As Winter Jam 2020 approaches at Amalie Arena, we connect with Andy Mineo a Christian hip hop artist, producer, music executive, and video director. A tattoo-covered, LGBTQ accepting, prolific rapper from Manhattan may not be who you would expect to be headlining one of the most prominent tours in Christian music, but Mineo will be joining Crowder, Passion, and Newsong for Winter Jam 2020 next week. Nine trendsetters in the industry are on tour together and amongst the chaos, Mineo took some time to explain the relevance of acceptance in today’s divided world.
IF YOU GO
Winter Jam Tour Spectacular
5 p.m. $15.
Amalie Arena, 401 Channelside Dr., Tampa.
Do you have any pros and cons for this type of tour compared to your normal touring schedule?
Yeah, the pros are, you know, you get to play arenas. You get to play in front of a ton of people that never heard your music. The con is usually it’s in the winter, freezing cold. The other slight con is you know, it’s just a short set. It’s like a 15-minute set or so. So that’s kind of a pro and con honestly, it’s like the entire night is really well produced. Really like really great production. The video lighting like is a top-notch show in the world for sure. And it’s like a little commercial for everybody, you know, everyone gets up, does their 15 or 20 minutes. And so it’s like a sampler platter of just music from all over the spectrum. So normally my live show is, you know, like 90 minutes, but this is a great opportunity for people to get a taste of what I’m doing and even come out to my own show later, you know?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned it being cold, at least you’re coming to Florida. Do you have anything you’re looking forward to while you’re actually in the sunshine state, even though it’ll be a little bit cold?
Yeah, yeah. Usually, I bring my skateboard on tour, and before the show starts we scoot around. There’s some great coffee spots out there in Tampa. I might go see Michael, see KD, who knows, I got a couple of buddies out there. Go get a boil with them or something. You know?
I ‘ve heard that. How’s your new home? You moved to Atlanta, right? How’s that compared to NYC?
I love it! I absolutely love living in Atlanta! We moved here for a few things. One for the creative process for me. I got a lot of people down here. Two, is just space and you know, I want to buy a home and just real estate man, just there are great opportunities here for us to do that. And for my family. Then, just the airport man. It’s a central location. Atlanta, you can get pretty much anywhere in the country pretty quickly. So I’m loving it! I absolutely love it! I don’t miss New York right now! I might go back one day, but for right now, my wife and I are building something for our family, you know?
I remember a time like when with the church-going community, we were expected to shun and deny things like the LGBTQ community. I’ve noticed with a lot of Christian artists, acceptance is becoming more of a matter of importance, even if it’s something they may not really understand. What do you think is happening to make this generation of Christians more accepting? Are you noticing how useful you are being in the attempt to remove all of this hatred?
Yeah, well, you know, I don’t think hatred is acceptable in any form of religion, particularly Christianity. And so, a lot of times people would disguise, their hatred as like, self-righteousness, you know? I think whether or not you’re lesbian, gay, transsexual, any of those things- You still need to be treated with dignity and honor because you’re made in the image of God. You also need to be understood. I think people have misunderstood loving someone, for 100% agreeing with everything that they’re about. And that’s just not true. You know, even if you disagree with somebody in their lifestyle, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t love them or hear them out or understand them or serve them. So, that’s a really, really interesting tension point. Because it’s kind of shocking that it’s taken people that longer just be like, yeah, I have gay friends, and what are we? What’s the issue here? So, I don’t know, I think it’s a bunch of hoopla! But I think the reason why some of that might be changing now- I think, you know, just this is the way culture shifts. Usually it’s slow, but inevitable. I think people are just more open to trying to hear and understand a marginalized people move. You know, because I think there’s a lot more social awareness of what’s happening because Information is more readily available. It’s not like, back in the day, if you just had no social media, no connection to the outside world, all you had was basically what your racist old grandfather told you. Now you have other sources of information. So I think that’s probably contributing some of it.
I know you’re really into literature, and you even did a blip at the end of the beginning of Gregory Coles’ “Single, Gay, Christian” book. What message do you think this book has to offer to both Christians and the non-religious sector of people?
Yeah, I think Greg’s book is a really important one for people to read and to understand what people are dealing with. So it’s called “Single Gay Christian”, and, you know, he’s from InterVarsity, which is an organization that I’ve always appreciated and was a part of throughout college, and he published through them. So he got to send me some of the book and talk about the tension of what it meant to be a Christian, to love God and try to serve God, but also to have real struggles with his sexual identity. He walks people through that tension in a very front row seat kind of way, and talks about his tension of like, “Man if I want to be faithful to Jesus, but I also have these things in the Bible that are contrary to what it means about Jesus, how do I deal with that? How do I rectify that”? So I think it’s always good to understand where people are coming from because that creates empathy. That’s why I think reading that book is so important.
Would you mind letting the readers know about the incident where you and Lecrae prevented a suicide?
