Mike Posner wants everyone to know that he will not be pigeonholed, cannot be categorized and refuses to fit any existing archetype. By the end of my interview, I came to realize that Posner is who Posner is. He’s a white college kid entering his senior year at Duke that has recorded songs with up-and-coming (and established) rappers KiD CuDi, Big Sean, and Wale, has covered and remixed songs from Electric Light Orchestra, The Fray and Beyoncé and has already been featured on Kanye West’s blog. Did I mention that he has a record deal? Not too shabby for a guy who claims to be your average twenty-one year old college kid.
Just the opposite is certain for Mike Posner – he is not your average college kid. While he told me that “[he has] a job but he balance[s] fun” into his life when I asked him what he likes to do for fun at Duke, he said, in the same breath, that “people are gonna cry when they hear” his 2010 LP. Benny Blanco, the twenty-one year-old producer behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and Britney Spears’s “Circus”, is working on the currently untitled 2010 LP with Posner at Downtown studios in New York City, where the album should be close to completion before the Blue Devil has to go back to Durham, North Carolina for his diploma.
Posner has become a sensation at Duke since he began performing there last year. His performances have become recurring events on campus with his revolving backing band, The Brain Trust, playing behind him. The shows have occasionally featured guests such as G.O.O.D. music protégé Big Sean and mutual friend Pat Piff, two up-and-comers that Posner has known since he interned at an urban radio station in Detroit a few years ago. The audiences for his first campus shows were built on word of mouth hype from his close friends on campus through social networking sites and after no time at all, it started to permeate throughout the music business resulting in a record deal with J Records, a Sony/BMG record label with a solid roster of both urban and pop artists.
Even though Posner had only been singing for a year and a half by the time he was signed, Posner says that he was “blessed with the opportunity to be the position to choose a label” and chose Sony because the label “understands who [he is] and where [he’s coming from] and that [he does] appeal to a few different crowds and is gonna have [his] hand in all those cookie jars at the same time.” He believes that his music has the ability to connect with everyone from the older white housewife to hardcore hip-hop producers, as it already has with legendary Atlanta producer Don Cannon, who presents the A Matter of Time mixtape with DJ Benzi.
Posner’s future mass appeal will have something to do with his diversified taste. Growing up, his father and mother had him listening to The Grateful Dead and balanced it out with Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye while Motown was “ubiquitous” around the Detroit area as he was growing up. High exposure to singers and songwriters is the reason why Posner calls himself a singer and not a rapper, why he prefers to produce his own beats instead of handing them off to rappers and the reason behind the crossover sensation that he will become.
Mike Posner on A Matter of Time:
[cardboard living]: You mentioned that your mixtape A Matter of Time has a story behind it from the opening “Tick” to the last song “Tock.” What do you think the motif is behind it?
Mike Posner: There’s a few meanings to it… one of them is “it’s a matter of time before you’re gonna have to deal with me” but I first came up with that name from the song “A Matter of Time”, which has more of a darker meaning and I was writing that song at a time where, for the first time in my life, people were bombarding me, asking me for beats, asking me to get on the hook with them and stuff like that. I remember just thinking, “Most of these people are just not gonna make it and not be what they think they’re gonna be and it’s only a matter of time before reality is gonna set in for them. And for the people who do make it, it’s only a matter of time before everybody forgets who you are, so there is kind of a double meaning between those two things. That song was special to me because at the time that I wrote it, I was one of those people as well.
8.5/10. The title track for the mixtape A Matter of Time is also one of its best. The haunting keys and bongo percussion echo underneath Posner’s raspy notes.
9.3/10. The catchiest song on the mixtape features a sample from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Evil Woman.” The track showcases Posner’s versatile sound that traverses through disco, dance and hip-hop.
Lewis Corson
Spoon – Got Nuffin
