On a recent Monday at the Brooklyn Central Library, a packed house assembled to hear Shyne discuss his 30-year career in, but mostly outside of, music. It’s Yom Kippur—and, by some divine force of cultural alignment, Belizean Independence Day—and the Orthodox Jewish artist and politician hasn’t eaten since the previous afternoon, when he was in Trinidad accepting a Global Ambassador Award at the 2026 Caribbean Music Awards Show. He’s running purely “on adrenaline.”
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If he’s drained, he’s not showing it, holding court with DJ and radio personality Max Glazer in the library’s packed Dweck Center. A library employee tells me that they received 406 RSVPs, more than usual for a Monday night event. The auditorium space quickly reached its 199-seat capacity. Then we waited about an hour for the former leader of the Belize United Democratic Party to arrive from a meeting at the UN.
The conversation was meant to commemorate the rapper’s self-titled debut album, which is now 26 years old. But Shyne took their talk all over the map, including everything from an extended plea for citizens to vote for AI regulation to a Sherm The Worm shoutout. Like a true politician (and MC), Shyne knew what to say to ignite the crowd. He led an impromptu recitation of some of Rakim’s iconic “Paid In Full” bars, quipped about looking like Obama, and reminded the crowd that he returned to the stage at Kings Theatre before Jay-Z’s trio of Yankee Stadium shows, noting there was “no comparison” intended.
I hung out with Shyne while he was in heavy prep for that show in Flatbush at the French Renaissance-designed theater, which opened in 1929 and was restored to splendor just over a decade ago. The cavernous former movie palace, with its gold ceiling and ornately carved trim lining the walls and stages, was a regal choice for “The Honorable Shyne’s” return to his childhood stomping grounds.
After about 15 minutes, Shyne walks into the theater alone, in a thin blue jacket, a blue sweater, and blue jeans with brown boots. Instinctively, he turns a pair of staffers into a de facto security detail while making his way up the stairs, tapping into second-nature considerations instilled from five years in Belize’s House of Representatives.
We sat in the theater’s Queen Room, a space lined with photos of greats like Chaka Khan and Diana Ross, where Shyne tells me he’s looking forward to getting on stage and re-embodying the “five-star general” that his eponymous debut depicted. “I give myself a poetic license to revisit those scenes of crimes and scenes of war in a celebratory fashion,” he said. “I was able to win the war against my opponents and able to win what some may argue is the most important war: against myself.”
Three months after dropping that album, he was involved in a high-profile shooting with Diddy that he maintains he didn’t commit. He served an eight-year sentence, lost his voice, had a spiritual renewal in Israel, and a polarizing tenure in the Belizean Parliament. Now, the 47-year-old is pursuing yet another chapter, which includes a plan to run for Prime Minister in Belize in 2028. But first, while he has the window to explore his original passion, his final four albums, and what he claims will be his last hip-hop run.
According to Shyne, The Honorable will drop sometime in the first quarter of next year. Rap Prime Minister, Actual Intelligence, and Belizean Breeze will all drop in the fourth quarters of the next few years. Each project has 10-12 tracks and boasts a packed marquee of superstar producers: Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Jermaine Dupri, to name a few. He’s also going to re-record Gangland, a 2012 project he recorded with a weakened voice. “My vocal cords were shot, and it just wasn’t Shyne,” he lamented.
His distinctive baritone is back, and he’s ready to start a journey that began in Flatbush decades ago. Born in Belize City, Shyne moved to Flatbush with his mother as a kid. They’ve lived all over the Caribbean haven, first on East 18th and Church Avenue, then to Newkirk Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, Winthrop and Hawthorne, and finally a spot in East Flatbush.
While he acknowledges that gentrification has brought a swarm of high-rises all over Brooklyn, Flatbush feels the same to him. “There’s a few new buildings here and there, but I still see the same Caribbean flavor,” he says. The King’s Theatre was inoperable when he was a kid, but he frequently passed it on Saturdays while out with his mother. They had a weekly routine; she’d visit Loehmann’s to shop, and he’d wait for her, eating a beef patty and cocoa bread.
