Freeload: Mickey Factz, Heav’n's Fallout

January 09, 2008

Pretty soon Mickey Factz will literally be able to bury us in mp3s. Here's another free mixtape from him, featuring a Prodigy (not of Mobb Deep) sampling "Smack My Bitch Up," among a bunch of other tracks that sound like they are from the future world of 1988. After the jump, check Stacey Dugan's Gen F from F51 where Factz admits that he went to high school with Drag-on (What's good Drag-on?)

Download: Mickey Factz, Heaven's Fallout



Bronx Science

Mickey Factz grabs your attention

By Stacey Dugan

Adlai E Stevenson is a public high school in the southeastern part of the Bronx. It’s where Afrika Bambaata went, and where he started his first group, the Bronx River Organization. The school’s recent contributions to hip-hop’s legacy are more modest; they include Ruff Ryder member Drag-on and Terror Squad alumni Remy Martin. “They both went on and did their own separate thing when the time came,” says Mickey Factz, a Stevenson alum with a fluorescent flow who spent some of his younger years rapping with the two. “My grind is a little slower,” he adds. “It’s taking a little longer, but I’m out for the longevity.”


Twenty-two-year-old Factz sees himself as a temporarily independent artist—remaining on the fringes of the mainstream until the right major label offers him the right deal. Before that happens, he’ll continue his current hustle: YouTube shorts where he gives his $300 sneakers to a homeless man, tireless MySpace promotion and a series of themed mixtapes he posts for free download if you hand over your email address. On Searching For the NERD he rapped over instrumentals from the Neptunes’ band and Flashback found him taking on hip-hop classics from the ’88-’95 era, but for his latest, Heaven’s Fallout, Factz claims his own sound—incorporating electro, house and techno rhythms and samples the same way Spank Rock folds in Baltimore club or Kid Sister uses Chicago juke. “Hip-hop seems to change every five years,” says Factz. “Now I wanna be at the forefront of this electric sounding music.”


Factz rarely speeds up his crisp lyrical cadence to match an aerobic tempo, instead he finds his stride in the breaks between epileptical beats. The rhythm on “Talk Yo Ish”—built from a sample of Uffie’s “Hot Chick”—stutters like a CD stuck on a scratch, but he makes the track swagger, turning sound into onomatopoeia and bragging, A Sidekick 4?/ Yeah, I got one straight from Taiwan/ And I got Marty McFly kicks on.


Factz’s hunger for fame led him away from his career as a paralegal a year ago, though he says he’ll likely return to law school after giving the rap game a shot. Besides, his current wardrobe of gold sneakers and space aviator sunglasses is a better fit for how he wants to present himself to the planet. “I was always somebody who didn’t want to be like everyone else,” says Factz. “I need to be looked at. Gawked at.”

Freeload: Mickey Factz, Heav’n's Fallout