*Popular Brooklyn Rapper and reality TV star Maino chops it up with I Heart Radio personality and EURweb Spotlight host Jazmyn ‘Jaz’ Summers about bringing Harlem and Brooklyn together in new music with ‘Capo’ Jim Jones, the criminal injustice system, and blowing up the internet a few months ago when he shared a fantasy of role-playing as a slave during sex with white women.
In April, he told Lip Service podcast host Angela Yee, “I like to play like a disobedient slave with a White woman. It’s two of them. It’s like me getting whooped, right? ‘ It’s like, ‘Listen, you’re going to act like, you’re master’s wife, and I just got whooped by master for eyeballing you. But the whole time, you’ve been really, you know, you liked it. You’ve been eyeballing me.’ It’s some freaky sh*t.”
Maino reiterates to Jazmyn that he was just joking
“You gotta understand the room. Right. I’m on a show, that’s a spicy sex show. We drinking, we having fun. We talking spicy and there’s a room full of friends. So I should be able to say whatever though, So we just bugging, we just having fun,” he dishes to Jaz.
“They took that thing outta context for one, you know, people were supposed to laugh at that first and foremost. Anybody who knows me knows I got a hell of a sense of humor. I never said that this ever happened. I never said this is something that I liked, but it was fun. It was jokes.”
But he reveals he does have a spicy sister girl fantasy that he imagines with Black women.
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“So I like women of power, like, cops, correction officers, authority figures. And any time I would like them to like wear their uniforms.”
So ladies do you just have to run to that costume store and get an officer’s outfit on to get with Maino? Nah he says,
“No, no, no, no. It has to be a real one. They have to be a real person They gotta be authentically like a policewoman or something like that.” And yes there could be some handcuffing going on.
But right now while he’s single ladies, he’s focused on his work.
I’m free and, single but I’m working. I just pressed reset on my career. My rebrand is even better than my old brand.”
The new album “Lobby Boyz” with Harlem rapper ‘Capo’ Jim Jones features Fivio Foreign, Fabolous, Dave East, Young M.A. Styles P, Capella Grey, and more.
The project highlights the dynamic sounds New York City is known for and “brings together heavy hitters currently in the rap game.
“It was a project that we talked about doing years ago. We just never had, the opportunity to do it. It was bigger than just me and him coming together as artists, but we actually tying together our separate boroughs. Brooklyn and Harlem coming together as one under the same banner. I just always thought that that was dope, especially now with a lot going on in the street a lot, going on in, in the rap community.” Maino shares with EURweb Spotlight. “So many young kids getting locked up and dying. I just felt like, you know, us stepping up to the plate, showing unity amongst each other was a big thing because we come from a city that always almost always professes for there only to be one king. When you think of New York, you think about only having one king. What we saying is that we all kings, we all kings you understand. And just because I stand next to another king, doesn’t, doesn’t dim my shine at all.”
Tracks like prayers featuring Benny the Butcher address the painful dilemma of growing up young, Black and in the hood with lyrics like:
“Shout out to the n***as that I got it out the mud with. Ghetto kids, streets turned us into convicts’**Prayin’ with the same hands that I touch drugs with”
“That’s the element that we come from,” Maino shares. “The pain of what we come from. That is me reflecting on my life. And speaking about the process of our criminality coming from these places. Coming from these environments. Just, as much as there’s smiles, there’s definitely a lot of pain inside of the ghetto.”
In another track with New York rapper Dave East, the three dare to reveal their vulnerability something that is often anathema for Black men who are concerned that vulnerability is synonymous with being soft.
“A lot of times with rappers, it’s very macho, right. You know, when you hear rappers everybody’s the biggest dealer, the biggest killer, the, realest, the realest person. The story is not told in totality to me,” he reflects. “In the story of the street, it’s not as peachy and pleasant as we’ve been, making it seem. So I like to show the vulnerable side, cause there’s a balance in life. We not always up. Sometimes we down. Sometimes we up. There’s things happening in our lives every day that, that, that I like to reflect on. I like to call my music party and pain. You know what I mean?
