Vic Mensa‘s path to creativity has not been a smooth one – as the Chicago native recently admitted that narcotics used to spark ideas nearly led him to suicide.
In his new Spin Magazine cover story published on Monday (May 1), the “U Mad” rapper opened up about his drug use over the years. While it started off innocently enough with mushrooms as a teen, his creative journey led him down much darker paths.
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“The first drug I really felt dependent on was mushrooms,” Vic Mensa said. “I started doing them abusively. Probably 100 times a year when I was like 19. But it wasn’t soul-searching. I started to lean on it as a creative crutch, and eventually it just stopped working and I started having bad trips — I would feel like my throat was closing and I was dying.”
He continued: “In the pursuit of boosted creativity I started doing a lot of molly and ecstasy. I was going to the bathroom in the middle of a studio session and railing molly with the powder falling on the ground. And I’m rolling up a dollar bill, on my hands and knees railing it off the bathroom floor — definitely with piss mixed up in it. That stopped working, and just tanked my serotonin.
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“When the molly crashed, I was so depressed and started snorting Adderall,” he added. “Then that stopped working. I would use each drug to the max until it stopped working. And then I was feeling like I couldn’t create, because I needed these drugs but the drugs weren’t working. And so I was hellbent on killing myself. I was on a full warpath of suicide.”
Thankfully, he was able to find himself in time – thanks to an ayahuasca ceremony in San Diego.
“When I did that first ayahuasca ceremony, my question for the medicine was: ‘Why do I feel so much pain?’” he revealed. “And I had a vision of seeing my mother’s blonde hair from my 5-year-old eyes. A higher voice came to me and said, ‘I used to want blue eyes. That is the root of my pain.’ I thought that was so revealing. It’s the first place I can really pinpoint it to within this lifetime: a sense of unworthiness because of not looking like my parents.”
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Vic Mensa’s creativity is back in full swing now, and he recently teamed up with Chance The Rapper and G-Eazy to deliver “$wish.” Taking a more rapid-fire approach to spitting 16, the trio — perhaps an unlikely one on the surface — make it clear that they’re about the big, fast life.
The track was a follow-up to January’s “Strawberry Louis Vuitton,” which was dedicated to the memory of Virgil Abloh.
