“Ayo/ The mouchwa was crimson/ The interstate was 78, boy, the hoop-ride was  Lincoln/The moonpie was stinkin’/I’m thinkin’, pissin’ on turnpikes/ Word life, we lose by  submission/I keep the Uz by the kitchen…”

This is how he begins “I-78/Capillaries,” a shining moment from DJ Preseravtion’s 2020  Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, an album composed solely of far-afield samples  sourced while crate-digging in Hong Kong. The poetic lines are quintessential Mach Hommy: full-throttle, in medias res, sprinkled with Haitian kreyòl, street slang, using  better words instead of good ones, painting an image through minor details, internal  rhymes, continuing with adept schemes until he stops to make a shouted declaration to  other rappers: “Your shit is basic math!”

To say that there’s no rapper alive like Mach-Hommy is to be lazy with description. But  sometimes the simple is best. There is no rapper alive like Mach-Hommy.

In an age where rappers rely on easy releases, over-exposure, and cheap shots, Mach Hommy develops vivid portraits in darkrooms unknown. He collaborates with very few  other rappers and relies mostly on a trusted, rotating cast of beat-makers. He has only  granted a handful of interviews since properly coming on the music scene over a  decade ago. He has no social media presence. He keeps his government name  unknown. His face has rarely been seen. He is known by his trademark: A bandana of  the Haitian flag that covers his face. In an 8.8-scored review of his 2021 album, Pray for  Haiti, Pitchfork noted, “Mach reveals himself slowly, through allusion and immersion, an  image loading grainily.”

“People be thinking I should be available for a bunch of bullshit,” says Mach. “I don’t  know what people think artists do, but I ain’t from that ilk. I got a schedule; I keep my  schedule. Some of us can seem reclusive or antisocial, whatever people want to say— that’s more of the darker side of it. Maybe we’re just very busy. Maybe we have really  aggressive schedules. We have families and stuff like that.”

Despite this, because of this, Mach-Hommy has emerged as the most talked about and  revered rapper in circles where people who live for well-crafted, non-establishment hip hop gather. He’s been quoted or directly endorsed by not only Jay-Z and Drake but also  Kevin Durant. Keyboard detectives seek to find out anything they can about him, trading  favorite songs from his sprawling discography, which spans at least 30 releases, most  of which are unavailable through traditional avenues of resale or streaming. One poster  noted that one of Mach’s albums was “double platinum on Soulseek,” noting the  project’s popularity on the peer-to-peer filesharing network. A YouTube reviewer  declared that his 2017 project, The G.A.T. (The Gospel According To), which has been  described by many as “the best jazz-rap album ever,” is “worth every single virus you’re  about to subject your computer to trying to find it.” There are hours of YouTube videos  reviewing his projects and exploring his mystique, including a pair of comical montages  entitled “I Wonder What Mach-Hommy Is Doing Right Now,” which have clips of the  rapper rummaging through enormous bags of marijuana in a warehouse, raising cattle  on his farm, dancing outdoor while a band plays Haitian rara music, adeptly twinkling  the keys of a graffitied piano, recording music in Puerto Rico, and more. But, to listen to  the rapper himself: “We doin’ donuts in somebody A6/Don’t none of this shit belong in  Page Six.”

There are Reddit pages dedicated to deciphering his lyrics, which he doesn’t allow to be  posted on lyric sites like Genius.com. It doesn’t matter—a written breakdown of his rap  lines wouldn’t mean much. There are amazing one-liners like: “Your flow trash, plus you  psoas like the muscle,” “Been playin’ with the heat, long as Udonis Haslem,” and “Every  shell got a name: Donnie, Leo, Mikey, Ralph” (which leads into an extended metaphor  about hockey masks and cartoons). Still, reading can’t do much to convey the wizardry  of his high-octane flows that often switch speeds while zooming along with seemingly  stream-of-consciousness textures that are complex, esoteric, street, and mystical. He’s  a singular MC who rewards multiple listens and encourages puzzle-piecing while  sounding better and more confident than just about anyone else who has ever spit a  rhymed verse. In his vocals, one can find the intricate observations of De La Soul’s  Posdnuos, the abstractness of A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, the freeform melodicness of Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), the menace of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, the entirety of the Wu Tang Clan, and more. “He’s one of those ones,” the Roots’ Black Thought said of Mach  in an interview when asked about his favorite peers. “Just the sensibility of someone  who’s been around since the 90’s, but also feels still cutting edge… The way that he’s  distinctly different is huge, too.”

