S
uppose your idea of radio personality Charlamagne tha God comes from clips of the veteran host’s most absurd moments on his show, The Breakfast Club. Like, when he asked Magic Johnson his first thought after receiving his HIV diagnosis. Or when, during a segment with rapper and actor Safaree, he blurted out “Nah, that ain’t it” in response to the artist freestyling. You might expect the real-life Charlamagne, born Lenard Larry McKelvey in Charleston, South Carolina, to mirror the unfiltered provocateur listeners have tuned into for nearly 30 years. In person, he is no doubt an apostle of the Biggie Smalls lyric “Bite my tongue for no one.” Adorned in a T-shirt featuring the animated political satire The Boondocks, he’s at ease in the iHeartRadio studios in midtown Manhattan, more than happy to offer his take on just about everything.
But this version of Charlamagne, who turns 47 later this month, is not the one you might’ve seen in viral videos. With decades in the public eye, and on what he describes as a “healing journey,” the Charlamagne in front of me on this rainy spring afternoon is rather zen. He is well aware that his older persona differs, in some ways wildly, from his current, more mature sensibility. “It’s something my good friend [author and wellness guru] Devi Brown always says: ‘You got to learn to love every single version of yourself. Every single version of yourself serves a purpose.’”
The author of three bestsellers, and the founder of the podcast network Black Effect, as well as the Black Privilege publishing imprint with Simon & Schuster, Charlamagne has made storytelling his life’s work. These days, married with four daughters, he tells me his primary focus is finding ways to be “of service.” He’s an outspoken advocate for mental health and has been candid in his books about his challenges growing up in South Carolina, experiencing abuse and incarceration at a young age. He founded the nonprofit organization the Mental Wealth Alliance with Alfiee Breland-Noble in 2019, and he supports a scholarship at his mother’s alma mater, South Carolina State University, for Black students to study English or communications. Charlamagne says his mental health work allows him to look back on his past with a sense of clarity.
“There’s been plenty of times I came on this radio and projected my hurt on the people. There’s been plenty of times I came on this radio and projected my unhealed trauma on the people,” he says. “And that’s why doing the work is so important. It will change you as a person, which ultimately changes you as a personality.”
Even so, some things don’t change. Charlamagne’s routine has remained more or less the same for his decades-long career in radio: Up at the crack of dawn and live on the airwaves shortly after. “Literally, this is my life,” he says, seated in a conference room adjacent to the studios where The Breakfast Club records each morning. “To be a morning-radio personality, you’re setting people’s tone for the day.”
Over the years, Charlamagne built the kind of deeply personal relationship with his audience that presaged the always-on culture of content creators of the 21st century. It’s what makes The Breakfast Club, which he’s co-hosted since 2010, a cultural force. By now, the show has become a reliably authentic dialogue within the Black community — during the past two presidential elections, Charlamagne was the go-to conduit between Democratic politicians and undecided Black voters. His career consists of multitudes: the comedic if not brash hip-hop radio host forged by the shock-jock era, and the thoughtful political commentator, able to articulate what even his critics would describe as a pretty nuanced perspective on the world.
“I’m happy that people can go back to certain moments and hear certain things and be like, ‘Bruh, that dude. He really has grown; he used to be really wild. He might still be a little wild now, but he used to be really, really wild,’” he says. “And for the people who say things like, ‘Man, I miss the old Charlamagne. I want that back’ — go back and listen to the old shit then.”
Right now, downtown, Sean “Diddy” Combs is on trial for sex trafficking, prostitution, and racketeering. You’ve talked to him many times over the years. What’s going through your mind as this situation is unfolding?
It’s sad. And people got mad at me, I think it was last year, because I said that when it first happened. I’m like, “Yo, we got to stop acting like these situations don’t bring out a plethora of emotions.” This is complex, especially if you’re a hip-hop-head. I was in jail writing down things I wanted to do for my future, saying I wanted to be signed to Bad Boy in ’96, ’97, because I used to rap. And so for me, man, just sitting back watching the situation, yeah, it is sad to watch yet another one of us … That’s what it feels like, right? It feels like, another one of us. I’ve been watching this my whole life. Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly. It’s like, damn. So, yeah, it’s not a good feeling. It’s not something that you … Don’t get me wrong. Some of the shit’s hilarious. We need The Boondocks and Dave Chappelle to come back right now. Because just this week, another man says he wants the other man’s nuts rubbed on his nipples? Come on, yo. You’re not going to sit here and tell me that’s not comedy.
