I met Papa Mbye at a park off Lowry Avenue, where we sat on a bench and baked in the August heat. Mbye, an emerging Minneapolis-based artist, drops his first EP, MANG FI, September 3. His music stands for itself: it’s dazzling and beat-driven, overlaid with harmonies and raps that track seamlessly from sweetness to angst. But Mbye’s life as an artist dates years back, to park benches like the one where we sat, where he hustled marker-and-paper caricatures as a teenager.
Back then, Mbye—whose family emigrated from The Gambia/Senegal when he was two—inhabited three worlds: his family’s African household, the African American community of North Minneapolis, and the western suburbs, where he attended school. He wanted to be a cartoonist. He’d stay up ‘til 5 a.m., exploring exaggeration and portraiture, drawing a thousand different versions of who he was.
“It really was hard for me living in those three worlds, and not really knowing who I was, and having people tell me who I was in all three places. So the art really was a conversation with myself,” says Mbye. “For me, it was the post-rationalization of those drawings that helped me find who I was.”
These portraits were caricatures too, distended and rearranged and beautiful in the way their distortions lent clarity. Each one crystallized some part of Mbye, with captions attached: paranoia + naivete = a ____. A vibrant rage. To uncover what’s beneath my shadow. He eventually started doing gallery shows.
Then, one night in 2019, Mbye was at a friend’s dorm room, drawing in his sketchbook as the others made music on Ableton software. He quietly wrote down some lines over the tracks—the group coaxed him into rapping them. They produced a song on the spot. Around the same time, he freestyled at a house party in Minneapolis’s Como neighborhood, then started getting booked at other parties and Skyway Theater. Right before he played, he’d find a back alley and write lines over a YouTube beat, memorizing them before he hopped on stage.
“Visual artists, like—I can do art shows and I didn't have to show my face, I can just put my thing on the wall,” says Mbye. Diving into a radically new art form scares him as much as it feeds him. “Once I’m performing, all that fear goes away, and I feel amazing,” he says. That exhilaration has carried him all the way to his first EP. In Mbye’s first language, Wolof, mang fi means I’m here, in one translation.
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