Charlamagne Tha God Details His Journey to 'Tha God's Honest Truth'

For the last fifteen years, Lenard “Charlamagne Tha God” McKelvey has carved a unique path through the world of media. In 2006, he left Moncks Corner, South Carolina (which is roughly an hour from James Island, a.k.a. the Charleston, South Carolina suburb where Tha God’s Honest Truth with Lenard “Charlamagne Tha God” McKelvy executive producer Stephen Colbert grew up) to begin his radio journey working with Wendy Williams. Four years later and Power 105.1 FM assembles its Breakfast Club, with Charlamagne Tha God joining forces with DJ Envy and Angela Yee to put the pressure on Hot 97. The show went on to impact the culture, but also took on the greater cause of bringing larger conversations to the people, hosting the likes of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Alongside Charlamagne’s Breakfast Club explosion has been a host (pun intended) of television work. The man who calls himself the “Prime Minister of Pissing People Off, the Architect of Aggravation, and the Ruler of Rubbing People the Wrong Way” was also finding himself as a voice people wanted to hear weigh in on the situations of today. By the third season of his MTV2 series Uncommon Sense, Charlamagne tells Complex that the direction of the series “was more politically driven. It was me by myself and it was just more politically driven. Next thing you know, they’re having talking head segments on MSNBC about the Charlamagne caucus, and how all of these presidential candidates got to come through and sit down and talk to Charlamagne on The Breakfast Club, and Meghan McCain on The View saying the best interviews in the political cycle and the best questions are being asked by Charlamagne. It was just interesting how that just came about.” It made sense that, at some point, Colbert—who’d started to regularly feature Charlamagne on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would be receptive to a project from Charlamagne where he’s giving his honest truth about the social issues being debated on our timelines and playing out in the news on a regular basis.

Ahead of the premiere of Tha God’s Honest Truth on Comedy Central, Charlamagne Tha God hopped on Zoom to speak on his journey. Not just his journey of becoming a television host, but The Breakfast Club’s journey to the Radio Hall of Fame. Charlamagne also gets candid about the work he’s done on his own mental health, and how that change has played into how Tha God’s Honest Truth has evolved, as well as how that particular journey informed the upcoming Mental Wealth Expo that he put together for World Mental Health Day (Oct. 10) in New York City.

Alongside this conversation, you will see exclusive images from the set of Tha God’s Honest Truth. Charlamagne called on Nigerian artist Laolu Senbanjo (who’s worked with everyone from Beyoncé to Alicia Keys) to bring a unique vision to life. Nah, seriously: the Jack Morton-designed set is inspired by the inside of a Cadillac Escalade (deadass) and is covered in art that features a mixture of Yoruba patterns and Nigerian symbols that Senbanjo calls “Afromysterics” with callbacks to Charlemagne’s South Carolina roots

This may not be the Charlamagne Tha God interview you were expecting, but this is the Charlamagne Tha God interview you’re being given. And, for some, maybe it’s the Charlamagne Tha God interview you need. And that’s Tha God’s honest truth.

Talk to me about the title—the process of getting to Tha God’s Honest Truth, but also the decision to have your full government name in the title. What was the thought process behind that?

Well, Tha God’s Honest Truth, that’s a play on Charlamagne Tha God.

Right.

It’s self-explanatory, it’s my honest truth. I think with The Breakfast Club every morning, you hear me with Envy and Angela, so that’s just a piece of me, right? You get a piece of me. It might be more than a piece, you might get a lot. You know what I mean? I don’t think you getting me in my complete fullness, complete totality. Same thing with The Brilliant Idiots with my man Andrew Schulz. I love doing that podcast. You know what I’m saying? I’ve been doing it for seven, eight years but you still may not be getting the fullness of me, my complete thoughts. This is how Lenard “Charlamagne Tha God” McKelvey feels about this situation. With this show, that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get Tha God’s honest truth, raw and uncut, my full perspective.

