He Survived Compton and Vegas. Now His Song Is Asking You One Question.

The van slows down first. That’s how Michael O. Franklin Jr. remembers it — not the shout, not the door. The van, easing off its speed on a street he’d walked a hundred times.

Then the voice: “Where you from, homes?”

The side door slides open. Rifles come up, pointed at him.

He doesn’t run. Running is what a guilty man does, and running on that street, at that moment, could have ended things faster than the rifles. So he stays still. He nods at the street sign above his head.

“I know,” he tells them. “The sign says 28th Street.”

He wasn’t the rival they were hunting, and he said so, calmly, like a man reading off his own address. The van pulled away. He was still standing on the sidewalk when it turned the corner and disappeared.

No sirens came. No headline ran the next day. Just a young man left standing on a street corner, alive for reasons that had less to do with luck than with the split-second decision not to run. He carried that morning with him for years before he ever wrote it down.

That morning is one scene in a much longer manuscript. Franklin is writing his story down under the title “Curse Breaker: From Generational Curses to Generational Blessings,” and this is the version of him a new song and a new movement are now asking Las Vegas — and everyone watching — to sit with.

From Compton to Vegas, and Back Again

Franklin grew up moving between two cities: Compton, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Both shaped him. Both, in his account, handed him the same set of streets and the same set of choices young men in his position tend to face.

He was gang-affiliated as a young man. He doesn’t dress that fact up, and neither should anyone telling his story. It’s the plain fact underneath the van scene — a rival crew mistaking him for someone else on a street that, for a moment, didn’t care about the mistake.

His mother died when he was eleven months old. He writes about growing up without his parents present and about the grandparents who stepped in to raise him — not as an exception, he says, but as a pattern he watched repeat across his community, generation after generation.

That repetition is the whole argument of his book. Franklin’s thesis is that generational curses — the cycles of absence, violence, and hurt that pass from one generation to the next — can be broken. He writes about himself as evidence, not proof by lecture, but proof by having lived through it and come out the other side.

It’s a bigger claim than it sounds. Most people who grow up the way Franklin describes are told their story ends where it started — that the block writes the ending before the kid gets a say. His book argues the opposite: that a curse traced back far enough loses its grip, and what gets handed down next doesn’t have to match what came before.

What Hip-Hop Taught Him — and What It Didn’t

Franklin writes about hip-hop with more nuance than most artists bother with. He credits the genre for what it did right: it gave real voice to people the culture otherwise ignored. Marginalized kids from marginalized blocks got to say, on record, what was actually happening to them.

But he’s also blunt about what the industry rewarded once money got involved. Materialism. Conquest. Violence. Not because those things were the only stories worth telling, but because they sold.

“The question is not who profited,” he writes in his manuscript. “The question is what your art is discipling your heart to desire.”

That line is the hinge between the memoir and the song. It’s not a takedown of hip-hop. It’s a question aimed at himself first, and then at anyone else making something people will listen to.

The Song That Started as a Confession

The song is called “Me 2 Too.” Franklin wrote it, performs it, and built a movement around it — Me 2Too!, always with the numeral 2.

Listen to the lyrics and the memoir shows up almost line for line:

“I used to be just like you / Everything you do, I used to do too.”

“Hurt people hurt people… I used to be you, but Christ made me new.”

“Held a grudge? Me too. Judged somebody’s life? Me too. Chased the riches? Me too. But I’m made new — that’s no longer me, I’m me too.”

The song isn’t pointing a finger. It’s turning the finger around. Every accusation it could make against a listener, it makes against the writer first. That’s the trick, and it’s also the testimony — the van, the grandparents raising a boy whose mother never got to, the industry that paid him to want the wrong things. He’s not describing a stranger’s mistakes. He’s describing his own, in the past tense, on purpose.

Not Shame. Solidarity.

The idea behind Me 2Too! is simple enough to fit on a shirt, which is more or less the point: nobody changes because they’re shamed. People change when someone says, “I’ve been there too.”

That’s a different move than most public reckonings make. Shame points down at someone. “Me too” stands next to them. Franklin’s version of the phrase — distinct from the #MeToo movement that shares two of its words — isn’t about calling out. It’s about calling alongside.

The song ends on an invitation, not a verdict: “Listen man — you can do it too.” Not a demand to be like him. An offer that if he could walk away from a van full of rifles and years of a life he’s since disowned, someone else’s turnaround is possible too.

Shame tends to make people defend the version of themselves they already are, because admitting fault feels like handing someone a weapon. “Me too” removes that risk. It says the person asking already stood where you’re standing, already did what you did, and is still willing to say so out loud, by name, in a song with his voice on it.

The Night Las Vegas Looks in the Mirror

The movement launches in public on Saturday, September 26, 2026, in Las Vegas, with an event billed as “Me 2Too! Live — The Night Las Vegas Looks in the Mirror.” The organizer is MCNM LLC. A venue hasn’t been announced yet.

The title tells you what the night is supposed to do. Not a concert that plays past a city’s problems, but one that asks the room to look at itself — the same way Franklin, on paper, has already looked at himself.

Organizers are pushing the hashtags #Me2Too, #Me2TooChallenge, and #MadeNew as the movement builds toward the launch.

“You Can Do It Too”

There’s a version of this story that stays a music story — a song, a hashtag, an event date. But the reason it’s landing the way it is comes down to something simpler than marketing.

The man asking a generation to admit what they used to be is a man who has already published what he used to be. The van on 28th Street. The grandparents who raised a motherless kid. The industry that sold him a version of manhood he no longer wants. None of it is hidden in a press release. It’s in his book, in his lyrics, in the plain fact that he’s still standing to tell it.

That’s the whole pitch of “Me 2 Too,” reduced to four words a listener can say back to him, or to themselves, or to whoever they’ve been avoiding: me too, made new.

Originally published on Digital Media Marketing Technology.