“Nggas got balled up just for being Haitian/ ’Til I let them caps fly without no graduation/  Kept waiting, in this age of instant gratification, the only real commodity to have is  patience”*

What can be shared about Mach-Hommy’s upbringing is that he’s a proud Haitian American who was raised in the crime-ridden Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark, New  Jersey, which is home to large numbers of immigrants—namely those of Haitian,  Guyanese, Jamaican, Nigerian, Liberian, and Ukrainian descent. As a youth, he  witnessed all manners of crimes. “I’ve seen people run down the street, jump on  someone’s car, jump down into the sunroof, kick the driver out, and get busy,” he  shares. He’s also witnessed his fair share of gunfights, including a shooting as he exited  a grocery store with his friend, sipping on a juice box. A few feet away from him, a man  ran up behind someone and let off a blast that laid his victim out on the floor. Afterward,  the assailant looked Mach and his friend in the eyes, tucked the hot gun in his waist,  and calmly walked away. “We were holding our little boxes of juice like, ‘Whoa—what  the fuck is that?’” he recalls. “I was just a baby at that time, and this wasn’t a movie.”

But there was also fun. Playing with firecrackers, attending talent shows, and worthy  out-of-school education. “I’m familiar with all of the holy books of all the major religions,”  he says. He doesn’t read as much as he used to, but, “By the time I was eight or nine  years old, I was reading the Qu’ran, the Pentateuch or the law of Moses, you know, the  Torah.” He also read many different versions of the Bible, including St. Jerome’s fourth century translations. “I had to study Latin, like, several different course levels of that.

I was raised Roman Catholic, so a lot of the mass and the singing was in Latin. I had an  organic road to having this type of understanding. I can speak any romance language  because I understand the root. I definitely can understand, if I’m not conversant,  because I can read and write so much. I had people in my family who spoke Spanish  fluently, so I was also exposed to that, as well.”

His family also provided him with a wealth of musical influences. His father is a folk  musician and a DJ who wrote a lot of music for Haitian konpa bands; his grandfather  patronized acts like Coupé Cloué, the pioneer of the raunchy konpa manba genre. His  grandmother’s brother participated in a large jazz orchestra. His mom’s little brother  introduced him to heavy metal and rock & roll. His aunt had him listening to classical  music and Jersey club. At home, he was surrounded by various Haitian forms of music  like zouk and méringue, the Domincan Republic’s bachata, Cuban salsa, Jamaican ska,  and more. “I’ve always been immersed in music,” he says. By the age of five he was  playing the piano, later learning to play guitar and trumpet. “My father always had  instruments around. Music is just in the family.”

Outside, Mach was strongly informed by the milieu of Jamaican music in his  neighborhood. The dancehall classics and lovers rock grooves played in outdoor  bashments or shared by his cousins from Flatbush, Brooklyn still pebble dash his  speech, music, and rhymes. He was also big on the pop songs of the 80’s and 90’s, yet  it was the growing hip-hop genre that would become his defining musical love. But only  after it got him in trouble at home. “The first time I can remember being reprimanded for  singing a song was LL Cool J’s ‘Around the Way Girl’,” he recalls. The fluid verve with  which he perfectly recites the song’s lyrics over 30 years later suggests that he didn’t  quite learn his lesson at the time. If parroting lyrics like “standing at the bus stop, suckin’  on a lollipop/ Once she gets pumpin’, it’s hard to make the hottie stop” didn’t teach him  to keep his mouth shut, sharing lines from Grand Puba’s “360 (What Goes Around)”—

“Here comes the Puba and you know I won’t fake it/Usually bust records on gettin’ butt  naked”—got the message across. “By that time, I understood that I had to keep it  private because, obviously, my parents weren’t having it at all,” he laughs.

As he grew older, Mach was continuously pulled toward hip-hop music. KRS-One was  the soundtrack to his formative years. Later, he would journey all the way to Queens to  get mixtapes by Ron G and developed a love for the MC’s from the borough. “Queens  gets busy, for real,” he says, mentioning some of his favorites: Tragedy Khadafi,  Capone-N-Noreaga, Mobb Deep, Kool G Rap, and Pharoahe Monche. “That Queens  sound at that time was so ill. I was like, ‘Whatever they got in the water, l want that.’” He  was also pulled to the Boot Camp Click, the Brooklyn collective that featured Black  Moon, Smif-N-Wessun, Heltah Skeltah, OGC, all produced by the murky sounds of Da  Beatminerz. But while his friends loved the music, rapping itself was not encouraged.  “Newark can be unforgiving,” he shares. “It was a place where a lot of acts wanted to  skip on tour. I’ve seen rappers get really punked when they came to town, so we never  wanted to do that. That was some clown shit. My neighborhood had zero tolerance for  people who wanted to rap. There was none of that. ‘Who the fuck you think you are,  Rakim? Get the fuck outta here.’”