Yeah, sure. So Lecrae was visiting me in New York City and per usual he wants to always go to the roughest or most action-packed parts of the city. No matter what city we go to, that’s like the first thing he wants to do is get on our rental scooter and just drive through, you know, South Central LA or something. So, of course, he goes, “Hey, what’s the roughest area”, and I was like, “Oh, probably the South Bronx”, and he was like, “Let’s go there.” So naturally, there’s a bridge that connects the Bronx to uptown where I lived. So we start walking in that direction. As we’re walking that way, a person was crossing the street like towards us. This bridge is kind of an interesting one because there’s a train subway train above it. So there’s kind of these crisscrossing pillars that hold the train up above it. So as you’re walking, it’s hard to see who’s coming across the street and people aren’t really supposed to be coming across the street anyway. Like it’s not there’s no pedestrian walks on it. So we’re walking and it’s dark, and it’s just lightly lit by the lights in the street. He sees somebody coming and he said, “What’s going on, man? Are we about to get robbed?”, and I said, you know, “This New York just let it happen”. Like, don’t let getting robbed happen, just let whatever is going to happen, happen. So, all of a sudden we hear a thud, and we hear like a groaning noise, and the person who was crossing the street had bumped their head on one of these crisscrossing pillars. The blood was starting to pour out of their forehead and they came out and they were like, “Oh my god!”, you know, I’m like, “This must be a setup”. But it wasn’t. This person was just distraught. They started saying, “I want to end my life! I want to go see God! This world is too hard to live in”. They started climbing over the bridge, over the railing, because they were going to jump off of the bridge. Lecrae and I reached over and grabbed this person by the arm and started pulling them back in, we started wrestling with this person to not have the jump. The blood is pouring out of their head. It was a transsexual woman. Once they got up close, we could see some of that. This person was just clearly, you know, depressed and anxious and wanted to end their life. By God’s providence, I feel like, we just happened to be there at that right time. They kept on trying to break away from us and run and jump off the bridge, and we had, some pedestrians walking by that we told to call the police. So finally the cops showed up and helped us with this person to prevent from harming themself any further. So it was just kind of one of those surreal moments that was happening. Like, you go for a stroll and all of a sudden you wrestling with a transsexual person bleeding out of the top of their head trying to end their life. That’s not the story I had in my mind when I walked out the door that evening, to do a walk with Lecrae. So a very interesting one, the one that we’ll never forget for sure. I think that made the news or something. It might have aired on The Breakfast Club or something like that.
Hearing things like this, it just really rehashes the point that as such a prolific artist, you seem to truly be audience honest with your audience. Your full-lengths, your EP’s, your album art, even your social media presence, has such a balance between having fun and challenging your creativity. It’s really special because your fans get to see you evolve and grow. It’s almost like we know you, without ever even meeting you. Do you find yourself being too busy or burned out with all of this?
Um, yeah, definitely attention. Because not only is this my job, but it’s also my passion. So somebody asked my wife the other day, like, “What does Andy do for a hobby?” and she was like “work.” Because yeah, if I had a free day to do anything I wanted, it would definitely be this. So it’s hard to try to create those boundaries and that balance when you really love what we do, but we try to build it into our life. I think just trying to have better mental health, helps deal with the stress and the pressures of things. I think mental health is the product of physical health in a lot of ways. What you do with your body and your mind and your time. So, yeah, I’m just trying to be a better human and a better husband in that regard. By trying to create boundaries, trying to learn how to say “no”. You know, those are all things that help.
With you being so busy, you’re also active with the 116 and your creative initiative called Miner League. Does this all intertwine with each other? And how does it set each other apart from each other?
Yeah, Miner League is a creative outlet for myself and my partner in Miner League. Yeah, we just want to have a home for artists to be able to flourish really well and be able to be guided by some of the things that I’ve learned over the years. You know, I think one of the important things for us to do as people, is pass on the information and the mistakes and the stuff that you learn to the people coming right behind us and they can have it better. That’s what we want to do. So, Miner League right now is a management company. It’s also a creative outlet for me to sign artists and allow them to release their visions into the world.
And with that, you know, all artists kind of have their influences. Are your influences mainly based kind of in the hip hop community, the Christian community, or maybe a mix of both?
Yeah, I think it’s a mixture of both, you know. So, I started primarily by creating music that was authentic to me, and the thing that people resonate within your music is something that they can relate to. So I talked a lot about life and faith and my struggles and my triumphs right, all the above. So I’ve definitely attracted a fan base at people who want music that is wholesome, and that is positive, but it’s still really done excellently. Then I’ve had opportunities to be on BET and Sway in the Morning and, you know, things like that. So I get introduced to those audiences as well. Just playlisting, you know, on Spotify and Apple Music, allows your music to just live amongst everything else in the world. I think there’s just kind of a general liking of the music in those two spaces- people who care about the content in that way, and then also people who just enjoy good hip hop. Which has been a really cool space to be in! It kind of touches both and that’s something that I pride myself in.
Your strong influence with your fans really is as positive as you’re aiming for. You have certain themes of perseverance like in the song and the video for “You Can’t Stop Me.” I really respect your approach to really show what you’re going through. so others can learn that they may be going through a similar situation. It may be a little bit different, but everybody’s going through something. Is there anything else that you’re kind of looking forward to after the winter jam tour that maybe we can watch out for?
It’s going to be this tour coming up. Once that tour is over, I’ll be launching my own headline tour and new album.
I’m really looking forward to that. Your last release, “Work in Progress” was kind of a buildup of different podcasts and incomplete, but really amazing works. Is that gonna have anything to do with the new release? Or is it going to be all brand new?
Yeah, it’s gonna be all brand new actually, the “Work in Progress” from me that just came out was kind of a way to hold people over while I work on a full-length album. You know, my mom passed last year, so I just hadn’t been making a lot of music this year. So I thought this would be a cool way to give people what’s been sitting on my hard drive and just now let those songs die. You know?
Absolutely.
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This article appears in Jan 9-16, 2020.
