For anyone who doesn’t know, I make music. I’ve been making it for well over two decades at this point. I started around the year 1997 under the name Mimic, and have gone by that name ever since. These days, you’ll see a lot of people trying to use the same name, but none have been in this as long as I have, nor are they doing the same thing I am.
I make rap music, but likely not what you would expect. I write lyrics primarily geared toward expressing my emotions, anxieties, and all things that bother me. I discuss everything, from my years of heartbreak and the issues I’ve had with religion, to the times I was bullied and moments of contemplating suicide. I cover a lot because I use my music for self-therapy.
And it works.
It wasn’t easy, and I wasn’t very good at the beginning. Some would say I’m still not very good. But they can kiss my ass. I don’t need them to approve of me. I never did, and you don’t either. When it comes to making music for therapeutic reasons, the goal isn’t to make others like it or you. The goal is to help you like you.
Before I get too deep into this, just know that this is a long article. The reason is that I go over some of my lyrics to show you specifically what I’ve written over the years. Some of it is rather depressing, but there is a point, so don’t get too hung up on it. What you’re reading is how I felt at the time, and the way I described it. In the end, writing what I did was the outlet I needed.
What made me start making music
I’ve always been interested in music, but I didn’t really start trying to make it until the end of the 1990s. I know, to some of you, that might as well be back during the old west. For me, it was high school.
I go into this in more detail on the About page of the site, so if you want to find out more, head over there. For now, I’ll give you a short rundown of what got me started.
I met a girl who I fell in love with. She broke my heart pretty badly, in a way that made me get stuck in place. I couldn’t get beyond how I felt about her, and my head was set on making me feel like absolute shit. It spent countless nights telling me about how worthless I was, how no one would want me, and how I would never be anything other than a waste of space.
As you can imagine, this can be rather stressful to go through. After all, what do you do if the constant shit-talking is coming from within your own head? You can’t exactly run away from that.
Well, the first thing I tried was bottling my emotions up. When that failed miserably, I went with another option: Music.
I began writing lyrics in two different directions. Some were focused on the anger I was feeling. They were very destructive, dark, and full of violence. Also, they mostly sucked. Seriously, they were pretty terrible and should never be seen by anyone ever, including me.
The other lyrics I wrote had to do with the way I felt. I talked about how depressed I was, how much I loved the girl who broke my heart, and how I knew that nothing would ever get better. Ultimately, I found out that I was wrong and things would get better, but at the time, I only saw the darkness. So that’s what I wrote.
Five years have passed by, and in that time, things have changed
Mimic, Emotional Release from the album Origination (released 2003)
I’ve been contained inside the frame, slowly going insane
Feeling deranged, I can not hold this all inside for too long
but at that time, I didn’t put my feelings down in a song
I let it build up inside and rise high above the line
until it forced me to try exiting this planet through suicide
What you read above is true. It took me 5 years before I finally started putting my feelings to lyrics in a meaningful way. I tried before that, but it was mostly off and on with more off than on. The recordings I made were pretty awful too, which may be why I stopped putting in much effort.
However, the final line there is also true. Before I put in the work that became the first album called Origination, I tried to kill myself. Obviously, it did not work. Apparently, I sucked at that as well.
But my failed suicide attempt did something else. It made me realize that I needed to find another way. I don’t mean another way to kill myself, I mean I needed another way to deal with the shit in my head and the pressure in my heart.
It led me to write more.
It led to Origination.
That album was a culmination of work that was written after I tried deleting myself from the Matrix. It saw me put in a lot more effort to not just expose the way I felt, but to spell it out in very clear, sometimes terribly depressing ways. One of my favorite lines of all time, is on that same song. It is the last line of the third verse:
Maybe I’ll try one last time to travel to the other side
Mimic, Emotional Release from the album Origination (released 2003)
If I commit suicide, will you see that I’m alive?
That line is exactly how I felt at the time. It is also a question that I can absolutely answer: no. She would have never known. Not at all. Even today, nearly 20 years after that album was released, I don’t think she even knows I wrote and recorded any of this.
But none of that matters. What matters is that writing what I did helped me reduce the stress I was feeling. And it’s only one song on a 21 track album I created in my bedroom on a shitty computer using what is now ancient software.
Making the music for Origination gave me an outlet that nothing else had. I spent late nights writing, some that were trashed completely and others that made it onto this and further albums. I didn’t just write to get a song made; I wrote to say what I was feeling in the most accurate way I could. That’s why some of the things I said don’t necessarily make sense to people other than me.
Again, the goal isn’t to try and make others like it. It’s to help yourself get through the fog of shit that you’re stuck in.
The lyrics don’t need to be good, they just have to be what you feel. They will get better over time, and likely find their way into other subjects, just as mine has.
