A biography for Vic Mensahasn’t been written yet.
“I don't see why clothes have to be women's or men's. It seems pretty limiting. I buy women's pants, women's shoes - everything, really.”
“My mother was from upstate New York; she's of Irish and German descent. My father was from Ghana.”
“That's something I can never lose: my love for the art of rap. As I grew older and became more interested in song writing, it just pushed my possibilities further. I always have to have a foot firmly on the floor as a rapper, because that's how I started.”
“Every time Emma Gonzalez speaks, I listen.”
“The Clash is pretty much my favorite band, and their songs like 'Rock the Casbah' are political dance tracks.”
“I've been combing through the Wolverine archives and advertisements from the sixties and seventies. I'm looking to take inspiration from designs of the past and bring them into the future.”
“I started taking my mental health seriously, really working with a therapist and a psychiatrist.”
“I just like Kodak Black. I feel like he's pretty self-aware, even if I don't agree with all the things he says.”
“I don't love America; I love people and places in America. How could I truly love an entity that views me as subhuman, that wrote in its constitution for me to be considered three-fifths of a person?”
“Everyone's life is for sale in America.”
“The disparity between the haves and have-nots was always blatantly obvious to me, and it's that exact gap that drove me to start writing and pick up a pen. I wanted to explain and understand the world around me because it was easy to see it was corrupted.”
“I don't want only young black people that listen to my music be able to appreciate it. I just want people to be able to appreciate it.”
“And being that my father is gone in immigrant and I have you know - that I owe my existence to immigration, I think that the fear of immigration that has existed in American history from the first day, I just find it to be wrong.”
“Being someone that grew up in a biracial household I never really felt accepted by black people when I was a little kid, I didn't feel fully accepted by black kids and I definitely didn't feel fully accepted by white kids cause I just felt like I could never be neither one.”
“I used to print out lyrics from Nas songs and write my own lyrics in the same syllable count but with different words and different rhymes.”
“On family trips and vacations, I remember walking around with my little sister and making funny songs on the spot.”
“My brain's always working, and gears are turning 24/7. So I was trying to think of solutions.”
“Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.”
“They say depression is just anger turned inward. Sometimes I turn it outwards, sometimes I turn it inward, but I know it's about self-worth.”
“I collaborated with so many people from Chicago - so many Black people, young Black women organizations like BYP100 and Assata's Daughters. Just being out there, I saw what a community mobilizing can accomplish in terms of freedom and how music and my words in my music can play a significant part in that.”