Few artists represent their city quite like Chance The Rapper. Chicago is a foundational piece to telling his story, the good and the bad. There’s a rich artistic scene to the tragic gun violence that can take place. Artists from Common and Twista to Chief Keef and Lil Durk to Chance The Rapper and Noname depict the full breadth of Chicago’s artistic mission statement.
Chance, in particular, is especially molded by his environment. In a 2013 conversation with Interview Magazine, he talked about his songwriting process and how he was thinking about the hot summers in Chicago at the time. The interviewer immediately highlighted that high temperatures lead to a high potential for violence. Chance The Rapper stressed that gun violence is a sobering reality he finds important to depict in his music.
“Chicago is a situation, you know? It’s more than just a city, it’s like a culture that allows gun violence to happen frequently, and there’s nobody that’s really saying that this shit is not normal, you know? The amount of violence—gun violence specifically, in Chicago—nobody’s doing too much about it. It’s scary. I want to voice it. I want to talk about it,” Chance told the publication.
Chance The Rapper Talks About the Violence That Can Take Place in Chicago
One person Chance believes depicts the sobering realities in Chicago well is Chief Keef. He argued that no artist makes people grapple with violence the way that he does. “He’s put that to a lot of people’s faces, and I’m about to shove it in people’s faces. Not exactly in the same way, but people need to know. It’s current. It’s happening right this second,” Chance The Rapper continued. “Today it was 70 degrees out in Chicago. And, I don’t know, whenever you write this, see how many gun-related deaths there were this day. If there’s less than two, I’ll give you five dollars later.”
Ultimately, it’s why an artist like Kanye West meant a lot to Chance The Rapper. He still vividly remembered the first time he heard him on his Walkman. “I think I heard ‘Through The Wire’ first, and I was so into the soul sample. Like, the high-pitched—it was just some different s**t that I wasn’t used to. I didn’t even know he was from Chicago. I remember listening for like, the next two hours, trying to find out who it was,” Chance recalled.
“Then they played ‘All Falls Down’ and the radio station was like, ‘This is Kanye West.’ And I went, ‘Well, I’m into Kanye West.’ A couple of weeks later, I got the album, and then I found out I wanted to be a rapper,” Chance added.
The post Chance The Rapper Candidly Opens up About Living in His Hometown of Chicago: ‘It’s More Than Just a City’ appeared first on VICE.
