MIKE

Michael Jordan Bonema, born October 13, 1998 in Livingston, New Jersey, is the New York rapper, producer, and DJ (recording as DJ Blackpower) known as MIKE^[1]. His childhood was unusually mobile: his mother relocated the family to Hackney, London when he was five, where he first discovered hip-hop through British grime artists such as Skepta, before the family returned to Philadelphia when he was twelve and then settled in the Bronx by the time he was sixteen^[1].

MIKE's mother played an outsized role in shaping his early work. The title of his 2017 breakthrough project, May God Bless Your Hustle, came directly from a comment she left on one of his Instagram posts^[1]. She died in 2019 while living in Nigeria, and visa complications prevented MIKE from traveling to see her beforehand, a loss that has surfaced throughout his catalog in the years since^[1].

In 2015, MIKE co-founded the sLUms collective alongside Adé Hakim, Darryl Johnson, King Carter, Jodi.10k, and Mason Dreiling, an underground New York crew built around mutual support rather than competition^[1]. The group's hazy, soul-sampling sound became closely associated with MIKE's own solo catalog, which expanded through War in My Pen (2018), Tears of Joy (2019), Weight of the World (2020), and Beware of the Monkey (2022), alongside struggles with depression and school anxiety that surfaced in his lyrics from his early teenage years onward^[1].

MIKE's relationship with Earl Sweatshirt began around 2016 through mutual acquaintances, after Earl purchased MIKE's debut project on Bandcamp for $45. What started as one rapper discovering another slowly grew into a mentorship, and the two first shared a stage together in 2019^[1][2]. That decade-long creative relationship culminated in 2026 with POMPEII // UTILITY, a joint double album on which MIKE's half, POMPEII, sits alongside Earl's UTILITY^[2].

MIKE learned production himself in 2016, taught by fellow sLUms member Sixpress using Ableton Live, a skill that let him shape the murky, sample-warped sound running through his catalog rather than relying solely on outside beatmakers^[1]. That period of steady output continued into 2025 with Showbiz!, released that January and described by critics as his most refined and spiritually attuned album to date, followed by a European and North American headlining run and an NPR Tiny Desk performance that August alongside collaborators Mark William Lewis and Liv.e^[1]. POMPEII // UTILITY, the joint album with Earl Sweatshirt released the following spring, arrived as the culmination of that stretch of momentum rather than a departure from it.

MIKE has spoken candidly about how he processes grief, describing an evolution from initial anger toward forgiveness and then uncertainty about whether he was forcing the right response, before landing on the idea that mourning keeps teaching him something new rather than settling into a fixed state^[4]. He treats recording itself as something close to a spiritual practice, deliberately preserving false starts and imperfect vocal takes because, in his words, a listener does not need to be a lyricist to feel somebody's pain, and he has described performing live as one of the only times he feels fully himself^[4]. That instinct extends to mentorship: MIKE runs his own label, 10K Global, through which he signed and toured with the rapper Niontay, a close collaborator he met in New York around 2019 who has since become one of his most frequent creative partners^[5].

MIKE has also spoken about the tension between his need for control and his desire to grow past it. He describes himself as "super controlling" with his music by default, tracing the habit to a broader, constant anxiety, and has said that making POMPEII // UTILITY alongside Surf Gang required him to actively practice letting go of that instinct^[3]. He extends a related philosophy to his relationship with fans, saying he wants the line between artist and audience dissolved entirely, describing longtime listeners who have followed him since his early twenties as family, and framing the spaces built around his music as places of shared responsibility rather than one-directional exposure^[3].

That same instinct toward community has a more concrete outlet: MIKE launched the annual Young World festival in Brooklyn, a showcase built around the same underground, mutual-support ethos that first drew him to sLUms, and it has continued to grow in the years since^[1].