MR MIDAS
DENVER, CO via long beach, CA Words by MZ. JAE // photo by chris vega Adversity is no stranger to the rap game. Turn on the radio, pop in a mixtape, and flip through the pages of a magazine, and one message is readily apparent: adversity and Hip Hop co-exist, in an almost parasitic manner. They feed of each other, slowly killing the other in the process, but at the same time, one can’t survive without the other. Long Beach-made and Denver-paid rapper Mr. Midas has more experience then most when it comes to overcoming, and in turn triumphing over obstacles thrown in his path. Raised on the streets of Long Beach, California, Mr. Midas is the manifestation of the “Son of the Crack Era.” Much like the parasitic relationship between Hip Hop and adversity, Mr. Midas also had a parasitic relationship with the super drug of the eighties. “The crack era was at its prime when I was coming up as a little kid,” he recalls. “It affected every community. My mom was on it, my step dad sold it. It killed my family but it also fed my family. On one hand the rent was getting paid, on the other it was destroying us.” In an effort to survive, his family packed up everything and moved, and moved, and moved. Mr. Midas went to 17 schools in three different states. The last move brought him to Colorado, where his brain tumor was discovered (and removed) in September of 2005. Two weeks later, his friend and a Colorado legend, Colfax Cac, was murdered. Bad management led to a failed record deal with the Ruff Ryders in 2007, continuing the series of hardships which shaped Mr. Midas’s life and career. Once part of the Bay Area’s native rap group, the Flo Masters, Mr. Midas has an established fan base in his home state, but a concentrated one in the home of hyphy. A collab with Clyde Carson on the Remix of “Bag Back” garnered Mr. Midas a great deal of radio play in the Bay and his continued work with the Flo Masters and the legendary DJ Juice has led to collabs with other Bay artists like Balance, Mistah FAB, and Young Winn. The “Cali-rado” native has also put in work with well-known Colorado mixtape DJs such as DJ Quote of the CORE DJs (Almost Famous) and DJ Shadoe of Black Wallstreet (Boss On Da Low). Mr. Midas’s upcoming project, The Son of the Crack Era CD and DVD, promises to showcase the controversy of his own life, and in turn also create its own. While many rappers tend to glorify the street life and the benefits of selling drugs, Mr. Midas aims to expose the other side of the street life, the inevitable consequences of the addictive hustle. “With the DVD we’re going to go from hood to hood, all over the nation to show the effects of the Crack Era and to prove the same thing went on everywhere. No one man can create such an epidemic at one time. The crack era and its rise was definitely a government-aided epidemic and you best believe the government made a lot of money off of it and is still making money off it to this day. They made money off our pain and somebody’s gotta expose it. The CD is going to show there’s a major hole in the whole rap game right now. People always talk about how they made all this money off of selling, off of pimpin’, off of robbin’ but it seems like no one ever went to jail, or no one died from that shit. So the kids gotta see both sides of the spectrum, or you’re just feeding them a fairytale.” And Mr. Midas ain’t ever been about fairytales. // www.myspace.com/mrmidas
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