Just Us: IkeZero on Music, Revolution, and the Making of Unjust
From Baldwin to Beats
Born and raised in St. Louis, IkeZero’s story begins at home. He remembers watching his sister sketch and write poetry, captivated by the way she used words and shading to bring ideas to life. “I was more intrigued with the way she used words and made stuff work,” he says. Literature soon became his own entry point into songwriting, with James Baldwin among his earliest influences.
What started as excitement to create slowly evolved into discipline. “It became a science,” he explains. “Understanding to love the process, love the science you make, but also reinvent it.”
Nearly two decades later, IkeZero’s sound blends hip-hop, R&B, house, Afro, and even rock. But for him, genre is only the vehicle. The destination is always story. “I really like to get deep into the psyche of a situation or person. Or tell a story about uplifting somebody a certain way, from start to finish… that process. The mindset, the perspective… and really bringing that to life.”
That storytelling comes through powerfully in his new single Unjust, featuring vocalist and longtime collaborator Katarra. The track is stripped down and soul-shaking — raw, real, and (for this writer) currently on repeat. As the first release from the Voices of Dissent project, it carries “Revolution is upon us” like both a warning and a call to action. Just us, going against evils that be.
Unjust: A Song for This Moment
The spark for Unjust came as IkeZero immersed himself in the stories coming out of Gaza, fact-checking sources and tracing the parallels between Palestine, St. Louis, and what he already knew about the U.S. government’s hand in oppression.
“Just seeing the rubble, the shatter of basic needs, and then to know some of the evils that played into it… ‘Engineering, supplying famine and filth,’” he says. “These are the sources that are against us, that could be for us, but they choose to be against us.”
The killing and destruction in Gaza is not random. It is systemic — carried out through the choices of people with hearts of stone. The images are more than fleeting scrolls on a feed. They are the weight of daily life for thousands of displaced, grieving families. They are what still stands, and what has already fallen, in a genocide the world keeps trying to look past.
When I asked IkeZero about lines like:
“Displaced, shaking with rage in the lands.
Holding hands or holding bones—limbs.
Broken fam, another home to bits.”
He told me, “It really felt like I teleported into the lives of those that are still going through these tragedies. I wanted to truly feel and understand a good way of writing what’s going on and how people feel without overexplaining it, and to make it as vivid as possible for the listener to feel as close to the unfortunate that’s going on.”
Working with Katarra, he says, only made the song more powerful. “She heard the lyrics. She felt the presence of what she needed. She was able to add the things that make it more emotional and more gravitational to people. And I appreciate her for that. She truly knows how to shift the emotion of a song.”
The Revolution Is Just Us
That’s what makes Unjust the perfect opening chapter of a 20-song collection created by St. Louis artists in solidarity with Palestine. IkeZero draws us closer to both the devastation and the collective call for change.
If Unjust is about anything, it’s about collective power. The chorus insists: “Just us, going against evils that be — Unjust.”
For IkeZero, that refrain isn’t just art. It’s analysis. “This revolution… it’s not the easiest. It comes with a change of mindsets, a change of understanding, and really being vulnerable for the solutions we need. The revolution is just us.”
The song delivers another searing reminder: “Televised revolution don’t exist.”
“It doesn’t get shown. It doesn’t truly get broadcasted to the media,” he explains. “Broadcast networks don’t look at the people. They don’t accept the people. They don’t want to give us the opportunity to showcase ourselves or express ourselves in the ways that we need to. It still is not televised.”
The revolution, he reminds us, doesn’t come from broadcast. It comes from proximity. From community. From us.
That belief — that it’s just us, together — is what he hopes listeners will carry away.
A Song a Day
Music, IkeZero reminds us, is always with us.
“You’re always going to hear a song a day, no matter where you are. It might make the playlist for your mood or your mindset for the day, whatever. But it’s always a song a day. Hearing music and setting that scale each day is very powerful.”
With Unjust, he sets the scale not just for a day, but for a sustained, collective rhythm of resistance — a soundtrack for solidarity, and a movement toward a just future.
Listen to Unjust now on SoundCloud and YouTube
Follow the artists: @ikezero & @katarramusic