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

Let me start by saying this entire post exists because some guy heard one of our songs on Spotify shuffle, decided it was cringe, and thought the correct move was to DM me about it. Told me it was "cap rapping at its finest." Said I was giving him Dax vibes. Called us fake.

I want to be clear about something: I'm not writing this because that hurt. I'm writing this because that's a stupid idea and it keeps coming up and I'm done explaining it individually to people who don't deserve the individual explanation. This is the last time I'm going to break this down. After this I'm just sending people a link.

• The Lazy Version of "Fake"
• Receipts and Context
• Authenticity Is Not Literalism
• Built as Oddballs
• Truth-First as a Standard
• What Comes Next

The Lazy Version of "Fake"

I grew up in North Platte, Nebraska. If you don't know what that means, it means I grew up in a place where there was essentially no diversity, no scene, no infrastructure for any of what I eventually wanted to build, and no particular reason to believe any of it was possible. My dad used drugs. My parents split. I stole a car at fifteen and did probation for it. There was nothing romantic about any of it. It was just life being difficult in the specific way that small town life is difficult, which is quietly and without any of the drama that would at least make it interesting.

I downloaded a hacked version of Cakewalk in 2001 on my wife's computer and started making beats. Burned them to CDs and tested them in my car. That's where this started. Not in a studio. Not with a mentor. Not with any kind of support system telling me this was a reasonable thing to pursue. Just a computer, a car stereo, and the specific kind of stubbornness that comes from having nothing to lose.

My brother Anthony was eleven years younger than me. I have a memory of him as an infant, maybe a year old, sitting on my lap watching A Christmas Story. He peed through his diaper onto me. That's my earliest memory of him. We were not close the way brothers close in age are close. The gap was too wide for that when we were kids. But music closed it. When he was a teenager he was a graffiti artist, leaving his tag - Jinx - all over North Platte. When he moved to Lincoln in 2013, he was just trying to get somewhere better than where he was. The music came. That's when everything got real between us.

In 2018 he played me a demo of a song called "End." It was for an album that would eventually become Black. I heard it and I knew immediately that no outside label was going to know what to do with it. Not because it was bad. Because it was too specific, too dark, too honest about things the industry packages differently. The only way this was getting out into the world the right way was if we did everything ourselves. So I went back to school, legitimized the engineering work I'd been doing since 2002, and we built Killing Field Records into an LLC in 2019. Two brothers from North Platte. No connections. No map. No scene waiting for us.

We officially named The Fields recording studio on February 2nd, 2023. Before that we were recording in my apartment in the Bishop Heights area of Lincoln, vocal booth in the master bedroom walk-in closet, blankets on the walls, long XLR cable running from the living room into the closet. That's where the Book of Colors trilogy got made. That's where Anthony became Jinx became Sollomon became Anthony again across three albums - Black, Sanguine, and Gold - that I will put against anything in this genre for emotional honesty and structural intention.

That's what we built. From a hacked copy of Cakewalk on a borrowed computer to a label with a roster, a real studio, a real catalog, and a real presence in the Nebraska underground. And some guy on Spotify shuffle wants to tell me it's fake.

Receipts, Since Apparently We Need Them

Here's what's actually fake: the idea that authenticity means literal.

Anthony wrote the Book of Colors in 2016. He was homeless. His parents were divorcing. He and my dad were getting into it bad enough that it almost got physical more than once. I was working maximum security corrections at the time, and I ended up inside a riot, and I came out of that with PTSD that I'm still carrying. Neither of us was doing okay. Not even close.

He started writing in 2015. Whatever was building inside him before that - and something clearly was - I can't tell you exactly when it started taking shape in his head. But by 2015 it was coming out on paper, and what came out eventually became three albums worth of material. Then we built characters to carry it. Jinx is the depressed version of him. Sollomon is the furious one. Anthony is the manic one who thinks he has everything figured out. The Book of Colors is one connected story moving through all three albums - Black, Sanguine, and Gold. It is the most precise map of his actual inner world that exists. Every dark corner, every ugly thought, every moment where he was genuinely not sure he was going to be okay. It's in there. He put it in there on purpose. He spent years making sure it was in there correctly, sometimes forty-five takes on two bars because he needed it to be exactly right.

That is not fake. That is the most honest thing I've ever witnessed another person do.

