October marks the the time of year when the brilliant light of the one of the most prolific MC’s to ever grace the stage left us. Micheal “Eyedea” Larsen began his extraordinary career at the tender age of 12. Raised by a fierce single mother who unconditionally supported her son, Mikey’s talent soared and his house was filled with wayward, misunderstood kids that he had met along the way. Coming from broken homes with nowhere to go, Mikey brought the needy home with him. He never asked his struggling, single mother if this guy or if this girl was welcome to stay with them. He would just tell his mom when she got home that this is so-and-so and that they will be staying in the house for a while.
Around 11 or 12 Mikey would put on weekly shows on a stage he built out of pallets in his mom’s backyard, first mastering break dancing as part of the local Minneapolis group Battle Cats, bragging how he could freestyle and spin on his head at the same time; his ultimate calling would be to become THE MASTER MC. In his mind, the road began with Battle Rap. He told me once that if you can’t articularly rap fast, you were a sucker MC. In the late 1990’s Eyedea began his battle rap tour, destroying every freestyle MC in his path. Soundset, Scribble Jam, and ultimately being honored as the only white MC to compete in the last Blaze Battle in NYC in 2000. Broadcasted live on HBO and hosted by KRS1, the Grand prize was $10,000 or a recording contract with the newly formed Bad Boy Records headed up by Puff Daddy. The Blaze Battle was effortless for Eyedea. No one could keep up…none of the MC’s that had gone through the same struggle to get on that New York stage had heard of or were ready for what Eyedea was about to serve. Eyedea won…a white, skinny, crooked toothed 17 yr old from Minneapolis severed a beating on the competition. During the time of the battles, Mikey and Maxx (Eyedea and Abilities) released an independent album Six Sense.