I can’t act like it’s one emotion. It’s easy to say, “Oh, man, fuck him. He’s a piece of shit,” blah, blah, blah, this and that. Yeah, he might be all of those things, but guess what? He also was somebody that every single time we was out in the party, he got the party started. He was a person that all of y’all was running around saying you was the Diddy of your city. Don’t act like you weren’t, now, OK? I see you changing your Instagram names and all of that, but at one point that was your guy. So that shit, it just sucks to watch.
And it ain’t just him. There’s plenty of people you watch crash and burn. That’s why I see certain brothers, man, certain sisters that have been around a long time, and I literally give them a pound and I compliment them because I say to them, I say, “Man, your plane has landed and the wheels came out.” Everybody always talks about the ascension and being up in the air, but when you land, you got to make sure your wheels come out. There’s a lot of people landing whose wheels ain’t coming out, and they’re crashing and burning.
What do you make of the narrative that there’s an effort to take down prominent Black men?
Listen, that is a narrative that is rooted in truth. We can’t act like that has not happened throughout the history of Black people’s existence in this country. We’ve seen that, whether it’s the Nation of Islam, whether it’s the Black Panther Party, whether it is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But think about those people I named and what they were doing. A lot of you entertainers just got bad fucking habits. Cut it out. Ain’t nobody trying to take y’all down. When people say it’s a shakedown, sure, but don’t give them nothing to shake. Make better choices. It’s really just that simple. At some point you got to have accountability and stop pointing fingers and blaming everything on the system or the white man. We’ll name all of those people in the entertainment space, in the sports space, and then try to lump them in with people who actually were really changing the world. Yeah, have we seen this system take down Black people before? Of course, that’s what Cointelpro was, all of that. That’s what J. Edgar Hoover specialized in, absolutely. But a lot of these entertainers, they’re just making poor choices.
“Cancel culture has been canceled. Say what you say. If it’s right, it’s right. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”
I’m thinking of the time Joe Biden came on the show during the 2020 presidential race and said, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, you ain’t Black.” Have there been moments where a white person is maybe taking liberties with the fact that they’re speaking to a Black audience on the show?
Do you know why Joe Biden’s “you ain’t Black” moment never bothered me? My reaction in that moment was my real reaction. This ain’t about who’s Black, it’s about trying to get something for my people. That’s how he really felt, and that’s because he had a bunch of Black people around him who used to say that. And I’m not making no excuses for him, because I’m not nobody fan, but that was just a bad granddad joke. And shit, was he wrong? All he’s essentially saying is, “Yo, if you vote for this person, you’re voting against your own interest.” And it’s interesting, because 2020, he won. People didn’t feel like that. Now, [Trump is] back in the White House, and you see a lot of his own supporters, the Candace Owenses of the world, the Ben Shapiros of the world, you see them saying, “What the hell is going on?” Candace Owens is calling Trump out, saying, “You can’t do that in regards to freedom of speech.” Saying, “I don’t like what he’s doing with DOGE.” You got Dave Portnoy trying to figure out what’s going on with his stocks, the economy’s messed up. You got Shapiro calling him out about taking the jet from [Qatar]. You can’t do that. So it’s like, was Biden wrong when he told Black people, “You voting against your own interest”? [Trump] told you he was going to do all of those things. So if you voted for that, you voted against your own interest.
People have lumped you in with the comedian Andrew Schultz, your co-host on the podcast Brilliant Idiots. Kendrick Lamar seemed to take a shot at him for a joke about Black women that he made on a different show, and the internet brought your name into it. What do you make of the critique that you were allowing this white man to speak too freely?