The character is how you aim the truth. Not how you hide it. Real life doesn't have clean arcs. It's repetitive and awkward and it doesn't resolve the way a song resolves. A character lets you take the actual weight of something and shape it so that somebody else can feel it instead of just hear it. That's craft. That's the job.

If you understand professional wrestling you understand this. The bumps are real. The blood is real. The years those performers put on their bodies are real. Nobody calls Mick Foley fake because he wasn't literally insane. The character is the vehicle. The damage inside it is not performance. Same thing here. We are not writing police reports. We are making music that is supposed to hit like a brick, and it hits like a brick because it is made out of real things, real damage, real hunger, real loss. The story gets shaped so it lands. That is not dishonesty. That is the entire point of having a craft.

Now let me tell you about being the oddballs, because that's the other part of this that people miss.

Lincoln's hip-hop scene has always been cliquey. Tight circles, cold shoulders, the kind of environment where if you didn't come up inside a specific group you were starting behind and everyone wanted you to know it. We came in from North Platte, which might as well be a foreign country as far as the Lincoln scene was concerned, doing something that didn't fit any of the boxes that already existed. Too dark for some rooms. Too strange for others. Not connected to the right people, not running in the right circles, not doing the kind of rap that got you invited into the existing infrastructure.

We were the oddballs. Everybody in the scene knew it and nobody was subtle about it.

Omaha wasn't warmer. Different city, same math. You either fit or you carved your own lane and accepted that the lane was going to be empty for a while and you were going to have to build the audience from scratch while watching people with better connections and worse music get opportunities you weren't getting. We carved. We stayed in it. Not out of stubbornness for its own sake but because there was genuinely no other version of this we could make. We couldn't make different music. This was the music.

The first show this label ever played was October 29th, 2022 at 1867 Bar in Lincoln. enemyX. We've played the Bourbon Theatre, the Reverb Lounge, the Waiting Room, we've opened for Twiztid and King Iso, we've played out of state. We built every single one of those opportunities from nothing, in a scene that was not waiting for us, doing exactly the kind of music that the guy in my DMs called fake.

Truth-first as a value is not complicated.

Truth-first as a value is not complicated. It means the core is real even when the presentation is theatrical. It means we're not wearing pain as a costume. It means we're not rewriting the story to make ourselves the heroes when we were the problem. It means when Anthony rapped about darkness it was because he actually lived inside it, not because dark was trending. It means I'm not going to clean up the parts that don't look good because that's the deal we made when we called this truth-first. You get the wins and you get the ugly parts and you get the lessons that came from doing things wrong and figuring it out anyway.

There is a line between performance and fraud. We are not manufacturing fake confessions for sympathy. We are not pretending fiction is autobiography to manipulate people into caring. That's corny and it makes audiences numb and it makes artists small. We don't do that. The character is the vehicle. The emotion inside it is the truth. If you can't hold both of those things at once you don't actually want honesty. You want gossip and you want it simple and you want to feel smart for catching something that isn't there.

The audio is pristine because I work to make it pristine. I mix and master everything on this label. I went back to school to learn how to do this correctly and I have been obsessing over it for years. I want the vocals to punch. I want the low end to sit right. I want it to translate on every speaker in every room. But the feelings inside it stay ugly. That's the whole architecture. Pristine audio, ugly emotions. Don't fake the core. Everything else you can obsess over.

Anthony's last show and what comes next.

Anthony performed for the last time on May 10th, 2025 at the Bourbon Theatre in Lincoln. It was the biggest crowd energy we'd ever had. People came out, showed love, and he was on stage doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing with his life. Two days later he was gone. Aneurysm. He was thirty years old.

He finished recording his last album on May 8th. Four days before he died. We had talked that week, like we'd talked before, about what to do if one of us didn't make it. His instructions were simple: finish it and release everything.

I'm finishing it. That album is called Shit Ain't What It Seems and it is coming. Everything else on this label is running. Sugar Cones are building. The Fields is open. Killing Field Records is not a memorial project and it is not shutting down and it is not softening anything to make it easier to swallow. Anthony wouldn't have wanted that and I don't want that.

We built this from a hacked copy of music software in a spare bedroom in North Platte. We built it through a scene that didn't want us, through a riot I'm still recovering from, through losing the person this whole thing was built around. It is still here. It is still exactly what it always was.