Mindbender Supreme and Michie Mee’s Life Lessons and Hip-Hop Mastery in Four Minutes of Fire With “Young Vet”
In hip-hop, just about the best position to be in is “old enough to know what you’re talking about, yet young enough to still be dangerous.”
That’s exactly the catbird seat Mindbender Supreme looks down from on “Young Vet,” hurling thunderbolts of hard-earned wisdom from his quarter-century in the biz that hit all the harder thanks to vocal affirmations from Canadian rap legend Michie Mee.
It’s a “life well lived” lesson in just under four minutes, with rapid-fire verses that take us from the devil-may-care indulgences of adolescence (“Get a license to drive… yourself insane!”) to the sage observances of maturity (“Grandpa Simpson was right!/ Generation gap’s a Family Feud/ I was a cool cat, now The New Cool is weird and scary/ Guaranteed it will happen to YOU!!”). Yet the mood is never less than triumphant, due in large part to Michie Mee’s periodic exultations of “Young veteran/ Better than any medicine/ We come again/ Can’t stop us, they let us IN!”
According to Mindbender—a.k.a. Malcolm Lovejoy—it was hearing his longtime friend Michie ad-lib the pithy oxymoron “young vet” on somebody else’s track several years ago that gave him the idea for his.
“I felt the energy so much, as she was declaring her timeless wisdom that stayed connected to her youthful energy,” he says. “It was that hip-hop ideology I love to hear, captured in such smart wordplay. So I decided to make a whole song about growing up through the life and times of adolescence and adulthood—surviving intelligently so you can be an icon, a legend and a mentor to the next generation.”
That’s a theme thoroughly in keeping with his latest album, The King of Queen Street, a double record that retraces this cultural mainstay’s exploits with a thoroughness that suggests he’s long overdue to update his billing as “Toronto’s best-kept secret.” Songs like “Mr. Front Row” (produced by Rich Kidd) depict Mindbender as a kind of scenester Forrest Gump, consistently present and accounted for at some of the key musical events in Toronto’s art history. Yet he’s been no mere idle bystander, as even a brief rundown of the collaborators who embrace him as a peer makes plain.
There’s Michie, of course—hailed far and wide as the queen of Canadian Hip-Hop—and also producer Tough Dumpling (who helmed both “Young Vet” and the new album’s first single, “The Love That Love Produced”). “Young Vet” received an extra polish from DJ Skratch Bastid, and the remaining liner notes to The King of Queen Street read like a kind of who’s who of Ontario music royalty—including Saukrates, Mel Boogie, DJX, DJ Grouch, Ian Kamau and Shad. And that’s not even mentioning multidisciplinary luminaries like Toronto mayoral candidate Knia Singh, Neil Donaldson of Stolen From Africa, and Matthew Progress of Freedom Writers.
What can we say? A guy’s going to collect a hefty stack of business cards if he works as long and as regularly as Mindbender has. In addition to the solo efforts he’s pumped out pretty consistently since 1999’s EP, In Another Universe, he spent many years advancing the hip-hop cause as half of Supreme Being Unit, a duo he formed with his (now sadly deceased) twin brother, Conspiracy. And when he hasn’t been rocking the mic as an MC, he’s found time to host In Divine Style, a Queen Street open mic that ran for five years, and also to help cultivate young musical talent through the afterschool songwriting program Parkdale Street Writers.
Meanwhile, writing as Addi Stewart, he’s carved out a thriving parallel career as a music journalist, interviewing some of rap’s top stars for publications like XXL, Pound Magazine, CBC, City on my Back, Swagg, and Now.
That isn’t just being a Renaissance man; it’s practically being a man for all epochs. Then again, you can get pretty far on just imagination, and imagination is clearly something this once-in-a-lifetime artist has in spades. Bend your mind, and the rest will follow.
Hi, Addi! Good to see you again! Care to introduce yourself to the readers?
Great to reconnect to Canadian Beats! I’m Mindbender Supreme of the mighty Supreme Being Unit. I have been making hip-hop since 1996 and have worn many Kangols in my many years as a hip-hop renaissance man. I’m a journalist that has written for XXL, Pound Magazine, Now Magazine, In Divine Style, Swagg, and many more, I ran the In Divine Style Open Mic for 5 years with DJ Dorc, More or Les, Alexis, and more… you might also know me from such erotic films as ‘Dressup’ or ‘Reunited’, which both won Toronto International Porn Awards in 2017 and 2018 in one of my other dream jobs as Malcolm Lovejoy: Professional Love Maker. Yes, I also make porn, and life is good being the Kool Keith of Canada!
The lyrics of “Young Vet” span the carefree days of adolescence to the lessons of maturity. What personal experiences influenced the storytelling in this track?
You’re absolutely right, thanks for noticing. I wanted to make a song as universal as possible speaking about life’s journey in general for as many millions of people I could think of, so I definitely had to speak on puberty, getting your license (which I did at 16 thanks to my stepdad), and having some of your first teenage experiences with drinking and doing drugs (which I definitely did)… also the recklessness and regrets that may come from such rites of passage! (I prayed to the porcelain god on many nauseous nights!) The song wasn’t long enough to really make clever observations about every year of life unless I made a 16-minute song! So I had to do my best in choosing milestones, the second of which is turning 21, and how I hope for folks to be safe enough in their 20s to not join the 27 Club, god bless Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain, amongst other legends. After the blessed hook from Michie, I took the adulthood verse in a different direction: I gave hopeful wisdom to help avoid a mid-life crisis, tried to inspire constant evolution both economically and emotionally, then threw a melodic rapid-fire rhythm curve ball: if you have children, you start the song/cycle over again while still dancing forward in life, and then gave a shoutout to Grandpa Simpson, speaking on the inevitability of aging. Which I’m doing as gracefully as possible. I wanted to speak about my feelings and observations about life in this song, but not exactly my life story. That’s coming later.
