Deep Dive: Lil The Mxrtian

"I don't need to be like the Grammy winner...I want to be (one) of course, but as long as I'm remembered...being never confined to a box and always being (my) own person. Yeah, I think that'd be good enough for me."

Philly-native Lil The Mxrtian may only be a young 19, but he got his start with music at a very young age.

Khalil developed his knack for rapping and songwriting when he discovered how much he loved to remix existing songs.

The earliest song he can remember remixing was a song from the Disney original movie “Lemonade Mouth”. He explained the significance of this song in particular:

“I told my dad, I was like, ‘Dad, I wrote this whole song myself’ and it was a joke. I didn't think he was gonna take me seriously. So, I sung it to him and it was like the chorus of Lemonade Mouth just to mess with him.(...) The dude got pissed that he found out it was someone else's song. (...) That was like my first introduction in songwriting. (...) If you claim something is yours, be 100% about it.”

Ever since then, Lil The Mxrtian would change pace and begin writing his own music, taking on after his dad’s spirit of being authentically yourself and unlike anyone else. From age nine to now, Khalil has been sticking to just that: being like none other.

Being like none other is, in many ways, what led Khalil to even calling himself Lil The Mxrtian. The artist explained how it all began with his dad trying to help him launch his career by taking rap seriously. Khalil explained how Philly is full of “the hardest critics”, so the importance of developing “star power” and your own lyricism to stand out is of the utmost importance.

Knowing this, his dad introduced Khalil to underground rap artists known for their lyricism: Nas, Notorious B.I.G.,Capital Steez, and many others. Joey Bada$$, however, would be the inspiration behind the name Lil The Mxrtian.

The young rapper and songwriter explains how Joey Bada$$ ultimately led him to picking his alias:

“So I was listening to Joey Bada$$, and I heard (his song) Survival Tactics. His first line was, ‘Niggas, don't want war with a Martian with an army of Spartans spar with a knife and a missile fight’ and I love that line.”

He went on to explain why the name Lil The Mxrtian holds so much significance to him:

“Lil The Mxrtian is kind of me paying homage to my dad while at the same time paying homage that really got me wanting to rap and really had me like, ‘alright, I want to do this’.”

Khalil also explained how the word martian in and of itself is something he closely related to growing up; to him, being Lil The Mxrtian meant feeling like an alien in various ways. He felt as though as rap went from “street bravado” to a more “cash money” and adlibs sound, he could feel himself clinging to a Joey Bada$$ style that didn’t perfectly fit into either category.

By all means, Khalil does not claim to feel martian-like in the sense that he is above everyone; rather, he claims the martian-like experience in the sense that loneliness was a normal experience growing up:

“‘Nobody would understand me because everybody's afraid of me’: That's how I felt as a kid; nobody understood me. I had just multiple problems as a kid. (I) was angry. I was always sad. (...) There was always a sadness about me that followed me around a lot as a kid. So that martian part (of my alias) is more of like the melancholy representation of who I am.”

In true nature of an alien, Lil The Mxrtian felt that the easiest way for him to communicate was through a language he constructed on his own: through his music. The artist detailed how music helped him not only communicate with his peers, but also with his father. This medium of music would serve to strengthen the relationship Khalil has with his father now. Pulling up a new Nas track or comparing artists to each other, Khalil explained, would rekindle a bond between he and his dad.

To Lil The Mxrtian, refraining from stepping outside the box of music would be selling himself short. When I asked the musician where he saw himself taking his music, he quickly noted that music was going to be just the tip of the iceberg:

“I wanna do it all. I want to do fashion, I want to be an actor. I want to be a model; I want to drop an album and then the next day be flying to Paris (to) model on a runway for Gucci. (...) I want to be the artist who the kids look back at and they're like, ‘that's my favorite artist’. Where some will say ‘he's my favorite artist, because he never stayed in a box’; ‘Yeah, he does all this stuff, but like, he never stayed in a box. He was never confined to one length’”.

Would it be cool for Lil The Mxrtian to win a Grammy? He responded with an “of course”. However, what is most important to him, above all else, is to never be forgotten, and to never be “confined to a box”.

Lil The Mxrtian has an array of music in the works. He is a part of a musical collective called Worst Generation. He described their sound as being well-rounded and not defined by one genre. The artist himself is working on an album which will be titled The Stoic, where he feels that his listeners will be able to really connect and resonate with the songs.