Everybody is allowed to have their opinion. Andrew Schultz is a grown man, I don’t “allow” him to do anything. He does what he wants to do. I don’t even know what my reaction would’ve been if I heard him say that [on our show]. Probably it wouldn’t have been nothing, because the reality is, that is somebody I actually know. We’ve been doing Brilliant Idiots for 12 years, and we’ve been friends longer than that. I know his mom, I know his dad. He knows my family. He was at my wedding; I was at his wedding. How are you going to tell me who he is? You don’t even know him, you know a clip. If that was your introduction to Andrew, that probably wasn’t the best introduction. But if you know Andrew, his die-hard fans that travel with him all around the world, selling out these arenas, that sold out the Garden — twice — they know his style of comedy. And listen, sometimes you shoot, sometimes you miss. But a comedian has the right to be a comedian. People have the right to free speech. But we know speech ain’t free. There’s a price that comes out of your mouth. And the reason I rock with Andrew is because he’s willing to deal with the consequences of the things that come out of his mouth.
Do you go back and watch your old interviews a lot, or do you stay away from the past?
Sometimes you’ll just see clips. And like I said, I’m 46, so I’m like, “What the fuck was I talking about?” So I got to go back and watch the whole interview for context. I do that a lot. Or when somebody passes, I go back and I watch the interview just to see if they were immortalized the right way.
That’s why every time you sit down and you talk to somebody, man, you got to make sure you really having that real conversation. Because regardless of whether we know when we’re leaving this Earth or not, these conversations we’re having with these individuals are going to be immortalized. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that. We’re on a lot of documentaries, Breakfast Club. People reach out to us all the time to license content, because we’ve been around that long. Look on the wall in the studio: Charlie Murphy not here no more. Prodigy not here no more. Mac Miller not here no more. Nipsey Hussle. Dick Gregory. Angie Stone. That’s actually the last time I did that — I went to watch Angie’s last conversation with us. One big theme of that interview was her talking about wanting to do a biopic, because a lot of people don’t know the history. Angie was in a rap group. I think that might’ve been hip-hop’s first female rap group, literally.
Recently, I’ve talked to a lot of Twitch streamers like Kai Cenat. I’ve come to realize how similar that world is to radio. What do you think of the new generation of commentators online?
I love those guys. I was just thinking about this the other day.I love streaming more than any of the new-media platforms that I’ve seen over the last 15 years, including podcasting. It’s the closest thing to what I do on the radio every day, because these guys are going live. Wendy Williams could go live by herself for four hours straight and be super entertaining, her and the callers. And that’s what these streamers are doing. Kai can go live for hours and be sitting there with his chat, keeping them engaged, doing an interview, talking about some music, whatever it is. Kai, DJ Akademiks. The dude Reggie [Twitch streamer girlhefunny1x]. That dude is hilarious to me. I just like his energy. And the other beautiful thing about guys like Kai and Reggie is, man, you watch them and you’re like, “Yo, y’all can do whatever y’all choose to do.” They’re just using streaming as the platform that gets their name out there and people start to know them. But you can take Reggie and Kai and put them on radio. You can put them on TV, in movies. If they wanted to do a podcast, they could. They can do whatever.
Do you feel like there’s still something special about the terrestrial-radio audience?
It’s the most unique media platform still around, because everybody’s commuting in the morning. People have this silly notion that radio is dead. It’s like, go look at the numbers. The same percentage of people in America who used to listen to the radio in the Eighties, Nineties is the same percentage of people who listen to the radio now. It’s like 90-something percent of people. Why? Because radios are still in cars, and people are waking up every morning all around the country and turning on this free entertainment. Now they got the apps, they got whatever app they’re listening to, and they’re listening to it on their commute. So, radio has gone nowhere.
You have four daughters. As they grow up and start watching whatever is out there, whether it’s YouTube, podcasts, or something else, do you pay attention to the content they consume?
Absolutely, a hundred percent. My oldest daughter, she’ll be 17 this year. She talks to [my wife and me], so I ain’t tripping off that. It’s the nine-year-old and the six-year-old, the three-year-old that I’m more concerned about, because what they like to watch is YouTube. You got to pay attention to that, because I don’t know what this shit is. You know what I’m saying? So I got to watch it. Sometimes I’m like, “Yo, what the hell these people talking about?” Because my daughter really likes Minecraft, so she used to be watching these videos of people playing Minecraft. But sometimes it’ll be cut with something else. So it’s like, you got to pay attention to what they’re actually on. And it’s interesting to see who is having that intergenerational impact. My six-year-old knows who MrBeast is.
