REDEMPTION SONG

VIC MENSA DRAWS ON HIS UNIQUE ROOTS - ONE PART CHICAGO AND ONE PARI GHANA - AS HE CREATES MUSIC THAT RESONATES WITH HIS WORLDVIEW

- JENNA ROMAINE

“Hey, this is Vic Mensa.” Even though it’s barely 10 minutes after the scheduled start time for our interview, Mensa is sincerely apologetic for his tardiness. It’s a Friday afternoon in January and he’s in Chicago, his hometown where he still resides. “I just left the mosque,” he explains as a car door beeps. “I’ve been studying and learning about Islam for a while now.”

Much like his family, his culture and his music, Mensa’s beliefs and life philosophy, though ever-evolving, act as the cornerstone of who he is. Perhaps that’s why so much of it is bared for all to see, inked on his skin, starting with his very first tattoo. His inaugural ink is a black panther with the words “Free Huey” above it along his left shoulder, a reference to the revolutionary Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton.

“I was first being politicized, and my big sister Aja Monet—she’s a brilliant poet from New York City—gave me Malcom X’s autobiography, and she gave me Huey P. Newton’s autobiography named ‘Revolutionary Suicide,’” Mensa says. “And Huey P.’s entire movement philosophy really related to me as a slightly young Black man in America trying to understand the world and my place in it.”

The Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist got the tattoo when he was 16 in an apartment building “somewhere in the hood” on the West Side of Chicago. It isn’t anatomically correct in reference to the official Black Panther Party logo, but Mensa likes that, reasoning that’s why it has “so much character.”