For the first half of his teenage years, Minister G, formerly known as GunDei (Gandhi), gangbanged on the streets of Miami, chasing money and cheap thrills. Influenced and motivated by the style of music that permeated hip-hop in the early 90’s, Minister G and a group of neighborhood friends known as the 6th Avenue Boyz, affiliated with the Little Haiti gang Zoe Pound, began to commit home invasions and terrorized rival gangs. “I was lost in these Miami streets with no purpose, taking penitentiary chances,” recalls Minister G. Like most young black males in the ghettos of America, he saw crime as the only passage to the proverbial good life, and the gangster rap genre he related to at the time only reinforced this outlook. In 1992, Minister G, along with his parents, relocated to Montreal, Canada. He signed a record deal with Montreal indie label Zoobone Records, went on to release various singles, such as the underground classic “The Solution,” on 12-inch vinyl and toured throughout Canada and the United States. In 2001, after hitting many roadblocks in his career and personal life, Minister G says he had a transformative spiritual experience and gradually began to realize that he had been deceived into trusting the destructive values of a culture deeply rooted in crime, sexism and nihilism.
Fast forward to 2013. The ghetto intellectual, as he likes to refer to himself, founded B.E. Entertainment, his very own music company, and is preparing the release of his full-length album aptly titled Church fo’ da Thugz this coming summer 2014.
Why call it Church fo’ da Thugz? Imagine, a church full of thugs? At first, “church” and “thug” as concepts may seem to be contradictory, but for Minister G, they are simply symbols which are to be manipulated for a greater purpose. A church, at its root, is an assembly of people who come together for religious reasons. For Minister G, his fans gather around his music and form a community which he claims to be a church. His targeted audience are 15-35-year-olds who identify in one way or another to the street essence of hip-hop culture and feeling marginalized. They think of themselves as outcasts, rebels without a cause. “These are the thugs who I preach to,” says Minister G. The album boasts 18 powerful songs dealing with the ethics and consequences of the street life, but it does not merely paint a grim picture of “the life.” It invites the listeners to engage with this subject and pushes each one to propose solutions. The music is not created to passively entertain its listeners; Minister G has a message. He aims to provoke his fans to start thinking critically about the social and political contexts they exist in and to hopefully initiate change.
Church fo’ da Thugz, as a project, took two years to finalize because Minister G says he wanted to deliver an albums of superior quality and content. The album was mixed by Grammy Award-winning engineers, such as Leslie Brathwaite who has worked with Rick Ross and Jeezy, Kori Anders, Ben Diehl who is chief engineer at Miami’s famous Circle House studio and Jason Goldstein who has nearly mixed every project from the Roots and Jay Z’s classic album The Blueprint.
Minister G’s goal is to revolutionize rap music with this album and save the lives of children who believe the lies being propagated through some of the rappers currently ruling the charts. Minister G accepts the responsibility of being a role model with open arms, unlike most of his past rap heroes and peers. “When 2 Live Crew said, ‘Shake what ya mama gave ya,’ the young girls did that. NWA said, ‘I’ma be a zaggin 4 life.’ I believed that and explicitly manifested that attitude and did nothing constructive with my life for years,” said Minister G. “Music has power,” he says, “and I plan to use that power for the greater good.”
Those who have yearned for the redemption of a culture that they feel they have tirelessly poured themselves into, yet to helplessly watch it denigrate through the years, may have finally gotten the answer to their prayers in Minister G. Perhaps you, too, would do well to check him out.
