KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City singer-songwriter Krizz Kaliko released his song “Genius” in 2009.
When Apple reached out earlier this year about using the song in the iPhone 16 ad campaign, Kaliko said he was surprised and thrilled for the opportunity.
“So the crazy thing is Apple reached out to me over and over and over again. I thought it was spam. I was deleting the emails,” Kaliko said. ”Finally, they found my wife who manages me Crystal. They called her phone like, ‘Hey, this is Apple. We want Krizz, and so we talked to them, and they were like, we need ‘Genius.’”
Apple contacted Kaliko and Crystal, his wife and manager, in May about using the song in the iPhone 16 ad campaign, but he didn’t know the exact launch date.
“So I didn’t even know when this thing was happening. Everybody’s watching Thursday night football, and their campaign launched. So my phone is blowing up. My mother is in the hospital, and I’m at the hospital tending to my mom, and my phone is buzzing over and over and over again,” Kaliko explained. “Everybody’s like, dude, is that you on the Apple commercial? So it is a really cool thing. It’s an honor for the biggest company in the world to seek me out.”
Kaliko initially recorded and released the song when he was working with friend and fellow rapper Tech n9ne at Strange Music Inc.
“I would do these big choral Queen, like sounding hooks or choruses, and so it was stacked with 40 different layers of vocals. Then, I put these cuts in ‘Genius’. So I always have a hip-hop element because that’s where we come from, but it was like this big theatrical song, and I guess it worked perfectly,” Kaliko said.
He said the song is all about inspiring others to go after their dreams.
“To be inspirational to other people, and inspiring other people to shoot for the stars. I always shot for the stars,” Kaliko said.
Kaliko formed his own label, Ear House Inc., in 2021.
He will go on tour soon and promote his latest work.
He’ll perform in Kansas City on April 13 at the Westport Bowery.
“It’s going to be absolutely incredible. So I’ll also be performing this song on that tour, especially now since Apple put it out there,” Kaliko said.
He’s also started his own rapper reviews of classic rock on his YouTube channel.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