This goes a long way to explain why he kept his rapping close. “It was a guilty pleasure  that became something that I ended up developing a skill for,” he says. “But my friends  on the block didn’t really look up to rappers in that sense. I never really went around  like, ‘Yo, I’m a rapper.’ It was my passion, but that was never something that was  appealing where I’m from.” He developed his voice and his name over time. When a  teacher scolded him for making a “mockery” of the class, the seeds of his nom de plume  were planted. Friends jokingly called him “Mock,” which he spelled as M.O.C.C. with an  acronym that he won’t share, as he finds it too corny to mention today. He later changed  the spelling to Mach when he learned of Ernst Mach’s measurement of the sound  barrier, but he felt he needed a last name. He came across a solution upon listening to  Smif-N-Wessun’s dancehall-tinged rap classic “Sound Bwoy Buriell” for the first time.

“My soul started to leave my body or something,” he recalls. “I’m sitting there, and right  then I’m like, ‘That’s what it is: sound boy killing.’ Mach-Homicide, Mach-Hommy. My  name is ‘sound boy killing,’ because that’s what I am. I’m a sound boy killer.” The  moniker melded his Caribbean influences with the sort of higher-concept ideas that have always attracted him and coded street entendre. He became of two minds.  Despite the allure of and participation in the street activity around him, he found an  escape. “I thought: My only way out of this hell is with my voice. I’m gonna break  through the Van Allen Belts. I’m gonna break the sound barrier. It’s more of a thing than  a person. It’s an act. It’s like the Mach-Hommy.”

“I ain’t heard none of you nggas’ weed plates yet/ It’s a safe bet/ Puttin’ money on them  is like a fake death/ I’m apex, they straight sex/ I got the game pressed/ They try to  sleep on me like a Hästens/ I’m Big Haitian/ Even my rice black, “Fuck was nggas  thinkin’?/ I think I need a light snack if I’m a finish drinkin’/ Intercontinental Mach, not  Mack/ I’m on a different mission/ Listen…”

Mach-Hommy raps like he’s The Most Interesting Man in the World because he may  very well be. Along with his bonafide street leanings and organic mystique, his raps are  delivered with virtuosity and layered with multiple meanings that reward repeat listens.  Regarding his 2021 album, Pray for Haiti, Rolling Stone wrote: “There are lines that stay  glued to your subconscious, and Mach’s cryptic cadence is reminiscent of Ghostface.  But where Ghost was Richard Pryor, laughing at his own experiences in an attempt to  bring some levity to darkness, Mach is a Haitian soldier. He is insular, biting, and more  cagey. Pray for Haiti is audacious, not because it’s trying to push the genre into different  places, but because every bar is rap chemistry. We’re hearing a man who wants to hit  us with details fit for a larger story arc in every stanza.”

Mach is never easy to decipher, but his precise yet dizzying flows allow for enjoyment  without the use of codebooks, even when he slips into different patois, languages, and  accents. He will name songs things like “Gossamer Wings” and drop phrases like “non  compos mentis” with an authoritative ease that urges you to come along for the ride. It’s  his unparalleled flips of words and ideas that gained the attention of Griselda Records a  decade ago.

Despite knowing Griselda’s head, Westside Gunn for years and even being instrumental  in the foundation of the movement, Mach still kept his rhyming ability to himself. He had  met Gunn in the streets of Atlanta at a time when Mach was heavy into film and editing,  having purchased $50k worth or high-end camera equipment. The Buffalo rapper was  trying to get his career off while Mach was a budding auteur in need of practice. “There  was nobody around—just me and him,” Mach recalls. “I was pulling up with him every  little place he went, and it was giving him this edge because it looked like he had a  professional camera crew with him documenting what he was doing.”

