Mick Jenkins • Coming Home (Tour Diary)

Mick Jenkins recently closed out his first headlining tour alongside producer stwo and THEMpeople member theMIND. The group traveled around the country and played for sold out shows from coast to coast. Shooter Bryan Allen Lamb covered the whole tour in a series of five HD videos, from the summer into Lollapalooza into the fall and now to the final piece, Coming Home.

We see Mick jumping into the crowd when the bass knocks on “Gang”, his collaborative track with Hurt Everybody. We see water being thrown into the audience as fans go wild. After watching this video, it's undeniable that Mr. Jenkins has found his stage persona, a far different man that the relaxed wordsmith who was speaking while calmly bouncing at Chicago's Reggie's Rock Club a little over a year ago.

Mick Jenkins is slowly evolving and spreading his truths. At one point in the video, he says, “How many people know all the words and completely miss the point? Tour is a place that has shown me how many people don't get it.” Rarely have I seen an artist tour the country with this kind of conscientious awareness.

While a tour video of Mick Jenkins might be worthy of a These Days write-up, the main focus is “coming home”, as he closed out his U.S. tour by performing at Chicago's The Metro. At the very end of the four-minute video, Jenkins performs “Martys” to a packed Windy City crowd, and it's impossible not to think how far he has come since this song made its way onto Worldstar. Since January of 2014, Jenkins has done nothing but soar, and it all seemed to have snowballed because of “Martyrs”, a song that feels like it was released an eternity ago. Two projects and plenty of features later and Mick Jenkins is becoming a household name, not only in Chicago, but across the country (and even overseas, as his team is currently touring in Europe).