His aunt Nadine still lives in Flatbush, and he’ll visit, schedule permitting, when in the city. Sometimes, he’ll grab some food from a local spot and get a haircut, or take the train to the Winthrop Street MTA stop for an extended walk through the old neighborhood. At the end of our interview, he daps me up, sheds the entourage and security, and heads south down Flatbush by himself.
The day I first met Shyne, in April, he was filming an episode of the Earn Your Leisure podcast in a Midtown studio. As I walked onto their set, Shyne was having a pre-shoot convo with co-hosts Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings, prior to what would be a two-hour interview that ranged from his political career to his Jewish faith to his disdain for dictatorships, topics that foretell some compelling musical themes.
He won’t be tapping into the gruff 1999 Shyne energy, instead giving listeners a glimpse of what he’s up to now. Though I haven’t heard any music, it sounds like we’re in line for some late-period “adult contemporary.” I asked him where he thinks he’s grown as an artist. He says, since his teenage debut, “I’ve been one of the best writers on the planet,” but, ultimately, thinks it’s up to fans to decide.
“My only evolution is my life as a human being,” he said. “But as far as skill, ability—I was always at an extremely high level. And for me, [my goal] is to maintain that high level at least. Exceeding that, expanding that? I think it’s based on the public response.” Shyne has said that the projects were crafted from a Thriller approach, a reference to how Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones reportedly set out to make every song better than the last on their 1984 epic. That was the impetus behind linking with so many legendary producers.
The process started with Dr. Dre, who Shyne credits with helping to mold the albums ahead. He tells me the Los Angeles producer is the first person who’s ever helped him craft a song. Shyne also credits Dre for teaching him that the “beat dictates everything,” from vocal melody to flow. And while some may be worried about how cohesive a hodgepodge of producers might sound, Shyne isn’t: “Once you make two classics, then you figured out the formula. That means you got an ear.” He’s matter-of-factly referring to his debut album and 2005’s Godfather Buried Alive, recorded while he was incarcerated at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility.
During the recording, Shyne says he got the urge to craft songs with a Caribbean influence, but didn’t want to put them on his rap albums. He’s saving them for Belizean Breeze, the aforementioned, yet-to-be-recorded ode to the Islands.
Photo by Johnny Nunez via Getty Images
A month later, in May, I’m walking down a buzzing Flatbush Avenue the night of Shyne’s Kings Theatre concert celebrating 25 years of his debut album. A vendor grilling jerk chicken is blasting “Can You Dig That?,” an unreleased song Shyne recorded in the late 90s. People who look to be in their late 30s to early 40s fill the arena. They all remember the brief era when Shyne was a prince of the city. The two openers feel disparate but equally liable to pop up on a streamer’s Shyne radio station. Belize’s Stig Da Artist offers some dancehall flavor in his first New York performance, before Scar Lip (who Biggs refers to as if he’s saying “scarlet”) does a rousing performance of “This is New York.”
And then, the room goes dark. Excitement surges through the theater; the packed-out crowd roars, waving a slew of Belizean flags in the air. Shyne walks onstage and takes in the reverie before starting with the first official song in his career as a recording artist: “America, I’m only what you made me.” Many American politicians might open a speech echoing his first bar’s sentiment, but I doubt anyone in the House can relate to Shyne’s following lines:
“Young, black, and fuckin’ crazy
Please save me
Im dyin’ inside
Can’t you see it in my eyes?
Im hopeless, fearless on the outside
Gun on my side, shit.”
I look down from my seat in the right balcony at a couple of men, possibly in their late 30s or early 40s, rapping word-for-word, with head-to-the-sky, arm-flailing mannerisms of rapturous congregants. They’re in completely different sections, probably unaware of each other, but locked in with Shyne all the same. Even as the “Shyne turned into Obama” jokes fly online, his still-resonant portrait of American decay shuttles everyone back to 1999.
Photo by Johnny Nunez via Getty Images
He performs in front of a display that alternates a waving Belizean flag and photos of the bald, bearded Shyne, radiating a slight menace in his photos. Back in the day, he was nicknamed Shyne-Po for being as flashy as infamous Harlem drug kingpin and style icon Alberto “Alpo” Martinez.
