy. There are some rules that we can’t escape, and those sets of rules are what we should call the thing. I’m telling you, every time we drop something—and we drop something every second—that motherfucker is going to fall. When we make God a person, you get to own your wife, you get to beat her up, you get to own people, and we start to worship the parts that are inessential to the truth of existence. God is a why and a how—not a who.

What other things did you feel tied to in regards to the creation of the album? 

Fucking alcohol. Drugs. Infidelity. I’m a lonely guy. I told you that I love direction and love validation. When you need validation from a person, you kind of do bad stuff to yourself and other people, like lie to yourself and other people, and have sex with a bunch of people, and want to be held by a bunch of people. So I had to lowkey grow to not hate myself in order to not be a cheater anymore. Grow to not lie to myself to not be a liar. My homie’s therapist makes him do this thing where you take off all of your clothes and stand in the mirror naked and say nice things about yourself. And I was like—oh my god! I could never do that. I called the other homie, and was like, “Do you like yourself?” And he was like, “I don’t think that matters.” And I’m like, “That’s what I thought too! But no, that’s wrong!” (laughter). It got to the point where I realized: I’m a person, so don’t leave me alone in the room with that nigga! 

Since the album has dropped, I’ve kind of been locking myself in the room with that nigga. I’ve been celibate. When I get lonely, I just call a friend or family, just like last night with my professor homie. Like, fuck, I don’t need somebody just kissing on me—telling me I’m the greatest person ever, in a bed—for it to count. It’s just tough. I always thought that I was a little cute, but when I got to Howard, it was a switch. Mind you, I’m Omavi. I have locs that aren’t frequently retwisted. You know, this alt boy, Hotep-coded, gentle soul. At the hood school in Charlotte, that wasn’t doing that much numbers. But when you go to Howard University, I’m telling you, it’s so much nonbinary pussy (laughter). So I was kind of going crazy in terms of understanding my own desirability. On top of that, that weird shit happened, so it’s a mix of that: hypersexuality, search for validation, trying to understand why everybody likes me all of a sudden. It sent me down a path for years where I’m just now digging myself out of by actually being alone and not being lonely. 

This reminds me of the interlude on your record, “drown the snake,” where your friend talks about how the demon grows with you. 

Mm-hmm. A week ago, I thought: Okay, when was the last time I wasn’t fucking like this? And then it was literally when that weird shit happened to me. Like, when was my sex not disordered? The truth of why things are [the way they are] lies in a truthful recounting of events.

I’ve been hearing a lot of people say things like, “It’s time to have conversations about Mavi,” which is essentially code for cementing you as one of the best. I want to know how that feels only a few years into fame. Probably like whiplash. 

No, no, no, no. It’s actually the opposite; niggas need to start calling me the best! I sound like I’m playing, but I’m so serious, but forreal, forreal. On some literature shit, I will not let myself die before niggas know that I’m a good writer. I love myself too much to do that. I give a lot to writing. I’ve given a lot to collective consciousness by bearing my soul and saying shit that hurts me to say. Niggas have to count that for something. The conversation has to be had. How many more do I have to do? I say this about MIKE too. I say things like, “MIKE is one of the greatest rapper-producers ever,” and it feels like a curse word to say that, but how many does he have to give us? The reason that doesn’t feel like whiplash to me is because I feel like the reason people leave me out of the conversation is purely fucking stylistic. That feeds into rap being this individualistic pissing contest about whose dick is bigger, whose chains is bigger, who’s bragging the hardest shit. A hip-hop needs to exist that I can be the best at. That’s why it’s important. 

Who are some writers that have inspired you stylistically?

This is going to sound so nasty… Charles Bukowski. 

What was he doing that inspired you?

First, Charles Bukowski is a piece of shit womanizer, woman beater—just, like, a white writer and how they are. But he’s such a fucking failure and a loser. And he’s such a fucking failure and a loser in the books. And I’m like—ooh! You might’ve ate with something there!

Also, definitely Toni Morrison when I get really languid. Toni Morrison writes a sentence that’s a passage, and I think that’s how I construct my lines a lot. She’s one of the biggest, for sure. And just poetry in general. I be finding these little poems that the homegirl be reposting, and I’m like, “Oh, I like that.” But Toni Morrison and Charles Bukowski are the big two. Also, a lot of the writers I take inspiration from are also rappers. Noname is the one. That’s the one. A hip-hop needs to exist where Noname is the best rapper because she is.

What was the writing process like with Shadowbox? I know you wrote all of Laughing so Hard, it Hurts a cappella. 

This one, I did the opposite. I wrote every single in the studio. That’s why the album cover is a photo. There’s an ephemerality to writing that way—capturing a moment—that I wasn’t allowing into my process. I mastered the album on tape, I did an actual physical print of the album cover and scanned it. The tangibility of these moments was something I wanted to introduce at every stage of the process.

That’s great. I was just going to ask you about the decision to make the album art a photograph instead of an illustration, like how you’ve done previously. 

Right. An illustration is something very decided. A photo isn’t as intentional unless it’s super staged. At the end of the day, it’s frozen movement. 

In the Shadowbox liner notes, you talked about reading Black Experience in Design (2022) and being intrigued by the idea that design is power. Design can also be very vulnerable, especially with the burden of being a Black artist. I’m curious about how you juggle displaying the personal in ways that allow you to still have power as an artist. 

Damn! You are fire! (laughter). You could literally just type up the questions and post. You don’t need me. Fuck! Somebody asked me how I felt about Black trauma being up for consumption. I was like, it always has been. The whole entertainment industry was built on minstrelsy and freak shows, so the trauma of the other is what America consumes as entertainment, period. That’s the tradition. I take power by displaying the vulnerable. That is my power because it’s mine. It’s the same as when somebody hurts you; giving words to that hurt and saying it out loud, that’s giving some of the power back to yourself. Yes, this happened, and it sucked, and it’s out of my control, but I get to define it and define myself afterwards.

You recently tweeted about wanting to be “mavi” in lowercase instead of uppercase. Why is that? 

I feel like uppercase is too masculine and too overstated. Too little-dick energy. I’m not an uppercase person, you know? It was a DOOM thing, and now DOOM’s dead, and I want to let stuff about him rest because niggas don’t let him rest. It’s a lot of things. It’s also a typeface, design aesthetic thing, but it’s also a philosophical thing. I’m not uppercase right now. Let’s not even put it as an uppercase or lowercase thing. I don’t want to be Mavi. I want to be just Mavi.

What do you want listeners to take away from your new album?

Themselves. A lot of my homies in L.A. recently got sober. I was talking to one of my other friends who’s not sober but is with them every day. He’s from the South. They staged an intervention for him, like—they want him to get sober, but he didn’t do anything particularly wrong or dick-y. And I was like, yeah, you don’t feel like you need to do that because you’re from the South and you know how church works. Communism was a church. Addiction was a church. Even sobriety, for the homies, was a church. Exercise and sex are churches. We build a church and worship a thing regardless. What I want people to take away from this album is to really interrogate how you design your god. Damn. You just made me get the point of my album.

I’m happy that this was great for you! Was there anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to talk about?

Fuck, no, I feel like you know all of my secrets. I needed this. 

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I know it’s early, so I’m sorry for getting you on here so early. 

Nah, I needed it. I was just rotting.

Thank you so much, Mavi. 

Of course. Until next time. 

Bye!

Adieu!

Mavi’s new album Shadowbox is out now on various streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Mavi is also on tour starting next month throughout the United States and Europe.

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Thank you for reading the 155th issue of Tone Glow. Interrogate your god.

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