Using my government name, that’s therapy work, man. That’s mental health and mindfulness work, simply because we can all get caught up in being caricatures of ourselves at times. I’ve been doing radio for 23 years. If you’ve been doing this thing long enough man, and you start getting write-ups about yourself and you start seeing all these comments about yourself on social media and you got publications labeling you as things. You start leaning into that like, “Oh, this is what they want? Let me give them a little bit more of this. I’ve said it a million times, “Don’t get caught up in being a caricature of yourself.”

I did. I can’t sit here and act like I didn’t at certain points in my career. And just seeing my real name, hearing my real name, it keeps me grounded. You know what I mean? My family and close friends, that’s what they call me, whether it’s ‘Nard or Lenard. It just keeps me grounded. When I hear that, I hear my mom. When I hear that, I hear my wife. And also too, man, I got three daughters. A lot of this is legacy plays at this point. Even though they are young goddesses, their last name is not Tha God. Their last name is McKelvey, so I want them to see that. I want them to see that on these companies I’m launching. I want them to see that on these TV shows that I’m doing, I want them to see that. I want McKelvey to really mean something in the future. We building these new Black dynasties, these new Black legacies, so it’s part of that.

I read that this show was supposed to premiere during the 2020 election. Was that true? How long had you been working on this before we got to now?

Yeah, it was… Damn, I forgot all about that. Yeah. We announced it last year, but I think the announcement came more so because my man Chris McCarthy and Nina Diaz had an article. I did an interview for the interview, talking about Chris McCarthy and my relationship with him and how he [was] the first person to put me on TV, and how he’s such a good eye for talent because so many people came from that MTV2 / Guy Code/Girl Code cool wave. Me and Pete Davidson and Awkwafina and Andrew Schulz, Lil Duval, so many people, right. Nicole Buyer.

It got announced and that was the plan. I was like, “I would love to get on before election season, just because I wanted to have a real voice in that election cycle.” Which is so interesting, because you can have a good plan, but that’s not God’s plan for you, right. God’s plan wasn’t for me to be a part of that election cycle with this TV show. I was a part of the election cycle with The Breakfast Club.

A lot of that has continued to set the stage for what we’re doing now and I’m glad. I love God’s divine timing because there are just so many different elements and pieces that got added and got removed. And the show that we would have done this time last year wouldn’t have been the show that we’re doing now and the show that we’re doing right now is the show we’re supposed to be doing.

Image via Láolú NYC

I remember the MTV2 series Uncommon Sense from about five years ago. What did you learn from that experience and what did you bring from that experience into Tha God’s Honest Truth?

Oh, so much. I mean, before Uncommon Sense, it was Charlamagne & Friends. I did two short seasons of Charlamagne & Friends, and even then it was just me learning to be a host. That was a weird time because I was kind of in the caricature of Charlamagne, but then also MTV2 was trying to make me a talk show host. So I’ll be up there with the suit and everything else and I’d be having to do mad different takes because I’d be being me or being the character of me, right? And it might’ve been too raw for MTV2. You know what I mean? So I just had to kind of play the game a little bit. Uncommon Sense came along and was a little bit more me, but then that was also a time where I just learned how to host a talk show, to be honest. I just learned how to hold a talk show because Uncommon essentially was more Chelsea Handler. Both shows are more Chelsea Handler than anything because I had a panel and I had a co-host. Zuri Hall was my first co-host, then Crissle West from The Read was my co-host. [By] the third season, it was just me. It’s so interesting how God works because even the third season of Uncommon Sense, [it] was more politically driven. It was me by myself and it was just more politically driven. Next thing you know, they’re having talking head segments on MSNBC about the Charlamagne caucus, and how all of these presidential candidates got to come through and sit down and talk to Charlamagne on The Breakfast Club, and Meghan McCain on The View saying the best interviews in the political cycle and the best questions are being asked by Charlamagne. It was just interesting how that just came about.

I learned so much from all of that. I learned just how to be a talk show host. But one thing that I wasn’t doing on that show was completely being me. It wasn’t completely my POV, but I learned a lot of the mechanics of just how to host and run a talk show from Charlamagne & Friends and Uncommon Sense.