“I’m not looking for an amen corner. These are my thoughts. This is the way I’m feeling in this moment.”
When you started in the 1990s going into the 2000s, we hadn’t entered the nonstop news cycle. What was that like for you in those early years of social media, when you started to see that shift?
I remember me and Lil Duval met on MySpace because we were both writing for Ozone magazine. That’s how you got your name out there nationally; you had to write for a national magazine. So I was writing for Ozone at the time. I had a [column] called the Chin Check, and I think Duval’s was called What I’m Hating On or something like that. And Duval just hit me, like, “Yo, you funny as hell. I like what you be doing.” When YouTube and all that stuff started to come around, we started to utilize it. I was doing skits and sketches. And guess what? In my mind, I wasn’t thinking people all over the country are seeing this, or even people all over the world. In my mind, I’m still just doing this for South Carolina.
Back then it was mixtapes, too. DJ Vlad used to have these mixtapes called Beef. And he literally was taking my interviews and putting them on his Beef mixtapes. So that’s how I was getting out there nationally. It was beautiful because it was very hyperlocal. I still treat it that way. When I wake up in the morning and I get on the air, even though I know Breakfast Club is in 100-plus markets, I’m not treating it like I’m talking to tens of millions of people. I’m treating it like I’m talking to really just who’s in the room, honestly. I don’t have a target audience in my mind, and I think that’s a good thing.
I feel like, back then being a hater was a little bit easier because you weren’t quite broadcasting it to the whole world like today.
It’s not like people didn’t see those things, it was just probably a little bit harder for them to reach you. You could only get touched if you was around a person. Or a person couldn’t just “at” you on social media. If a person had a problem with you, you didn’t know until it was too late. Like, “Oh, we in the same place. The same vicinity. What’s happening now?” Now, you do know when somebody got an issue with you because they said something about you on social media, on some platform. Back then, it definitely wasn’t like that.
Has that changed your approach at all? Do you feel like you operate the same way today?
Nah, I’m not the same person. Shit, when I started radio, I was 19. So you’re talking about a teenager, a guy in his twenties. I’m 46 now. My mind state was totally different, I wasn’t thinking about nothing back then. It was just shits and giggles, it was fun. It was, “I’m going to say what I want to say because I want to say it.” I still feel like I operate in that space — I’m 46 years old, and I say what I want to say now. If what I wanted to say was the same at 46 as I was at 20, man, that’s a big problem. Muhammad Ali said, “The person who thinks the same at 50 the way they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.”
You don’t self-censor out of concern for so-called cancel culture?
Cancel culture has been canceled. People have the right to be outraged. People have the right to disagree; all of that is fine. The reason I say that I still approach things from a hyperlocal perspective is because I can tell when somebody is approaching the microphone and they’re concerned about what the people listening are going to say. What the people who are home on social media are going to say. When the reality is, people are going to disagree with you. I’m not looking for an amen corner, these are my thoughts. This is the way I’m feeling in this moment, and I reserve the right to change my mind.
I might say something one day and get more information and be like, “Yeah, I wasn’t correct yesterday. That’s how I felt yesterday, but this is how I feel today.” There’s nothing wrong with that. People nowadays like to say things and then just either stick to it because of pride, because of ego, or let it go just because they scared of the mob. You can’t trust folks like that. Say what you say. If it’s right, it’s right. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. If that person changes their mind, they have the right to do that as well, but at least that person is being honest.
Do you think that plays into the election results? Trump speaks to people’s raw emotions, versus Democrats, who tend to be a bit more polished. From your perspective, what have you seen since the election that gives you the sense that cancel culture has been canceled?
