“It’s Amen ‘Cause I Said It Is”: Breaking Down ZuluMecca’s Verse of the Year

There’s something sacred about bearing witness to an artist who isn’t just writing from their soul, but excavating it in real time. ZuluMecca doesn’t just rap, she unearths, she contends, she offers blood on the altar.

A few months ago, my brethren MpiloMightJust and Dwayze reviewed Kane Keid’s Not Famous on the podcast, but I was absent on that episode. The album is a textured, spiritually searching project that doesn’t just flirt with vulnerability, it commits to it. The production is hazy, brooding, deliberate. Keid’s verses are quiet prayers and battle cries at once. Then ZuluMecca arrives on ‘Leap of Faith’ and everything tilts. Her verse on the track doesn’t feel like a feature. It feels like revelation. She delivers what is, in my opinion, the best verse of the first half of 2025.

The Verse (In Full):

Ah, joy cometh after mourning. Even wrong numbers call someone.
Melancholy drumming at my door like a scorned lover.
Survivor's remorse left the corpse through a tug of war.
Killed and built a home inside these crumbling walls.
Wrote my name in open cracks, hoping for some meaning in graffiti tags.
Living in denied suicide, take your healing back.
Bleeding hands, keen to please my master, give us free at last.
Oh, give us greed and then command us not to steal.
I made my demons fast. Intermittent cause I sin less.
Mosey through locusts, infested omens for the big less.
Wading in the waterfall, I pray and call for your maya.
Making deals with deities for all the cake I desire.
Make believe I made it even when my state was dire.
Put my faith in idols, Proverbs-8 reminders.
Congregate, there's a lot at stake. Wake the sirens, better late.
Beggars prostrate, and we are Osiris.
The rest of us contend for best actor cast in a motion picture.
Judging your own conviction, calm on a boat that's sinking.
Callings that don't get picked up always result in sickness.
Observe the culture, we supposed to slaughter goats for dinner.
Adorn my wrist with the skin of offerings.
Hear me, I sing at altars. They fear me, but swing regardless.
I duck the cross. Cause when I tussle, the gloves dissolve.
And I'm punching till blood is drawn.
If I'm stuck here, then word is born. Then it's up to God.
Lost in nostalgia, romanticizing my daydreams.
Draped in favour, don't wake me. I'm safe in the simulation.
Flesh returning to nature, the rest could burst into flames.
But my fate is sealed to the day I reveal the secrets I came with.
Heap the riches in the chamber with the kin you wasn't chained with.
You breaking bread with men who don't pray for the food you gave them.
I filled the hungry stomachs of congregations who hate me.
I got the faith of a man in a den with apex predators.
It’s amen cause I said it is.

Grief, Identity, and Reclamation:

Let’s start with that opening:

“Ah, joy cometh after mourning. Even wrong numbers call someone.”

It’s a subversion of Psalm 30:5, “joy comes in the morning” but here, Mecca gives us mourning. Her joy isn’t clean or promised. It’s born through grief. Then she flips a metaphor about isolation: “Even wrong numbers call someone.” There’s beauty in being misdialled, chosen family, unexpected connection, and holy intention.

And she doesn’t stop there. Melancholy becomes a “scorned lover,” survivor’s guilt becomes a “tug of war,” and she “kills and builds a home inside crumbling walls.” It’s identity as architecture. Survival as reclamation.

“Wrote my name in open cracks, hoping for some meaning in graffiti tags.”

Graffiti is protest. Graffiti is visibility. This line feels like an admission of wanting to be seen even in brokenness. Of finding authorship in spaces that were never meant to hold her.

Then comes the defiance:

“Living in denied suicide, take your healing back.”

She rejects the neatly packaged, capitalist version of “healing.” The kind sold through social media affirmations and branded retreats. This line doesn’t whisper. It snarls.

Spiritual Labor, Subversive Rituals:

“Bleeding hands, keen to please my master, give us free at last.
Oh, give us greed and then command us not to steal.”

Here she invokes both religious subjugation and the hypocrisy of systemic scarcity. It’s plantation theology meets modern spiritual consumerism. The hunger is manufactured. The punishment is preordained.

“I made my demons fast. Intermittent cause I sin less.”

A brilliant bar! Funny, dark, deeply aware. “Intermittent fasting” becomes spiritual discipline. She doesn’t erase her demons. She negotiates with them.

Then comes this staggering image:

“Wading in the waterfall, I pray and call for your maya.”

Maya in Hinduism means illusion. She’s asking for it… or maybe recognizing it. Either way, this is faith informed by illusion and still choosing to wade. That’s faith with teeth.

Divine Identity and Performed Pain:

“Beggars prostrate, and we are Osiris.”

Osiris: god of resurrection, torn apart and put back together. This is self-deification not for ego, but for survival. For anyone whose identity has been shattered and reassembled, this line hits different.

“The rest of us contend for best actor cast in a motion picture.”

Performance is survival. Especially for the Black, the othered. You learn to act for acceptance. Act polite. Act faithful. Mecca cuts through that with brutal clarity.

“Callings that don’t get picked up always result in sickness.”

That line alone could be a whole essay, man! Purpose denied becomes disease. It's true spiritually, emotionally, and even physically, for artists, for outcasts, for anyone whose voice is left to rot in their throat.

Sacrifice, Ancestry, and Holy Rage:

“Observe the culture, we supposed to slaughter goats for dinner.
Adorn my wrist with the skin of offerings.”

This is Zulu culture, hip-hop, and ritual all layered in one. In Zulu culture, slaughtering a goat is a sacred offering — especially to ancestors. The skin worn on the wrist is a sign of spiritual alignment. But in hip-hop, “slaughtering GOATs” is competitive dominance. And in religion, offerings are often coerced. Mecca doesn’t just reference all three — she embodies them.

“I sing at altars. They fear me, but swing regardless.”

She is the offering. The (wounded) prophet. The feared figure who still gets challenged. This is the burden of being visible, powerful, a woman walking through a world that tries to crucify its oracles.

“I duck the cross. Cause when I tussle, the gloves dissolve.”

This is rejection of martyrdom. Of being expected to suffer beautifully. There’s nothing tidy here. The gloves are off.

Legacy, Betrayal, and Rewritten Theology:

The closing stretch of the verse is quieter, but no less sharp.

“You breaking bread with men who don’t pray for the food you gave them.
I filled the hungry stomachs of congregations who hate me.”

You don’t get more honest than this. Mecca calls out those who take from her spirit, her labour, her lyrics, then deny her humanity. Sound familiar?

“I got the faith of a man in a den with apex predators. It’s amen cause I said it is.”

This is where the verse becomes mythic. Daniel in the lion’s den, but updated. The predators are apex. The faith is chosen. And that last line?

“It’s amen ‘cause I said it is.”

Not because the church said it is.
Not because the scripture said it is.
Because she said it is.

It’s spiritual authority reclaimed from institutions that never made space for people like her in the first place. It’s divinity, it’s Black, it’s ancestral, it’s earned. It’s theology from the margins — radical, rooted, fierce.

This isn’t just a verse. It’s a gospel for the dispossessed. A sermon delivered in poetry and bruised metaphor. It doesn't flatter. It confronts. It builds a theology in real time — from grief, from illusion, from fire.

What makes it all the more powerful is that ZuluMecca doesn’t ask for your agreement. She declares truth and walks away. This is the verse of the year (so far). Listen again. But this time, come barefoot. You're stepping on sacred ground.