I think the other thing that’s changed, too, is social media, specifically people being unafraid of speaking out. For someone like you, who is also unafraid to speak your mind, have you had to adjust your approach to certain topics or subjects?

I think for me, I approach things with a different level of empathy just because I like to give people the same grace that I want God to give me. And if that’s too hard for folks to give other folks the grace they want God to give them, at least give folks the grace you would want another human to give you. I approached things differently just because I’ve done so much work on myself. I know I’ve disturbed a lot of people’s peace in my day. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.

I realized that the best way to keep your peace is to not disturb the peace of others, and I say that all the time because it’s so true. I’m just more careful with the way I say and do things just because I know humans are impacted by it and humans are influenced by it. It’s literally that simple. I don’t want to intentionally hurt anyone. So you can’t be just reckless and say, “Fuck it.” You can’t do that. That’s just not going to work, and I realized that long before any of this social media outrage was going on now.

I’m not afraid to have people disagree with my opinion, that’s never going to be a problem of mine, but I’m very cognizant of unintentionally hurting people. And by the way, I still don’t always get it right. I still might say something and think I got the best intentions and think I’m doing this because I’m trying to raise awareness to something and end up unintentionally stepping on somebody’s foot. That’s when you just apologize. If that person wants to accept, cool. If they don’t, God bless them. I send them healing energy, but I got to keep it moving.

What about where you’re at in your journey? You’re entrenched in the radio game with The Breakfast Club, but also making these moves with Stephen Colbert. How are you seeing—I don’t want to say the next five years, but are you on your David Letterman, Howard Stern type shit? What’s your plan going forward?

If I told you my plan going forward, it might be people who try to stop that plan. There definitely is a plan in place, man. I’m at the point in my life where if the things I’m doing don’t empower other people, if they don’t create jobs for other people, if they don’t make stars of other people, then the things I’m doing aren’t big enough. I think that a lot of people get to a certain place in their careers and they still want to be bigger.

I listened to a Bishop T.D. Jakes sermon a couple of weeks ago and Bishop T.D. Jakes said so many of us pray to be bigger, but none of us pray to be better, and that’s what I do; I pray to be better. I want to be a better version of myself at all times. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better friend, a better family man. And I think me becoming better is just going to continue to help me to evolve. And the more I evolve, the more I’ll be able to do for other individuals.

You can’t continue to do the same things forever and you can literally feel when you’re moving into the next chapter of your life. I’m very aware of things that I’m around that make my energy go up. And I’m very, very aware of things that I’m around that make my energy go down. And so yes, I definitely have a five-year plan.

How important is The Breakfast Club amidst everything else you’re working on right now?

The Breakfast Club is going to always be important. The Breakfast Club was one of my prayers that I prayed for and I’m still in the midst of that prayer. The Breakfast Club is what I’ve always wanted to do as a radio personality. Literally every single goal, every single vision I had as a radio personality, I’ve accomplished with The Breakfast Club. I grew up listening to Tom Joyner. I grew up listening to Doug Banks. I grew up wanting to be a nationally syndicated radio personality and The Breakfast Club, we’re on in 100-plus markets. Envy and Angela will tell you from the beginning, I was the dude saying we going to be nationally syndicated.

I remember when Nicki Minaj had “Moment 4 Life” and she had that little line when she was like, “Best believe that when we done, this moment will be syndicated.” I was just like, “We’re going to take that line and we’re going to flip it.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s corny. Blah, blah, blah.” I’m the type of person, I speak things to fruition. I can see things, I have visions and that was the vision. I knew The Breakfast Club was going to be everything that we are now. When I used to work for Wendy Williams, I introduced Wendy Williams into the Radio Hall of Fame. Fast forward 15 years later, The Breakfast Club is getting inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame and Ray J’s introducing us. So it’s like, “Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve done everything that I knew I was supposed to do with The Breakfast Club.”