Michie Mee’s affirmations on “Young Vet” are empowering and triumphant. What was the collaborative process like working with her on this track?
Interestingly, she was the FIRST person I wanted to work with when I was brainstorming and dreamscaping the “King of Queen Street” album in November of 2022. It was Michie Mee, Saukrates, and Tone Mason who were my very first three wishes of who should guest appear, and they all happened, thankfully. But since Michie Mee lives in Jamaica now, it honestly took a few years to put the song together for the release date of September 13th, 2024. I’ve been friends with Michie since visiting her at CKLN 88.1 FM when she used to co-host ‘The Powermove Show’ with DJX (who also does scratches on the album), so it was an honor for her to agree to do a song together (once the business was taken care of, thanks to the label Type A Records). I knew I wanted Tough Dumpling to be the producer of the track for sure since we are all Jamaican-Canadians, and we all shared some special times in Toronto. There was another more hype beat that almost made it, but it felt right to do something slightly unexpected for all of us and make a breezy island calm and meditative song, instead of the obvious super-banger that we obviously could make together. Over the span of a few months, I sent music to her and the foundation for the concept “Young Vet”, which she liked, and she sent her chorus back to me on one of the happiest days of my musical life. We weren’t in the same studio but we definitely all collaborated on ideas and vibes for the song’s final result, and I am so happy and honored to be able to say I recorded a song with one of my all-time Canadian hip-hop idols: the original MC and Queen Michie Badgyal Mee! AND hellafied super big up to the global DJ god Skratch Bastid for the butcher sharp cuts! Can’t stop, won’t stop…
Your album The King of Queen Street retraces your journey through Toronto’s arts and music history. What motivated you to craft a double album that’s so rich in personal and cultural reflection?
Thank you for the compliment. I actually have a lot more personal stories about my hip-hop memories over the last 25 years as a hip-hop icon and cultural documentarian. I have books to write, podcasts to speak on and make, parties to celebrate my peers and myself at, and so many other ways to elevate the Myth of Mindbender Supreme. But I have dozens more notebooks of rhymes to share with the world, and hundreds of unreleased songs with all kinds of new concepts, styles, flows, and sonic experiments. “King of Queen Street” is actually my THIRD double album in my career, after “Journey Into Sound” (2018) produced by Peppermint Noise Pollution, and “Beautiful Mutant” (2004) produced by Dorc, Vangel, Next of Kin & Bookworm. There’s only one or two “I’m dope/they’re wack” traditional braggadocious rapper songs on King of Queen Street, every other song has a clear concept and explicit intention almost evident in every title: “Cruel Beauty City”, “Inner Child’s Hand”, “Death of a Bad Habit”, “Unsafe to Love”, “My Dad is Broken”, “Speaker’s Corner”, “50 Ways (Closure)”. ‘King of Queen Street’ is an album I’m very proud of for many reasons, but someone once said: “Only two MCs in Toronto could make an album like this, but one of them wouldn’t.” I’m humbled and honored to hear such comments, and I got love and respect for nuff rappers in our city, we all play a role in making Canadian hip hop the pinnacle of the art form!
As someone who has straddled the worlds of music and journalism, interviewing major rap stars, how has your work as a journalist influenced your perspective as a hip-hop artist?
I feel I deliver very interesting insider perspectives from both sides of the fence of artistic observation. I have been literally “Mr. Front Row” at hundreds or thousands of epic music concerts and rap events in Toronto and beyond. But I’m definitely not just a journalist or some superfan, I am an unprecedented master of ceremony and I’ve rocked on hundreds of stages as Mindbender as well, looking out into the crowd and whoever is in the front row, where I would normally be standing… if and when I wasn’t rocking the mic! I have always gotten longer interviews when I talk to rappers because I really do understand them on levels that many unscrupulous/trolling/uninformed/agenda-driven/contrarian/jaded journalists simply do not. Whether it was Kanye West, Method Man, Kool G. Rap, Twista, RZA, or T.I., I always get extra time talking to my interview subjects because I ask such good questions and nurture such good conversation. Also, I’m willing to ask hard questions but with a vocabulary, they don’t feel disrespected, and I can see inside the song and the show in similar ways as the artist, so my criticisms come off as constructive. It has done me very well so far, but I definitely feel the need to focus more on Mindbender the MC for the next few years, and just find a book publisher that is smart enough to invest in the stories of Addi Stewart the journalist aka Mr. Front Row to tell all those stories to.
Until I capture my white whale/dream interview with Eminem… or the long-overdue interview with Drake that I tried to get for Now Magazine when I worked there, but they didn’t swing at my pitch! It’s not easy being a trailblazing visionary, but in the immortal words of my hero Tupac Shakur: still I rise.
Mindbender Loves You!