Photo by Meghan Mclaughlin
FSD: How’d you get into making music and rapping?
MFn Melo: I’ve always been interested in music. When I was maybe a freshman or a sophomore, me and my friends, not anybody in PIVOT, a couple of kids I went to grammar school with, we called ourselves CMG. It was just our first initials and stuff. We used to rap over G-Unit beats. We thought we were the new G-Unit, I was Lloyd Banks. We used to do that and just mess around over the G-Unit beats, but after a while I let that go. I started coming over here [Saba’s house] to play basketball and I never left. From the day I graduated until today I’ve been in this basement for most of that time.
FSD: What’s your endgame or your goal for music? What do you want to achieve from your career?
MFn Melo: I don’t have any specifics. I just want to be successful and that’s just my perception. I’m not looking at like $4,000,000 cars or anything. If I can get that, cool, but that’s not in my sights. I’m just trying to progress and help the people around me. If I can do that through music then great. That’s the end goal: to help myself and others through music.
FSD: What inspires you to make music?
M: Life man. Life is crazy. It can be really good, and it can be really bad, and it can be a grey area where you determine whether it’s good or bad, like you can’t really control everything. There’s going to be some bad, there’s going to be some good, but you just gotta take it in stride and keep moving. Me being around my friends and PIVOT. They helped me so much, not with music, but me as a person they helped me grow. Us just communicating with each other. My mother. I want to make sure she’s okay. For a while she was the person that was making sure the family’s good, she’s always been the rock and I’m trying to take that burden off of her. Life just inspires me to do that. The good stuff, the bad stuff, everything inspires me to want to create. I’m just all about the growing and the process.
FSD: What does MeloDramatics say about your life?
MFn Melo: Just the bipolarness of it. It’s like, just the play on words, like I’m real chill, but I’m real dramatic at times, and that’s kind of how life is. A lot of my music is chill to a certain point, but when you hear the tone, when you hear what I’m talking about, it’s kind of dramatic. You know, there’s some pain there, there’s some passion, not so chill. It’s me fusing the two and finding a balance.
FSD: So when you’re making music do you focus more on the lyrics or the overall feeling of the song and the production?
MFn Melo: That’s a good question. When I first started I was really into bars, and making sure my raps were on point, but as I went on I wanted to make it more acceptable to everybody. I’m trying to blend the two of those and I think I’m finding my groove. I’m finding that balance. I don’t want to be Wale.