Even re-upping for five more years with The Breakfast Club. For me, it’s about continuing to move the culture of radio forward. I think radio is very stagnant in a lot of ways. I don’t think radio leads in anything anymore. When you think about personalities, podcasts lead in that. When you think about music, streaming services lead in that. When you think about live events, festivals lead in that. When you think about just news, social media leads in that, right? So it was just like, how do we keep the radio business fresh? That was a part of me becoming an executive with iHeart and launching The Black Effect Podcast Network because I feel like the next generation of personalities is going to come from the podcast space. People like me that started the way I started aren’t getting those opportunities in radio anymore. It ain’t no kids coming fresh off the street, fresh off dirt roads in Moncks Corner, South Carolina that are getting opportunities to crack the microphone. Now you got all of these different points of entry when it comes to internships and everything else. So where’s the next wave of personality going to come from? It’s going to have to be podcasts.

When that PPM rating system came into play, they turned radio stations into jukeboxes and they took all the personality out. That made way for the podcast spaces. That made way for the podcast world, for all of these people who got these different unique voices to just start talking and throwing it out there and people started consuming it and eating it up. And so for me, I just wanted to be around to just hopefully continue to help move the culture of radio forward and make radio great again. [Laughs]

I don’t want it to be just one Breakfast Club. It shouldn’t be just one Breakfast Club. There should be multiple different personalities that get an opportunity to be just as big as The Breakfast Club is or just as big as Angie Martinez, any of these different legends and icons. You got to give kids a chance and hopefully I’ll be one of those executives that can keep those doors open for that next wave.

I remember that first Ray J call-in being one of the early interviews that had people saying, “All right, what’s going on over here?” Where does that particular moment in time rank for you in your radio career?

Man, huge. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be No. 1. That was a very pivotal moment, man because when they put me, Envy, and Angela together, they were expecting instant results and those instant results didn’t happen, t least as far as radio is concerned. But from day one, and literally day one, we told them, “Yo, we need a videographer in here to record our interviews every single day. Every interview we do, we need to record.” And at the time we were putting them up on Power1051FM.com. The reason I knew that was important was because that’s something that I was doing in Philadelphia. That’s something Angela Yee was doing when she was on Shade 45 with her morning show. That’s something Envy was doing when he was doing afternoons on Power 105.1. We just knew that the internet is what we got to feed. So social media, dot com, those are the things that we were feeding. Ray J was our first ever in-studio guest. Breakfast Club trivia! First-ever in-studio guest was Ray J and our first-ever viral moment when Ray J called in drunk from Vegas or wherever he was, that was our first huge viral moment.

I remember Doc Wynter saying... I forgot what he said [and where] he was at, but they were talking about that Ray J interview. Ten years ago, a lot of these heritage platforms like radio still weren’t understanding the power of the internet. They weren’t understanding that the world was changing. So even though we were in New York, there were still people tuning in on the iHeart Radio app and consuming this content via the internet. Ten years later, the internet is the platform. Ten years ago, I don’t know if people looked at it

At the beginning of our conversation, you spoke about your mental health journey. I was reading about the Mental Wealth Expo you have coming up on Oct. 10. What sparked this particular event?

Man, I’m so glad you asked me about that. Like I said, man, if the things I’m doing aren’t bigger than me at this point, then what am I doing?

[I] started going to therapy in 2016, and [started] understanding why I’ve been having panic attacks and anxiety attacks my whole life. Why I suffer from bouts of depression, PTSD, things of that nature. Therapy gave me the language and helped me to understand what it is I was going through. I thank God that I’ve had angels around me who have been doing the work on themselves for a long time and encouraging me to do the work. Everybody from Amanda Seales to Angela Rye, my good sister, Devi Brown. My late friend, Jasmine “Jas Fly” Waters, we used to have so many discussions about depression and anxiety and stuff like that. We used to lean on each other, but the pandemic, I guess, just became too much for her.

