Meet Eric July

Your New Favorite Anarcho-Capitalist Christian Rap-Metal Artist

- Stephen Humphries

It starts out as a typical music video. A camera follows a rapper into an abandoned warehouse, where artists thrash their heads in time to a Richter-magnitude rock riff. But this is no ordinary rap-metal group. For starters, the song is called “Statism.” Listen closely and you’ll hear the emcee, 27-year-old self-identified anarcho-capitalist Eric July, railing against handouts and arguing that taxation is theft. His band is Backwordz, and it recently signed to Stay Sick Recordings, a record label launched by Chris Fronzak of the immensely popular metalcore band Attila.

Q: Tell me about your upbringing.

A: It’s just a typical story: Young black kid, no father around, ends up being a knucklehead. My mother was working two or three jobs at a time just for me. I was getting in trouble a lot. She put me in [a school in another town]. She gave me her car to drive me out there. It’s funny, because we talk about school choice. We had to go through back ways to get admitted into a school by using other people’s addresses.