“Y’all got Po? Did y’all get Po today?” he screamed at one point in his set.
The juxtaposition of Shyne Po and the current clean-shaven, curly-haired politician is pretty cool to witness. While giving a soliloquy about the wayward “young boy” he once was, the women attendees drown him out while catcalling circa 1999 pictures of him shirtless and flashing a platinum grill. So many artists of his generation are either no longer here or are currently shells of themselves after years of failing to take care of their bodies. Given his circumstances—between the early legal battles, a decade in prison, and the loss of his voice—he could’ve easily burned out, too. But, like Jay-Z or Nas, it’s good to see him looking healthy and vibrant.
Juelz Santana was one of several surprise guests during the show, including AZ and Lil Cease, and contributed to one of the night’s crowning moments, walking up to his host specifically to rap “One more for Shyne locked inside,” during a performance of “Dipset Anthem.” Shyne then introduced “Oh Boy” by telling the crowd that he encourages “law-abiding behavior and conduct,” while joking, “when I was a gangsta, a gangsta is nothing without the ladies.”
The interplay between Shyne Po and today’s more conservative politician isn’t always as endearing. Weeks before, in Kings Theatre, I told him about online pushback to his stance on Israel and Cuba. He scoffs and gives me the disappointingly typical rapper response: “I don’t pay attention to the comments.” Rappers probably shouldn’t, but elected officials are supposed to.
Despite not being in office, politics are foremost on his mind. During our first talk, after the Earn Your Leisure taping, he was pretty curt about music, but talked extensively about his political aspirations. He plans to run for re-election to Parliament and, eventually, the Prime Minister’s seat, prioritizing education, housing, healthcare, and better benefits for police.
Some of the opinions he aired in his EYL interview were panned online. There was pushback to his calling Cuba a “dictatorship,” as well as claims that he was oversimplifying their current political situation and using talking points that manufacture consent for the US to invade the Caribbean country. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to invade Cuba and is currently employing a naval blockade that’s led to fuel shortages and nationwide blackouts. Despite the US pushing countries in the region to refrain from Cuban allyship, several Belizean leaders have urged the need for solidarity with Cuba. Shyne feels otherwise.
“Cuba has always been a dictatorship over the last couple of decades. There was a time Cuba was a democracy, and that democracy was overthrown and replaced with a dictatorship. What I hear you saying, ‘Oh, that’s our friend, and they stood in solidarity with us. So, it’s okay for them to be a dictatorship.’ I don’t share that opinion. I don’t subscribe to dictatorships. I’m not a fan of monarchs. I’m a fan of democracy.”
Elsewhere, we get into a discussion about his two-state solution stance on Israel and Palestine. Shyne moved to Israel in 2010, and recalls being spiritually “enlightened” while studying the five books of Moses there. During his conversation with Earn Your Leisure, the self-identified “centrist” clarifies that “being religious doesn’t make you a Zionist.” He rejects the Zionist label, but, citing the Book of Moses, says that Israel was in the region before Palestine and insists there’s no solution where Israel doesn’t exist.
I tell him that many people feel like calling what’s happening in Palestine a “war,” as he has, misrepresents my view on the conflict; that Israel expanded past attacking Hamas into a genocide against Palestinian citizens who were never fighting. He feels otherwise.
“I totally reject that there is a genocide. It is a war, and I maintain my two-state solution,” he firmly states, echoing US State Department talking points. I wonder if he’s just trying to stay on Trump’s good side after recently receiving a visa or attempting to maintain positive relations between America and Belize, which signed a “safe third country” agreement last October. I’ve previously said that it feels like hip-hop, outside of indie grassroots scenes, has flipped from “Fight The Power” to “emulate the power.” Shyne’s political career seems to have embodied that shift.
Photo by Johnny Nunez via Getty Images
At least Shyne showed out for the people with his Kings Theatre performance. He started a little choppy, sounding lost in the beat at certain points, but got sharper as the night went on, with a back-loaded setlist and some exciting guest spots creating an electric night for his hometown crowd. At a certain point, he gave his DJ a simple “drop that,” and the room roared for the night’s rightful closer, “Bad Boyz,” the Barrington Levy-featured hit that even your grandmother may know the rapper for.