When I wrote SHOOK ONE and [was] telling my story, I wasn’t ready to have those conversations yet. I literally wrote that book because my book publishers came to me asking me to do another book, and at the time I really was in a weird place because I didn’t know who I was. It’s like I went to therapy and therapy was stripping me of everything that I thought I knew, you know what I mean? Literally, everything I thought I knew about myself, all of this stuff I thought I had figured out, therapy made me realize I didn’t know shit. I didn’t know who I was. I was keeping a journal when I was going to therapy. I remember telling my book agent Jan Miller, “Well, I’ve been keeping a journal of me go into therapy,” but what I realized was what I had in that journal, my therapist was telling me things to understand what I was going through. That necessarily wasn’t for public consumption. I wasn’t able to tell people… Because I’m not an expert. I’ve never claimed to be an expert. I just had some experiences. So what I decided to do was, “OK, I’m going to take these experiences, I’m going to write about them. I’m going to write about the things I’ve learned in therapy, but I’m going to bring in my man Dr. Ish Majorr to give these clinical correlations so it can [have] some expertise along with these experiences in this book.

So I put that book out and I had to go out there and promote it, and I realized I wasn’t ready to have those conversations. It was raw, man. It felt like being in therapy every time I’m sitting down on these stages or sitting down on these TV shows. I’m a very sink-or-swim type person, so I just went all-in with telling people what I was feeling and what I was experiencing, and historically what I was experiencing. Next thing you know, I become this unofficial mental health advocate. I remember Tracie Jade Jenkins, who’s part of The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation. She and Taraji P. Henson are best friends and they launched that organization to help eradicate the stigma around mental health. Tracie told me one day, “Brother, you ain’t no unofficial nothing. You are a mental health advocate, whether you want to be or not. So embrace it.”

A lot of things started happening over the years. I had brothers coming up to me telling me that they started going to therapy because of me. I had women coming up to me saying their husbands started going because of me. We just started having these different conversations about how to deal with our traumas. And then stuff like Nipsey Hussle happened. I had a conversation with somebody that was really, really, really close to Nipsey, and I remember just saying to myself, “Man. I’m going to really, really devote my life to healing.” Not only helping myself heal, but helping other Black people heal, especially Black men because we deal with so much goddamn trauma man, and we project that trauma onto everybody in our lives. We project it onto each other, that’s where the violence comes from a lot of times. We project it onto our women. So for me, it was the Mental Wealth Expo. People [ask] me all the time, “Where do you start? Where do you begin? Is it therapy? What are the resources?” So I just decided to assemble a whole bunch of my favorite people to just have a day of mental health and healing education. And we’re doing that on 10/10, which is World Mental Health Day, from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

I got my foundation, which I launched, The Mental Wealth Alliance and that’s who I’m doing this with. Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble; she’s our chief executive officer. She’s hosting a Black woman’s panel on mental health. I got to Angela Rye there having a conversation with Resmaa Menakem who wrote this brilliant book called My Grandmother’s Hands, dealing with racial trauma in America. Angela put me on to the book, that’s why I thought she’d be such a great person to have a conversation.

Of course, my good sister, Devi Brown is there. Devi is one of the leaders in mental health and mindfulness right now. She partnered up with Deepak Chopra. She works for the Chopra company. She’s going to be there doing her podcast, Dropping Gems, live. I have the good brother Jason Wilson there. Jason Wilson has been helping young Black men deal with their trauma through martial arts and other things for forever so he’s going to be there. My man Jay Barnett. I got Michelle Williams. She’s doing her podcast, Checking In. Michelle Williams’ been very vocal about her struggles with mental health. And Devi Brown and Michelle Williams are both on Black Effect.

It’s free and open to the public. You can go to mentalwealthexpo.com to get more information on that and to RSVP. It’s going to be a great day from 11 AM to 4 PM. We’re going to be educating people on mental health, but also giving people resources to heal. That’s something that I plan to do hopefully two or three times a year in different places, but the first one is on October 10, World Mental Health Day, in New York for this year.

Tha God’s Honest Truth With Lenard “Charlamagne” McKelvey premieres on Friday, September 17, 2021 at 10 PM on Comedy Central.