Existence isn’t precious when you hate who you are…
When the meaning of your life is gone, and you can’t move on, your perspective changes. That’s what I’ve come to learn, years after writing those lyrics:
Existence isn’t precious when you hate who you are
Mimic, Job from the album Iconoclast (released 2004)
when the meaning of your life is gone and you can’t move on
beyond the help of human beings, I’m seeing the end
how can I love a God who won’t protect my greatest friend?
Many people, when faced with depression of this magnitude, and feelings of suicide, find themselves at odds with religion and the idea of God. Keep in mind, I was raised as a Christian, went to church all the time, participated in Youth Group activities, even wanted to become a preacher at one point. But after depression struck, something broke inside me.
I don’t mean a small glitch, I mean something more like the whole Google service crashing.
I found myself questioning things I had previously known to be true, and not finding a lot of answers that made sense. As time went on, those questions became anger. Eventually, that anger found its way into the music and the lyrics I was writing.
Anyone familiar with my work knows there are three primary things about my music:
- I write some very depressing lyrics
- I can obliterate the microphone
- I have had serious problems with God
Now, I know that many people are very much believers and won’t like this part of what I’m saying. I get that, and I’m not trying to offend anyone. This was a problem I was having, and that’s what I’m talking about. That problem, however you choose to look at it, made its way out through my music. It was a problem that I couldn’t pray away. Instead, it remained stuck in my head.
I bring this up because the music I made helped me here as well. If you listen to anything I’ve made in the past year (which is actually a lot), you’re not going to find many things related to issues with religion or God. That’s because the lyrics and music I made helped me get through that as well. And that’s my point for bringing this up.
During the hurricane of hell that was going on inside of me, I fired off track after track that screamed and yelled about God. I wrote what I felt, and put it into my music. Song after song, album after album, year after year. I literally created an album called The Mind of God.
Coincidentally, that album is when things really turned around for me with regards to the broken heart issue (yeah, it lasted a very long time). By that point, I had knocked out five albums of songs. I had probably written 150 songs or more at that point, but not everything had made it onto albums.
On that album, my sadness had become anger. I wrote a song called “Out of the Darkness.” The lyrics ranted and complained heavily. I was mad at how I wasted so much time from my life obsessing over someone who had likely forgotten about me entirely. I spent years dwelling on her, on the tiniest details of our short time together.
I was rather unhappy, to say the least.
In time, through my lyrics, I was able to progress myself. It was not an overnight thing, either. It wasn’t even over the course of one album. No, if we’re looking at this from the point of Origination, a lot of my issues didn’t find a final resting place for 10 years. That’s more than half as long as some readers have been alive.
That isn’t what you wanted to hear, is it?
You wanted to hear that I wrote a few songs and everything turned around immediately. You wanted me to say that after I knocked out a few tracks, everything was right as rain.
I could say that. I could tell you that everything will be better if you just sit down and jot out some lyrics. If you just tell that piece of notebook paper how you feel, your heart will go back together, bullies will leave you alone, and you won’t cry anymore.
But I can’t.
I’ve mentioned this before on this site: I’m not sugar-coating this or blowing smoke up your ass. These things are hard, and for whatever reason, they aren’t meant to be easily gotten over. I know because I’ve been through some horrible shit that mentally screwed me up for a long time.
Here is what I can tell you
It will not be instant, but it will help. These things take time, and the truth is, you’ve got a lot of that ahead of you. It is important that you do this for yourself, because no matter what anyone says, you owe it to yourself to give this a chance. In fact, you need to give yourself every chance you can, because the alternative is final. After that, you can’t say the things you’ve always wanted. You won’t be able to find out what will work to make things better.
Writing lyrics helped me tremendously. It took a long time and a lot of writing. Try it and see how well it works for you. All I’m talking about is writing lyrics, I’m not talking about learning to sing well or rap or whatever. I’m talking about letting the depression, the anger, the anxiety, and the frustration inside you find its way out.
And don’t feel like what you need to write has to be perfect. It won’t be. Trust me, I’ve written some absolutely terrible pieces of crap over the years. When I first started…well, let’s just say that for you to write something more shitty than I did, you’d have to really be trying, and even then I doubt you will.
Seriously, I sucked really bad when I first started. When I find CDs of me from back then I break them, throw them into a box, and set them on fire. You probably think I’m kidding, but I’m not. My wife wants to hear some of them. That will never ever happen.
So sit down and write. Listen to music that will get you in the mood if you must. Check out the Resources page of this site. I’ve added a lot of music that you’re welcome to use, including an album of collaboration tracks. On those, you’ll hear me kick verses but also leave blank spots. Those spots are for you. When you’re ready, grab a mic and rock the beat with me.
I truly do hope making music helps you. It is tough and can take a while. It probably won’t take you as long as it did for me. If it does, then it does. But don’t give up. You didn’t come this far just to stop now.
If you want to try something else, there’s always making other types of art, as well as writing stories, journals, and more.
