First of His Name: 8 Years Later
May 18, 2018 — May 18, 2026
Eight years ago today I dropped an album in the middle of law school.
Not as a distraction. Not as a hobby. As a declaration.
First of His Name came out May 18, 2018 — my second semester at Cooley Law School — and if you go back and listen, you can hear exactly where my head was. I wasn’t rapping to escape. I was rapping to document. Every bar is a timestamp of a man figuring out who he is while the institution is trying to tell him who he should be.
I re-released it today — properly, under OPEN MANUAL AUDIO VISUAL (OMAV), available on every platform — and inside of a few hours it was already moving. That’s not an accident. That’s what real music does.
The Title Wasn’t A Flex. It Was A Prophecy.
Yes, it’s a Game of Thrones reference. But the weight of that phrase goes beyond the show.
First of His Name is what gets announced when a new house begins. When a lineage is established. When someone takes on a title and a responsibility that didn’t exist in their family before them. There was no blueprint for what I was building — an artist, an attorney, an entrepreneur, a brand — all at once, on purpose, in Detroit and Indianapolis simultaneously.
I said it on the title track:
“Whole family poor, nobody rich But everybody dropping babies in this bitch I gotta build a legacy, something bigger than me I know I can make a couple big figures from me With stamps on they name Know how to handle the fame And not succumb to the shit that destroy all the lames Look how far I came — this how I’mma reign ‘Cause I never had anything, I’m first of my name”
That wasn’t a punchline. That was a mission statement. The whole album is.
What’s On The Cover
Before you even press play, the cover tells you everything.
Old photographs of my grandfather, my father, and my uncle. Three generations of Detroit men. And that’s me holding my niece — my first niece, my brother’s first child — who had just arrived in the world right in the middle of me trying to build something for generations I’d never meet.
Past and future in the same frame.
A new first, held by someone trying to be first.
I couldn’t have scripted that image if I tried.
Made In The Fire
Second semester of law school. Contracts. Torts. Federal courts. And in between all of that — this album.
The tension in that is real, and you can feel it in the music. “God’s Favorite” opens the project with exactly that energy:
“2015 we said that we was most hated 2018 I’m feeling like God’s Favorite”
That flip — from most hated to most favored — is the whole thesis. Not that circumstances changed. That perspective did. That I did.
The chorus says it plainly:
“If they saying that you change then you made it If you wanna be the change, gotta make it If you see a chance, gotta take it How you want the sky but won’t leave the basement?”
I was talking to myself as much as anyone.
The Last Record of an Era
This was the final project before the old regime folded.
F.C.L.A.$$ — the collective, the infrastructure, the version of this operation that had multiple moving parts — was reaching its end. I could feel it. You always can. And so First of His Name carries the fingerprints of transition: some production from my longtime collaborator, but more of me in the producer’s chair than anything I’d done before. I was stepping forward. Taking more ownership. Trusting my own ear.
“Plaza Vibes II” still has that collective energy — family, squad, rolling as a unit. But even there the writing is mine:
“Boss vibes, jigga style, playing family feud We so raw hoes think our family rude Look out for each other, what family do You gotta add, not subtract from family moves”
Addition over subtraction. I’ve lived by that ever since — and the people who couldn’t add eventually moved accordingly.
Skrong
Track 9. The one that hit first today when I re-uploaded. 219 plays in five hours with no campaign behind it.
That record carries something that’s hard to manufacture. It’s the sound of someone who has been underestimated their entire life finally feeling the ground settle beneath them. Not arrogance. Settledness.
“Look at what we on Made it to a place where they say we ain’t belong Now look — we too strong, we too strong, we too strong What we on is too strong”
The people who found it today weren’t discovering something new. They were returning to something that already meant something to them. Eight years later, it still hits. That’s the proof.
STREAM SKRONG ON YOUTUBE MUSIC
Eight Years of Distance
Here’s where things stand today:
Indiana bar admitted. Active ALJ. OMAV LLC operational. WELÇOME® at ten years and counting. Harry Romantica LP coming this summer. The catalog crossing toward a million cumulative streams.
And a project I made in a law school apartment — with photos of three generations on the cover and a baby in my arms — still pulling plays eight years later on the day of its anniversary.
The chorus of “Google Maps” always made me laugh a little:
“GPS tell me where I need to be Tell her time to go and she don’t wanna leave GPS tell me where I need to go”
I know where I’m going. I’ve always known.
Eight years in, the route is clearer than it’s ever been.
Stream First of His Name on all platforms. It’s been re-released under OMAV with new cover treatment. The catalog is open.