Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Vic rose to public awareness as a member of the eclectic hip-hop band Kids These Days and founder of the Chicago collective SAVEMONEY alongside Chance The Rapper and other local upstarts Joey Purp and Peter CottonTale. His solo debut mixtape INNANETAPE dropped in 2013, igniting immediate accolades (including a spot on the XXL Freshman cover in 2014), and a fortuitous introduction to Jay Z that led to a record deal with Roc Nation. Mensa went on to help Kanye West pen his esoteric song “Wolves” from The Life of Pablo, drop three critically acclaimed EPs (2016’s There’s A Lot Going On, 2018’s Hooligans, and 2020’s V TAPE) and his debut full length The Autobiography (2017), as well as furthering social causes in his hometown through his nonprofit SAVEMONEYSAVELIFE. In both music and his social activism, Vic challenges the American system responsible for a history of overcriminalization, racial injustice, and issues that affect the lives of people in underserved communities, while showcasing profound levels of consciousness and self-reflection.

Ho99o9 (horror) - An unauthorized biography
The first spores of Ho99o9 were identified by the CDC’s infectious disease unit
in the outsourced offices of purgatory that are peppered all throughout New
Jersey in places like Linden, Elizabeth and Newark.
There was only legend until cultures were collected. Once told as a cautionary
tale of two neighborhood kids, their story mutated into a reflection on the
horrors of the society that produced them. What happened between those
early days in the neighborhood and the present day is often debated.
theOGM (Jean) & Yeti Bones (Eaddy) are certainly a product of their early
environment. There weren’t any fields or even much grass for a kid to play on.
Gardens were made of concrete and a reality sustained only by dreams of
places where the train tracks went.
Eaddy’s Pops brought Motown and the militancy of the armed forces into
Eaddy’s sometimes rigid and uncompromising basic training for life. Pops was
hard because hard makes leaders in the human chain of command. And Jean
was always there in the street level offices of Chris Christie’s “small
government” purgatory in the defunded, decommissioned and deconstructed
district of Linden New Jersey. Jean knew when Trump’s future fuc boi and
every other neo-con said “small government” what they really meant was
“Fuck you nigg…”
Style was lacking but what Jean’s Pops was packing into his ear speakers stayed
embedded in Jean’s mind - The sounds of Haitian Kompa sung by Sweet Micky
(Michael Martely). The bizarre behavior and non-conformist styles of a Haitian
icon caught Jean’s eyes and ears back then and once again now with Micky
recently rising to become president of Haiti. Thieves and liars giving way to an
influential artist elected to rebuild a crumbling nation? Noted.
Jean and Eaddy kept lampin in overlapping circles of connected streets,
bordering cities and shuffled between under funded public schools. The sounds
on Hot 97 filled blank tapes with Bone Thugs, Busta, Onyx, Lil Jon and Missy
Elliott. Mental hard-drive uploads with flow served to drive them to finally
jump on that train to see what else was out there and what they found
changed them irrevocably.
Eaddy began branching out, bringing hardcore like Bad Brains back home with
him. The pair didn’t know it at the time but the resulting amalgamation they
brought back was the Deathkult. They were armed only with a pawn shop
sampler and the power to influence.
Born to lose in Jersey, reborn in NYC and subsequently reimagined 999.
Rewired to spread a promise for the next emancipation from time. The gospel,
the vibration, hardcore punk, rage and rhyme - theOGM and Yeti Bones emerge
transformed into weapons of mass expression and the spectacle known today
only as Ho99o9 (horror).
Then just like that, Ho99o9 vanished from the east coast, allegedly recruited
into a beat laboratory in Los Angeles. They baptized in blood and emerged
wrapped in a sound that had not yet been heard.
A congregation gathered in a scene of like-minded mutants and L.A. quickly
became the HQ of Ho99o9. More minions manifest with Horror spores started
spreading all throughout North America and the European Union - a pandemic
of fools gettin' woke as the fringe becomes the majority and we recall the
prophecy of Sweet Micky.
And Today - a new nation rises to smash the guise of the god-head. A deity-less
religion of our collective humanity, neither divine, nor wicked, led only by the
march of the Deathkult and delivered by its soldiers - theOGM and Yeti Bones in
their United States of Horror*.

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