Truth-First, Even When We're Playing Characters (And No, That Doesn't Make It Fake)

People hear me say "truth-first music" and immediately assume I'm promising a documentary. Like every bar is a sworn statement. Like I'm supposed to hand you timestamps and a notarized affidavit with the hook. No.

Killing Field Records is truth-first, and we also play characters. All of us. And before somebody gets cute about that, let's be clear: performance does not cancel truth. It just means you do not understand how art works yet.

The Lazy Version of "Fake"

This post exists because somebody slid into my Instagram DMs a few weeks ago convinced our music was fake. He heard one song on Spotify shuffle, formed a whole opinion, and brought it to my inbox like he was doing me a favor.

He called it cringe. Said I was giving him Dax vibes. Said I was exaggerating and trying to be something I'm not. Then he got hung up on the character question. He had heard from somebody that we play characters, and in his head that meant the whole thing was made up. Cap. Costume. Fake. Whatever word he needed to use so he could feel like he caught something.

He caught nothing. He just did not understand what the character is for.

Receipts, Since Apparently We Need Them

Why This Hits a Nerve

I need to back up and explain something about this label before I go any further, because the persona conversation makes zero sense without the context.

Killing Field Records started in 2002 as a concept when I was nineteen years old. It became an LLC in 2019. The name came from learning about the Cambodian Killing Fields genocide. Two things hit me at once: never fully trust your government, and that name is terrifying in exactly the right way. That dual meaning has been there from day one.

My brother Anthony co-founded this with me. He was the backbone. Not in the sentimental obituary way people say that after someone dies. Literally. The catalog we built, the sound we developed, the reason any of this means anything to anybody at all, it runs through him.

The Book of Colors trilogy is the clearest map of his inner world that exists: Black in 2020, Sanguine in 2021, and Gold in 2022. He wrote those albums from 2015 to 2017 during one of the worst stretches of both our lives. Our parents were divorcing. Him and his fiance were going through a rough patch of homelessness. He and dad were having blowups that almost got physical. And I was working at a maximum security prison, where I got caught in the middle of a riot and other various traumatic experiences came out the other side with PTSD that took years to understand.

We were not doing okay. Either of us.

Anthony passed away on May 12, 2025. Aneurysm. He was thirty years old. Two days before he died he performed at the Bourbon Theatre in Lincoln in front of the biggest crowd energy we had ever had. Then two days later he was gone.

I'm finishing his last album right now. We recorded it together in 2024 and 2025. He finished recording on May 8. Four days before he died. We had already talked that week about what to do if one of us did not make it. His instructions were simple: finish it and release everything.

So when some random guy with a Spotify account slides into my DMs talking about "hella fake," I want you to understand the full fucking weight of what he's dismissing.

Jinx Was a Character. The Pain Was Not.

Anthony wrote three albums worth of material out of that 2 and half year stretch. And when it came time to record and release those songs, he gave those emotions characters to live inside. Jinx. Sollomon. Anthony. Different containers for different parts of the same person: the depressed version, the furious version, the manic version that thought it had everything figured out.

The darkness in those records was real. The pressure was real. The weight of what he was carrying was real. But no, not every bar happened exactly like that in the real world. Some of it is compressed. Some of it is sharpened. Some of it is uglier than the original moment because that is what it takes to make somebody else actually feel it instead of just hear it.

That is not a gimmick. That is architecture. That is a person taking the most painful period of his life and building something out of it that other people can actually find themselves inside of.

If you want the clean version of Anthony, go read a memorial. If you want the truest emotional map of him, go listen to the records.

Truth-First Does Not Mean Literal-First

Truth-first as a philosophy is not about literal accuracy. It is about the core being real even when the presentation is theatrical.

That means we are not wearing pain as a costume. It means we are not trend-hopping and calling it a personality. It means we are not pretending we were the hero in a story where we were the problem. It means when Anthony wrote about darkness, it was because he lived inside it, not because dark was trending.

I've worked at a maximum security prison. I've been in situations that most people making music about darkness have never even sniffed. And the most honest thing I can do with that experience is not recite it back to you like a police report. The most honest thing I can do is take the feeling of it, the actual weight of what it does to a person to live inside that environment day after day, and find a way to make you feel even a fraction of it.

That requires craft. That requires structure. Sometimes it requires a character. Sometimes it requires shaping the story so it lands.

That is the difference between a photograph and a painting. Both can be honest. One of them simply demands more from the person who made it.

Half the people claiming to be "100% real" are cosplaying trauma they borrowed from somebody else's life anyway. I'll take crafted honesty over performed authenticity every single time.

If You Understand Wrestling, You Already Understand This

Professional wrestling is performance. Characters, storylines, exaggeration, all of it. But the bumps are real. The blood is real. The years those guys put on their bodies are real. Nobody calls Mankind fake because he was not literally insane. The character is the vehicle. The damage inside it is real.

Same thing here. We are not writing police reports. We are making records that hit like a brick because they are built out of real emotions and real consequences. The story gets shaped so it lands. That is not dishonesty. That is craft.

This is what I told the guy in my DMs, and he answered with "gaaaaay," which was roughly the end of the intellectual portion of the conversation.

• The character is the vehicle.
• The emotion inside it is the truth.
• If you cannot work with that, you do not actually want truth. You want gossip.

We Built This as Outsiders

We have been doing this specific thing, in this specific way, in Lincoln, Nebraska, since long before "authentic" became a marketing word. And nobody rolled out a welcome mat.

The hip-hop scene here has always been cliquey. Tight circles. Cold shoulders. The kind of environment where if you did not come up inside a specific group, you were already behind. We came from North Platte, which might as well have been a different planet as far as the Lincoln scene was concerned, and we showed up making music that did not fit any of the existing boxes. Too dark for some rooms. Too weird for others. Not connected to the right people. We were the oddballs and everybody knew it.

Omaha was not much warmer at first. Different city, same math. Either you fit the existing culture or you carved your own lane and accepted that the lane was going to stay empty for a while. We carved. Not because we wanted to be difficult, but because there was no other version of this that was honest. We could not make different music. This was the music.

That is part of why the Nebraska angle in those DMs irritated me. People act like darkness has to come with a zip code they already recognize. Like pain is only believable if it happened in a city that already has mythology attached to it. Nebraska has cops, addiction, broken dreams, family collapse, isolation, violence, money problems, dead ends, and people walking around carrying things they are never going to say out loud. There is no shortage of truth here. There is just less branding around it.

Why This Blog Starts Now

Fair question: why am I writing this in 2026 when I built this section into the site years ago and then barely used it?

Because I wanted a place to put the real behind-the-scenes stuff. Not highlights. The actual work: running a label, running a studio, developing artists, keeping posthumous projects organized, dealing with tech problems, dealing with people problems, and building something out of nothing in a place that was skeptical of us from the start.

And then I just did not do it. "Coming soon" is a polite way of saying I got busy and did not follow through.

That changes now. Because if I am going to stand behind truth-first as a value, I cannot do that from a distance. I have to do it from inside the mess, same as everything else we make.

Anthony's last album is getting finished. Sugar Cones are building. BLXXDSHOT is in the mix. The label is still running, and it is running for real. Not as a side project. Not as a hobby. As the thing I built my life around alongside my brother, and the thing I intend to keep building in his name.