My City: An Interview with Malik Yusef

A groundbreaking, unfiltered testimony from one of America’s most important cultural voices—told through the poem that shaped a generation.

Malik Yusef is an award-winning artist across music, film, and spoken word. A poet, songwriter, producer, and one of the founding creative forces behind G.O.O.D. Music, his collaborators include Kanye West, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Common, John Legend, and Bono. But before the platinum records and world stages, there was a poem—written on the South Side of Chicago, in the Wild Hunnids, where he became known as The Wordsmyth.

That poem is My City.

This book is the first time Malik Yusef has ever opened that poem line by line—revealing the history, philosophy, trauma, and beauty woven into every bar. The result is something rare: part oral history, part cultural testimony, part spiritual inquiry. It is not memoir. It is not journalism. It is testimony.

More than a literary work, My City is a survival manual disguised as an interview—a guide to mental emancipation, street-level wisdom, and the internal revolution required to stay human in an inhumane system.

Through intimate, expansive conversations with writer and collaborator Revolution MacInnes, Malik speaks openly about growing up on Chicago's far South Side, navigating street nation culture, the truth behind “keeping it real,” and the systems designed to limit who gets to dream. He unpacks the psychology of survival, the legacy of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the prison industrial complex, and the quiet resilience required just to keep breathing.

Part One moves through My City section by section, allowing Malik to decode every metaphor, every reference, every memory. From Frank Sinatra’s Chicago to the breakfast programs of the Black Panthers. From Gwendolyn Brooks to Bob Marley. From K-Town to the Wild Hunnids. From redlining to religion. The language hasn’t been sanitized—words are spelled the way Malik creates and speaks them, sentences break where his breath breaks. This is oral history as literature.

Part Two contains the fully transcribed podcast Revolution Untelevised: The Building of My City, where Malik and Revolution revisit the era, the fashion, the underground poetry scene, the making of Love Jones, and the emergence of Chicago hip-hop. Even more raw. Even more unfiltered.

This book explores:

• The duality of Chicago—beautiful and brutal, divine and divided
• Mental emancipation and the work required to “debug your own code”
• Street nation culture, organized survival, and what “handling your functions” really means
• The intersection of capitalism, policing, and manufactured scarcity
• Faith, doubt, and the difference between losing religion and finding truth
• Why “making a living” is the lie—and why breathing itself is rebellion

Malik Yusef writes for those who loved their city long before it loved them back. He writes for those who only knew how to survive—and survived anyway. He writes to remind us there is still something worth fighting for.

My City is more than a book—it is breath, truth, math, memory, and the blueprint for surviving America with your humanity intact.

Still here. Still breathing. Still free.

Revolution MacInnes is a Grammy-nominated voice artist and technical producer. A business partner of Malik Yusef and co-creator of this book, he serves as a board member and officer of Become, Inc., a Chicago-based nonprofit focused on racial equity and systems change.

For readers of Black history, Chicago history, hip-hop culture, cultural criticism, political testimony, and revolutionary philosophy.