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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I just asked him, like, how did you get into radio? And he said, I got an internship. And I said, what do I got to do to get an internship? He said, go down to the radio station and ask for an internship. And I'm like, it's that easy? I said, I'm not in school or nothing. He was like, so? Mind you, this is 1998 Charleston, South Carolina. Things were totally different. And that's what I did.
I went down to the radio station. And I filled out my internship papers and I started as an intern. Like literally, I was the guy that would drive the radio station vehicle to the concerts or to the different remotes and help them, you know, set up their posters and things like that. And then that eventually turned into me getting a gig.
in the promotions department, which is just being a paid intern. So I was making, what, $5 an hour or something like that. And then I would always be in the studio with Willie Will. And Willie Will would bring me on the mic sometime. And, you know, we'd be talking.
And I remember one day, my man Ron White, who was the music director, still a good friend of mine to this day, he comes to me and he goes, yo, you ever thought about being on the radio? And I'm like, No, but I am now. And so he started putting me on Sunday mornings, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. And they used to do something called voice tracking where you would record your voice and they would air it.
And, you know, I was too much for Sunday mornings. So they started putting me on Saturday nights, 7 to 10 it was voice track, 10 to midnight it was live. And that's where the bug bit me. And I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Same way that when I was sitting in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, and, you know, my father would tell me if I don't change my lifestyle, I'm going to end up in jail, dead or broke, sitting under the tree. And, you know, watching people who I loved, who made poor choices, end up in those circumstances. It's the same thing now. I love hip hop. You know, I love being a hip hop radio personality.
But a lot of the hip hop radio personalities that I grew up admiring, there was a glass ceiling and they didn't realize it. And so they thought that they was growing, but they kept hitting their head, kept hitting their head, kept hitting their head. And I'm looking at them now and I'm like, oh, these people are washed. Like, I don't want that to be my life in the future.
And that was from a professional level. And just from a personal level, it's like, yo, my daughters know their daddy. They know their daddy is silly. They know their daddy is a very unserious person. But there's just some things that I don't want to have to explain. Because when I said these things, I was on drugs. I was drunk. I was wiling. I wasn't in the right mind space.
But what I have learned, Mel, is that you've got to love every version of yourself.
Because I'm 46 years old this year. I was born in 1978. So I'll be 47, right? I'll be 47 this year. I know 20 year old me did not know what 46 year old me knows. I know 15 year old me didn't know what 30 year old me knew. So it's just like, yo, you got to give yourself grace because you just did not know what it is that you know now.
So why would you ever beat yourself up for what you did not know? And like I said earlier, to me, life is just a process. I don't believe in good or bad. I just believe in everything is just one long process. And there's things that happen for you along the way. Not to you. There's things that happen for you along the way. And I accept it all. I accept the good with the bad.
And, you know, one thing one of my one of my therapists says to me is that, you know, you can't have any of your success without having any of your success. Right. So any problems that I had, you know, growing up, any problems that I had when I was young, that all led me to this point where I'm at now. And I go back and I think in my mind, I go hug the 8-year-old version of myself.
I hug the 16-year-old version of myself. I hug the 20-year-old version of myself. I have conversations with those other versions of myself all the time.
Can you believe we got, can you believe we're here? Can you believe we got it? Yo, man, I'm glad 25-year-old you decided to go this way. I'm glad 19-year-old you decided to get into radio. I'm glad, you know, you read all of those books when you're 8-year-old, you 9-year-old, you 10-year-old, you read all of those books when you was younger.
Like, you know, I know you and your pops had some issues, man, but he did give you the autobiography of Malcolm X when you was very, very young, and it taught you all about growth and evolution and, you know, knowing that somebody like Malcolm Little can become this great individual like Malcolm X and introduce you to, you know, the nation of Islam.
where they took the worst of us and made them the best of us. So, you know, you got to give every single version of yourself grace. Like Marty McFly didn't go back into the future and go back to the past and cursed his parents out. He tried to help his parents, help his parents get on the correct path. We have to do the same thing, you know, with ourselves.
You got to give every version of yourself that ever existed grace.
Not really, because I know that I know that we're we're a smart community. You know, like, you know, I grew up listening to Public Enemy. I grew up listening to Wu-Tang Clan. You know, I grew up listening to Scarface and Killer Mike and like all of those brothers, you know, always had things in their music of socially redeeming value. So I know I know who we are.
I just think that sometimes there's people in our community that got to have the courage to grow up. You know, I always say that the two greatest hip hop albums, well, the two most important hip hop albums in the future, people are going to look back and they're going to say Jay-Z, 444, and Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale, and the Big Stepper.
Because if you listen to the content of those records, Jay-Z's talking about the maturation of a man. He's talking about not cheating on his wife anymore. He's talking about issues with his father. He's talking about going to therapy on that album. I remember hearing that album on my third, it came out the day after my 39th born day. Like literally I was on a roof in New York,
Showing 261–280 of 811 · page 14 of 41
← Previous
Next →