He performs the song twice, omitting, “Let your fuckin’ brains hang, snitches,” which admittedly is not a tactful platform resolution. Earlier in the night, he skipped about four bars on “The Life” about his fantastic drug operation. Though he rapped “kidnap Janet Reno” during “Let Me See Your Hands,” there are some aspects of Shyne Po he won’t bring into 2026. He doesn’t listen to songs with harsh lyrics these days and purposely left “Get Out” off the setlist because it’s too misogynistic.
There’s another edit on “Bad Boyz”: he rhymes, “it’s a Belize thing” instead of name-checking Bad Boy, his former label run by the infamous Sean “Diddy” Combs. The two were involved in an infamous shooting in 1999, where Diddy got into it with some street cats from Brooklyn, bullets flew, and clubgoer Natania Reubens was shot. For years, she’s claimed that Diddy was the gunman, and Shyne has always maintained he wasn’t the shooter.
Shyne says Diddy immediately threw him under the bus after the shooting, refusing to bail him out or even split the cost of his defense. He says when he was bailed out and returned to the condo he was staying in, which Combs owned, his belongings were packed up, disposed of when no longer useful, like so many of the mogul’s former artists.
Still, Shyne says he refused to cooperate against Diddy when he had the chance back then. The two rekindled in the early 2020s, and Diddy allegedly helped Shyne get his visa. But, as he tells the Earn Your Leisure hosts, they had another fallout that he won’t get into and hadn’t spoken with the Bad Boy founder since shortly before his legal woes began. Even after such a rocky history, he didn’t use Diddy’s public disgrace to crusade against him, even if he’d merely be telling the truth.
He says he initially “felt sorry” for Diddy after Cassie’s lawsuit, believing he was facing a “systematic orchestration to destroy another icon.” But when producer Lil Rod’s sexual assault civil suit against Diddy divulged that the Bad Boy mogul bragged about making Shyne “take the fall” for the shooting, it “struck a nerve with him.” Still, he says he prays for Diddy to “rehabilitate, and have his redemption,” while doing what he can to “make amends for the damage and destruction that he caused.”
And as amends and redemptions go, Shyne wishes the same to Ye, the man formerly known as Kanye West. Shyne says Ye is “like a little brother,” and that his comments and actions were “repugnant, disgusting, and reprehensible,” but that he doesn’t hold them against him because he believes Ye wasn’t in his right mind.
Photo by Johnny Nunez via Getty Images
“I’ve been on every spectrum of Judaism, so no one can claim Judaism more than me, whether it’s in my DNA or my practice,” Shyne says. “I didn’t take what he said [offensively], because I knew he was insane.” He adds, “This idea that we have to hold a person who was temporarily insane accountable by canceling them is misplaced. It’s ill-advised. It is not going to bring about reconciliation and healing. There needs to be dialogue.” Shyne says he’s open to facilitating that dialogue between Kanye and Jewish leaders.
At the end of Shyne’s Kings Theatre set, he’s given a proclamation by the New York City Council. Councilmember Farah Louis calls him a “Belizean, Brooklyn-born hero.”
The crowds at Kings Theatre and Brooklyn Library agree. Over 70 people stayed after his library appearance to get a picture with Shyne, the respected lyricist revered in the annals of “keep it real” history, admired for his resilience after the Diddy saga, as well as the religious and political pivots that followed his prison sentence. There is space for the myriad affiliations he’s accumulated over the years because Shyne seems to view life as constant evolution, never conceding to what society brands him or even who we was yesterday.
His debut album depicted someone on a relentless quest for power. 30 years ago, he thought it might have come with a gun and a Pyrex, but incarceration stole his chance to assume it through music and brand deals, like his rap contemporaries. Eventually, he won state power. But being a politician isn’t inherently honorable. Dominion can, after all, be wielded for or against the people, and honor, in government, is earned through positive impacts delivered for a constituency. For Shyne, the jury’s still out on that one.
“I think satisfaction is a fleeting illusion, and every day you have to renew the approach, the formula, the application,” he tells me. “I think you grow, and as you evolve, your appetite changes.”
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