In “Never Take Me Alive” with Dave East and Fabolous, they spit:
Mama praying for me, hope that God listening
I’m traumatized and broken, know I need fixing
Know it’s me against the world and my demons at the same time
And I’ll never let ’em take me alive
It’s me against the world and my demons at the same time
And I’ll never let ’em take me alive
“Shout out to my man,” Maino says. ” He’s actually the one saying that but that speaks to our existence, that speaks to our position. Black men trying to strive. In dealing with the world every single day, dealing with the ups and downs of life, dealing with being a father You know, coming from the streets in prison and violence. Hell yeah. That is actually one of the most profound pieces of writing on the album. ”
Maino has lived the life he raps about. He had ten years of his life stolen from him by the criminal injustice system when he was just 16 spending of it in solitary. Black men in America receive sentences that are almost 10% longer for the same crime committed by a white man. And because of the bail system they often spend time in jail before trial meaning, they are punished whether they are innocent or not.
.”It’s always been that. Our position in this country has always been, guilty until we prove ourselves innocent. We gotta jump, over hurdles. We gotta, jump through circles to get through the justice system because it was never designed in our favor. it was always designed in a way to actually have us convicted. The whole system needs to be redone,” Maino declares.
And he shares with Jaz that there are not as many ways out now. “It’s unfortunate that now the music seems not to be a way out. You see, my philosophy was always that music was a way out of the streets, a way out of the trouble, a way out of pain, a way into a life that we couldn’t afford before. It was a way for us to, feed our families and take care of our mothers. But now what we seeing at an alarming rate is the fact that artists are being criminalized, pulled in on indictments, locked up, and murdered. We’ve never been in a time like this. I used to think before I got into the music business, that if you could become a, a rapper, if I could become a successful rapper, then it would insulate me from some of that life. It would shelter me. I thought that if you got to a certain position or a certain place, then you are too far away from the reach of the gun play or the reach of the law. So they showing us that that’s not true at all.”
“Putting Black men in jail has always been to break up black families, to keep fathers away from sons, to keep sons, away from their fathers and not have directions. And then what happens when you don’t have the father in the household to direct your son, and the mother trying to do it all herself, then what happens is he follows in his father’s footsteps,” Maino opines.
He explains that his upbringing was rough. Both of his parents were drug addicts. “My mom developed her own little habit, but she never let herself get to the point where she was in the streets,” Maino says “I watched my dad go from being a good father to a friend.”
Unfortunately, his parents’ addictions meant that Maino had to more or less raise himself and his younger brother, and “petty crimes” became a way of life. And, before too long, those crimes became bigger, more serious ones — which is how Maino found himself locked up for a decade starting at the age of sixteen for allegedly kidnapping a drug dealer for ransom.
“I got through that with pure will, the will to survive, the will to see another day. I knew that I would, at some point be free,” he tells EURweb Spotlight. “Doing the time was one thing, what was probably more scarier than that was not knowing what I was gonna do when I came home. That was probably even more scarier because I was in prison and kept seeing people that I knew that was going home and coming back. That was a scary thought for me because that revolving door, just to be an in and out criminal for the rest of your life. You do 10 here, you do five here. You do three here. Do another eight there. Like, whoa, whoa. Mm-hmm nah, yeah. I didn’t want that to be my life. And I had seen older dudes, you know, in their fifties and their sixties that had been lifelong criminals in that way.”
“I had only been in the street and in prison. Those were the only two places I had ever been in my life. But I think that my experiences in prison made me stronger. I went at a time when I was very young, so I kind of grew up in there. I had no face hairs. I wasn’t this tall. I had gone through puberty while I was in prison. So it kind of molded me and got me prepared and it made me stronger.”
Now Maino is focusing on promoting Lobby Boyz with Jim Jones, his successful podcast “Kitchen Talk” on Fox Soul and watch for him to be on tour soon. He has triumphed over daunting challenges and looks forward to what the future will bring. And yes ladies he definitely fine and single.
Check out the full convo in the video at the top. And please subscribe to Jaz’s YouTube channel.
Interview/article by Jazmyn Summers. Follow her @jaztalk1 on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Video editing by www.patrickhousefilms.com
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