The two bonded over their shared social experiences and love of fashion, forming a  loose collective known as Fashion Rebels. They would create their own designs, hurting  their thumbs while sewing rare and expensive materials onto varsity jackets and  baseball caps, giving birth to Mach’s oft-repeated phrase, “Once a Fashion Rebel,  always a Fashion Rebel,” and his recurring theme of acquiring a python trenchcoat. “I’m  still going to get that coat,” he promises. “It’s just that python skins come in slivers, so  it’ll take a lot of pieces, and you’ll have to sew them all together. Pythons are much  slimmer than alligators.” The motif of exclusive wears is exemplified in collaborations  like “Best Dressed Demons,” “Margiela Split Toes,” and “RIP Bergdof” where Mach talks  about spending “thirty grand on sweatsuits” and raps, “It’s a black swan event, not a  black tie affair/ This is Fashion Rebel drip; no cap, buy a pair/ Seen McQueen split, Dior  seams bad, Max Mara was scared/ Donna Karan mascara was smeared/ That kinda  shit will have you banned from the Met Gala.” Yet, despite knowing one another for  years, Westside Gunn had no idea of Mach-Hommy’s lyrical prowess. “I never breathed  one word about making music,” confesses Mach. “I never even hinted towards it.”

It was a mutual friend who alerted Gunn to Mach’s ability. “Someone snitched,” Mach  jokes. Gunn pressed Mach: “You’re wilding with this camera shit, bro. You gotta get on a  song with us.” At the time, Griselda was more of a name than anything tangible. The  first projects were minted as GXFR—Griselda by Fashion Rebels. All the deals were  done by handshake, no paperwork whatsoever. Mach appeared on Conway the  Machine’s “Beloved,” from Conway’s defining 2015 album, Reject 2. “At that time, I

hadn’t rapped in over five years,” says Mach. “I hadn’t thought about it and never  thought I would do it ever again. You couldn’t even tell me back then that I would be  doing what I’m doing right now and it would be where it’s at because I wasn’t thinking  about it. But once I did that record, it’s like something in me went ‘click.’”

Mach went on to release a series of well-regarded EPs, but his true coming out was  with 2016’s seminal HBO (Haitian Body Odor), which repurposed a slur term used  against Haitians as a coming out party and his first widely-recognized classic. It also  showcased Mach’s avant-garde business models. He eventually created a limited  edition multi-position vinyl, using a pressing method that was so advanced it left  producer Timbaland and rapper 2 Chainz with their mouths agape when they saw it on  Vice TV. That version is rumored to have sold for $5,000. Speaking on his market  philosophy to Billboard magazine, he said: “Ask yourself what you would pay for one  hour of happiness. Would you pay $300 for one hour of happiness? Now, if I told you  that one hour of happiness, that one hour where you will be transported outside of  yourself, what if I told you that was infinitely repeatable by you whensoever you chose  to do it again with no limitation on it other than you having the time to listen to it. Do you  think one hour of happiness whenever you want it is worth $300? It’s that simple. I think  it’s worth way more than $300, but I created a number where I felt people could engage  with it, and it would let me know that at least this person is making an effort. I do not  want it in the wrong hands.”

His special edition releases are masterpieces featuring pop-up cases, foil packs, skull  candles, and more—all sold through his own internet-based storefront, www.billy-z.com.  Uproxx.com listed him amongst their round-up of “The Most Ingenious, Innovative  Independent Rap Release Models,” writing that, “For the past several years, artists have  bundled low quality, mass-produced merch to their music in order to bolster  their Billboard figures. But in Mach’s case, he added a limited supply of functional, well done merch to his physicals in order to bolster the value of what his fans are receiving.”  There are also real-life scavenger hunts, like his collaboration with Tidal where he  instructed the streaming platform’s X (then Twitter) followers to go to a grocery market in the Bronx and inquire about a bag of lemons at the counter, in support of 2020’s Mach’s  Hard Lemonade. One person who made the trip was rewarded with not only a free bag  of lemons, but a swag bag including a copy of the album and valuable on-theme  merchandise.

Exclusivity has been an integral part of Mach’s brand, giving off the aura of a man  rapping from the penthouse of a billion-dollar high-rise complex, covered with spray painted Basquiat tags, hidden in the middle of a magic forest only accessible by solving  age-old riddles. But now, Mach-Hommy is interested in being more forward-facing. “I’m  on my Hommy Appleseed shit,” he says. “Now that I’ve done the so-called impossible,  the next thing for me to do is make sure this music spreads all over—making sure  samples are cleared so the music can play wherever I need it to play. I may have been  contracting before because that was what was good for me in that place. Now I’m in a  place where I should expand. But don’t expect to see anything weighing down the  impact and the style of how I present material. I’m still gonna be Mach-Hommy.”