uring his senior year of high
school, Chancelor Bennett was suspended for
“chiefin’ a hundred blunts.”
That suspension lasted 10 short
days, but it helped kickstart the
transformation of an artist who’s
now become an indomitable
cultural force in Chicago. During
that suspension, the high schooler became Chance the Rapper;
three years since the release of
his debut mixtape, appropriately
titled 10 Day, he’s still making his
presence felt.
On Friday, Chance the Rapper, now 22, announced that his
charity initiative Warmest Winter has raised over $60,000 to
help provide coats for Chicago’s
homeless population. It’s but one
example of Chance living up to
the honor bestowed upon him in
2014 by Chicago’s young people
as “Chicago’s Outstanding Youth
of the Year.”
This year, he’s gone on field trips
with kids, hosted “Open Mike”
events that gave aspiring Chicago artists the chance to perform
alongside Chicago legends like
Kanye West and Vic Mensa; and
used his social media presence
to sponsor Memorial Day anti-violence campaigns with #SaveChicago. He did all of this while
releasing two of the year’s most
refreshing and innovative hiphop records — Surf, led by Donnie
Trumpet and the rest of the Social
Experiment, and Free alongside
the newly political Based God
himself, Lil B.
Bennett’s tireless dedication to
his city didn’t spring up overnight,
though if fate had gone different-
YAUDIO Magazine
Issue 1
ly, fans may have never seen his
rise. Yet he made it happen, driven
by the motto tattooed over his
heart: “Get back to work.” Finding
Yeezus: Another proactive and
provocative Chicagoan inspired
Bennett to go into rap. In an interview with Hip-Hop DX, Chance
the Rapper shared that the first
album he ever bought was West’s
College Dropout. “The soul samples and the content — like what
he was talking about — a lot of
people weren’t really talking about
college and being institutionalized by school,” Bennett said. “I
could understand it on that level. I
knew I didn’t like school, so it was
something I could relate to.”
Music gradually took up more and
more of his focus. In high school,
Bennett faced teachers who
mocked his aspirations to make a
career in music but offered little
to inspire him in turn. “This for ev-
during his suspension and spent
the next year recording it. In that
time, he attended Harold Washington Community College but
dropped out to focus more energy
on his tape. However, it wasn’t until he watched a friend, and fellow
rapper, get stabbed to death in a
fight that he got serious about his
work.
“It was just a wake up call, kind of
like, I’m young and I could definitely die in Chicago,” Bennett
told Hip-Hop DX. “It’s not guaranteed that I’m going to be able to
live a full day. I just started working way harder, recording more,
shooting videos, got a manager,
started playing more shows, and
it just became more of a career
for me and less of a hobby.”
Bennett started touring more aggressively. After Childish Gambino’s publicist saw Bennett perform at South by Southwest, he
brought
the two
together
to cut
“They
Don’t
Like
Me” on
Childish
Gambino’s
Royalty
tape.
The two
then
connected for
Gambino’s
Camp tour. “We’re like big brother
little brother,” Childish Gambino said in an interview with XXL.
“He’s smart. He gets how music is
an advertisement for a brand, and
kids get his brand.”
“It was just a wake up call,
kind of like, I’m young and I
could definitely die in
Chicago,”
ery math class that I ever had,” he
raps on 10 Day’s “Windows.” “So
fuck you if I failed, and fuck you
if I passed! For shitty summaries
and bummers in the past, Cause
some of our teachers act as if
summer was for class.”
He started working on the tape