Charlamagne tha God
speaker
811 appearances
15 recordings
7 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 21 Jun
Charlamagne tha God’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Like, you know, I'm one of those people that actually believed my grandma and my mom when they told me God was always watching, you know, even though I didn't always make the right decisions, I still... strive to move like God was always watching because God is within. I am an extension of my creator.
Man, number one, whatever you're doing that's negative, you can't escape from it. There's a million, tens of millions of people who have done the exact same thing that you're currently doing. And you know how that movie is going to end. And it's going to end the same way for you if you continue down that path. And what I would tell folks is you don't have to know what it is you want to do.
You just know that you want to do something. So why not put positive energy into whatever it is you're trying to do or just put positive energy into your life, period. Like, you know, an acronym that I love is a positive energy activates constant elevation.
Yeah. Positive energy activates constant elevation. Right. So for me, it was I know that if I constantly keep doing this, like my dad said, I may end up in jail, dead or broke, sitting under the tree. And when you start seeing that actually happen, whether it's to you or other people around you. If you continue down that path, once again, you made the choice. You got to deal with it.
But for me, I decided to say, yo, I'm going to do whatever I got to do to not do this. So I worked at I worked at Taco Bell. I worked at a clothing store in the mall called Demo. I did telemarketing. I was the guy that would call your house and try to sell you 20 CDs for a penny. Like I did. I did so many. I did so many fucking odd jobs like just just to avoid being in the street.
Absolutely.
The first time I got arrested, I was sitting in the backseat of a car and one of my homeboys shot at somebody. So, you know, we all ended up going to jail. Literally, they came and got me out of high school. The second high school I had went to because I got kicked out of the first high school. And my mom was teaching at this high school, Scratford High School.
And they thought I would behave more because my mom was there. So I ended up getting caught up in that situation. I think I did 45 days in the county jail. My dad ultimately ended up bailing me out. And I tried to be on the straight and narrow a little bit. But to your point, the allure of the streets, right? Like, you know, a lot of the people that I was hanging around and being with, they were...
In the streets, heavy. So I was like.
It's what's around you.
Absolutely. And so it goes from acting up in school to now all of us are getting a little bit older, but we're getting introduced to things like the drug game. And I'm watching people make a little bit of money. So I want to make a little bit of money, too. And I remember I was involved in a drug bust. You know, the house that we used to sell dope out of got busted.
And I was like, is it for me? Like, literally, I'm going to figure out my life in a real way. I am going to. Because another thing that I always thought about when my dad would tell me that people end up in jail, dead or broke, sitting under the tree. I had a lot of people that I used to look up to who didn't make the best choices. And I saw that happening to them.
Something just started clicking to me like, yo, there's no redo on this thing called life. Like this day that you're living right now, you're never getting back. So you're going to have to start making changes in your life right now to get to where it is that you need to be. Because, you know, one day you're going to wake up and you're going to be 30. And Biggie Smalls had this great lyric.
Biggie Smalls said, being broke at 30, give a brother the chills. And that's where my mind was at. And I was still broke at 30, but... I was on my way. I was on my way because I was already in the radio business at that point.
You said a lot of things that, you know, just make me really think about that journey, right? Like you used the word just now, you said discouragement, right?
I had a lot of encouragement early on, even though my dad wasn't always doing the right things. And even though he was hard on me, he was always encouraging me to do the right thing. Same thing with my mom. She was an English teacher, always encouraging me to do the right thing. So even when I was getting in trouble, I knew that what I was doing wasn't what I was supposed to be doing.
To answer the question, the positive energy that activates constant elevation. I used to want to rap like most people who come from communities like I come from. When you're Black and you're growing up in a certain environment, the people you see who look like you are usually in entertainment or athletics. I'm only 5'6", so there wasn't going to be no NBA for me, right? You could be a jockey.
Maybe. But I was always my grades was always so bad I could never play football. And so for me, I always wanted to rap because I used to always love storytelling, always love storytelling. You know, my mom, my mom was an English teacher. I grew up on the Booker program reading four books a week, you know, to get a free pizza.
You know, my mom would always tell me to read things that don't necessarily pertain to me. So I grew up reading Mad Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. So I was always in love with storytelling. So I'm in a recording studio. Right. Because if you want to be a rapper, you've got to be where people are rapping. So I was in this recording studio, two of them, actually. One of them was called TNT Studios.
Another was called Never So Deep Records. And the guy who owned Never So Deep Records is a great mentor to me to this day named Dr. Robert Evans. But at the studio, I met a radio personality named Willie Will. And he worked at Z93 Jams in Charleston, South Carolina. And I'm a curious person. If I see you doing something positive or doing something that looks cool, I'm going to ask you.
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