“As a kid, I used to see these monsters and things in my face and like scales,” he says. “And I never really knew what it was. Until I started going deeper in my mind and figured out what it was. It was weird, I used to scare myself looking in the mirror, I would see this beast in my face. It changes, its skin changes, I would look at myself and start seeing horns and fucking red scales, like a dragon. And then one time, I put all the bullshit aside and got into myself and just accepted what it is.”

Makonnen moved from LA to Atlanta when he was 13 to live with his mother, a nail technician. She bought him a keyboard and he would make beats for her to sing over. They made three albums together.

The night after his high school graduation in 2007, Makonnen sat in a parked car smoking weed with his friends. A gun rested on his friend’s lap. Makonnen had just watched his friend remove the clip but still wanted to remove the gun from the car. Not knowing there was still a bullet in the chamber, he reached for the gun. It slid off his friend’s lap and the trigger fired and the bullet struck his friend in the head, killing him. Makonnen spent the next month in jail and the next two years after that on house arrest, living with his mom, two dogs, Roland keyboard, and Gateway computer while he waited for the case to go to trial.

He launched a blog called The Newness in January 2008. For four years, The Newness served as a creative outlet and public journal in which Makonnen documented his adventures on the digital high seas. He interviewed future stars like Lil B and Miguel, posted tributes to his favorite bands, and shared new movie trailers and European fashion trends. The blog has since been taken down but a few dozen screenshots have been preserved in digital amber at WaybackMachine.org.

In 2009, Makonnen was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to five years of probation. In 2010, he started posting original music to his blog. In one 2011 music video titled “The Newness”, he wanders around Atlanta carrying Martha, one of the mannequin heads he had saved from his brief stint at cosmetology school. Martha wears black lipstick, a shock of magenta hair, and a red Phantom of the Opera mask. Written in marker across her hairline is “ILOVEMAKONNEN” -- the moniker Makonnen chose for himself to fight depression and an apparently never-ending torrent of internet hate.

“It was just a big Makonnen Ain’t Shit Fest,” he recalled in a 2014 interview with The Fader. “All the negative shit that you could think about the name Makonnen, they threw it at me. If I let the outside hate get inside of me, I would have probably killed myself. That’s what they were trying to push me toward. But I knew the truth about me. I love Makonnen. Just say it in your mind and you’ll start believing it. I used to chant it in my house. I had to love myself and stay strong.”