Well, I’ve been saying that forever as far as Trump is concerned. In my last book, Get Honest About Lying, I got a whole chapter called “The Language of Politics Is Dead,” and it’s because Donald Trump killed it. I grew up on this fantastic movie called Bulworth, which I think everybody should watch. It stars Warren Beatty and Halle Berry and Don Cheadle. And Bulworth is a guy who was a senator in California who ends up running for president because he actually wants to kill himself. And he hired somebody to kill him. And so he’s sitting around, he falls in love with Halle Berry, so he starts hanging out in the hood. So he’s listening to Don Cheadle, who’s the head of a gang, talk about all of the sociological conditions that are causing people in the hood to act the way that they’re acting.
And so Bulworth starts to repeat this stuff, because it’s the truth, right? So the thing about the truth is, you can’t run from it. The truth will impact you in some way, shape, or form. So he just goes out there, and he just starts telling the truth. And I’ve always said, “Man, that will work. That will work.” This movie came out in the Nineties. I was a kid watching that, saying that would work in our society if a politician did that, because that works anywhere. There’s never a time where honesty and authenticity don’t work. Our whole lives, we’ve sat back and watched politicians and know they’re bullshitting us. Whenever you saw a politician actually telling us the truth, whether it was on a local level or a national level, it cut through. Now, was Donald Trump telling the truth? No, not about everything. But he gave off more of an authentic energy than anybody we’ve seen in a long time.
I always said Republicans are more sincere about their lies. Trump is more sincere about his lies than any Democrat in the modern area is about their truth. He’ll get up there and tell you a bald-faced lie with the utmost confidence. I don’t even think he believes he’s lying. I think he really believes the things that are coming out of his mouth in whatever moment he’s saying it. That’s why it comes off as authentic. Meanwhile, a Democrat can be up there trying to tell you the truth, and they stuttering and they stammering and they looking down and they barely want to even talk about whatever the real issue is that they actually probably have a solution for or are passing legislation for.
“We know speech ain’t free. There’s a price to what comes out of your mouth.”
Can you cite an example of that?
Recently, Donald Trump signed an executive order to lower the price of prescription drugs. And he did a speech where he was talking about his “fat friend” who called him and said, “Hey, I’ve been taking such and such.” And he told his friend it’s not working and blah, blah. It’s like, yo, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris signed the actual piece of legislation that capped the price of the insulin at $35. I got family members who were super happy about that. But Trump was able to message a simple executive order. It was funny, and it got so much press. And now you see people like, “Yeah, Trump’s lowering the price of prescription drugs.” Biden and Harris actually passed legislation that did that, and they weren’t able to make the noise Trump did. That’s because Donald Trump hit you with storytelling. He told you a story. It was funny, it stuck. Democrats don’t do anything that sticks.
What would you ask Trump if you had the opportunity?
I would have to think about it. Especially during the campaign, I had a strategy of how I want to interview Trump. And I’m not even going to say it, because I don’t want nobody to steal my idea. But honestly, it don’t even matter now, because he’s the president. The only thing we should be telling our fellow Americans right now is that when you are the president of the United States of America, it is your job to uphold the Constitution. Simple and plain.
And I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, I don’t care if you’re Republican. I don’t care if you’re Black, I don’t care if you’re white. I don’t care if you’re gay, I don’t care if you’re straight. I don’t care if you’re rich, I don’t care if you’re poor. If you’re an American, you should want the leader of your country to always uphold the Constitution. So when you hear the leader of the free world saying things like he doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution, or taking $400 million jets from foreign countries … These are clear-cut things in the Constitution that he shouldn’t be doing. So you as an American have to point out the fact that what he’s doing is unconstitutional. That’s what we should care about in this moment.
How do you reconcile the fact that, given the length of your career, there are so many versions of you floating around out there?
I don’t. To me, I look at it like a rapper probably looks at it. Jay-Z probably sits back and looks at 4:44 as a moment in time. But then he looks at Hard Knock Life as a moment in time. He looks at Reasonable Doubt as a moment in time. And I’ve had conversations with people like Malcolm Gladwell — I remember Malcolm Gladwell broke my heart one time. I can’t remember what book it was, but he was like, “I don’t even believe most of what I wrote in this book anymore.” And I’m like, “What?” But when he broke it down, it made sense. “That’s where I was then. This new work that I’m writing is where I am now.” And that’s just life. I thank God that I got that type of catalog.