5 musical milestones: Victor Mariachi

5. Hearing The Marshall Mathers LP for the first time.  Any millennial who’s into hip-hop knows where they were when they first heard this album. Violence, sex, and drugs put together with poetry and sarcasm — it affected me deeply. I knew I wanted to rhyme with the same impact.

4. Seeing Death Grips play at the Masquerade. Jam-packed in a crowd of crazy kids suffocating me, I witnessed how an artist’s presence alone can stir up a reaction. The pandemonium showed me what great music can do. I was terrified and amazed at the same time.

3. Meeting André 3000. Edgewood Ave. is where I met André 3000 walking with his entourage, holding a laptop. Meeting an idol in the flesh makes the dream much more feasible to someone on the come up.

2. Weapons Of Our Ancestors. My debut album, produced by [izo], is my first official project. Releasing it is a surreal experience that I’m still trying to understand. Seeing people purchase my music digitally and physically at a record store (shoutout to Criminal Records and Wax ’N’ Facts) was a wonderfully motivating milestone for me.

1. Playing my first live show on August 18, 2016. I was an opener for a show put together by WAKE at 529. As a shy and extremely nervous person I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. The outcome, though, was like a movie. People were cheering at the end of my set. This influenced me to break the fear of expressing myself in public.

Victor Mariachi’s Weapons of Our Ancestors is out now.