M1llionz: forever changing the game

M1llionz grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, but took his first steps in Jamaica and learnt to speak in patois. His Jamaican heritage is a touchpoint for his music, which is knitted together with his bespoke yardie-brummie dialect, and it’s the reason he’s written a song about his family’s experiences with Windrush and seeing people uprooted from a country that’s their home. “It’s something I needed to speak about,” he reflects. “People have been told that they have to go ‘back’ even though they’ve lived here their whole life, or because they can’t find a specific document they’re invalid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He first got into the studio thanks to his mum, also a rapper and spoken word artist, and learnt how to make beats and edit his own music videos from the age of 11: “Rapping about being lyrically better than everyone else. That’s what it all came down to every time.” By the age of 12, he was carrying a knife: “It was for safety more than anything. When you grow up in dangerous places, that’s how you feel you need to protect yourself.” There’s a pause, before M1llionz deadpans, “Really I should’ve just done karate and done a kung-fu kick. I would’ve been alright.”

Truth is, despite not regarding himself as a political artist, M1llionz’s debut album ‘Provisional License’, released in 2021, is a taut 12-track indictment of a system that’s wilfully unhelpful, a system which funnels a disproportionate number of young Black men through prison instead of addressing the root causes. In the record’s opening track, M1llionz lays it bare: “I come from poverty, I needed money. Instead of helping me, they sent me to prison.”

“Obviously if you commit a crime, you commit a crime. But the length or harshness of certain sentences doesn’t make sense compared to other crimes,” he says. “Also, there’s no rehabilitation inside anyway. You’re just gonna have to sit down for two years and then they just want to hope that you’ve changed your attitude to life, when really they haven’t taught anything. The reality is, you can’t rehabilitate yourself.”