The woman behind the ticket window sat up a bit higher in her chair. She spotted a teenager in a high school track T-shirt racing toward her, moving so fast that when he reached her window he threw his hands flat against the glass, as if to slow his momentum. He panted theatrically. Before the woman at the counter could welcome him to the Greensboro Coliseum or that evening’s Chance the Rapper concert, he spilled his guts:
He had a problem! He bought a ticket for the show! But his friend had his ticket! He couldn’t find her! And he couldn’t call her because she had his phone! And this is the one show he wanted to see all year, because who doesn’t love Chance the Rapper? You know? Could she find his ticket in her system? His birthday is in December! He swore he had a ticket! She loved Chance too? She understood, right?
The woman began to speak but —
He continued: And his friend? With the ticket? She should be here! He didn’t know if she was coming in this entrance! She has braces! Metal braces! “Hardcore headgear!” He turned and scanned the crowd and spotted someone, leapt joyously and ran off.
A moment later he returned with his ticket. “See?” he said, holding it like a badge. The woman grinned, and the kid made a heart shape with his fingers, tapped his chest with a clenched fist and pointed at her, then shouted “Blessed!” and vanished into the arena.
After six years, three albums, three Grammys, a one-day Chance-centric music festival (the Magnificent Coloring Day, last September at U.S. Cellular Field), many well-publicized decisions not to sign with a major label, endlessly flattering stories about his civic deeds, as Chance the Rapper prepares for the biggest homecoming show of his career — a headlining spot at Lollapalooza in Grant Park on Saturday night — it’s the right moment to pause and mark what is happening here. And what is happening, for starters, is old-fashioned cultural ubiquity, the mass acceptance of a performer, the kind that happened before the internet fragmented our tastes into many narrow niches.
Who doesn’t love Chance the Rapper?
No one, apparently. U2 and the Obamas and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Beyonce and Eddie Vedder. Spider-Man, in a recent issue, said he was a fan. At a show in northern Wisconsin a guy who works third shift at a plastic-injection factory told me he relates to “Chance’s DIY thing.” At that same show an elderly woman who came by herself, said she was a fan “because someone needs to represent common decency nowadays.”
Consider early June, in North Carolina, at the end of the Chicago superstar’s “Be Encouraged” tour. The mood in the Greensboro Coliseum was buoyant. Outside, storm clouds were breaking up and inside, you could feel the promise of summer arriving. Many in the audience were graduating high school that week, several had raced to the concert straight from graduation practice. A sense of possibilities hung in the air. These were the moments before a pop concert in a bland, contemporary entertainment complex on a commercial strip in a secondary market, but nothing felt routine: The audience, in jeans torn at the knees, floppy Joni Mitchell hats, were teens and 30-something hipsters, black and white in near-equal measure and most interestingly, they were happy.
As the doors opened, police tensed. The crowd surged and then, startled by their own enthusiasm, laughed. The cops lowered their shoulders.
Chance the Rapper — age 24, aka Chancelor Bennett, aka Lil Chano from 79th, aka Chicago’s hottest cultural export in years — inspires those kind of vibes, a spirit of cooperation, a tenor of generosity. When I asked audiences at his concerts last spring what they liked about him, music itself rarely came up. His shows, unlike many arena concerts, don’t build toward some blockbuster hit or cathartic anthem. Instead, the audience is there for him, the person.
Shontadra Hill, of Charlotte, said “I like that he gives back to Chicago Public Schools. I like that he’ll talk about God, and drop an F-bomb in the next breath. He gets that people can be a lot of different things at one time.”
They regard him with a not-entirely secular reverence, noting the goodwill and hopefulness they draw from him. As Josephine Lee, artistic director of the Chicago Children’s Choir (and Chance collaborator), later said: “I think everyone is looking for someone to lead our divided society, and Chance, he’s got almost a Dalai Lama thing.”
I was thinking Springsteen.
Chance’s shows, said DJ Oreo, the Chicago DJ who served as ringleader on the spring tour, “are about giving you more than you came for.” Chance, who in six years has graduated from open mics at the Harold Washington Library to nationwide headliner, is a self-deprecating, everyman presence. His earnestness wafts off the stage, but not annoyingly so. He tells stories about growing up in Chatham as light piano trills in the background. He introduces 4-year-old songs as being recorded “when we were broke kids.” He sings about his grandmother, encourages friends to hug friends. He asks audiences if they want to go to heaven, and he doesn’t mean metaphorically. He’s corny and endearingly awkward. He’s a lot of different things at one time, reminding you over the course of a 90-minute performance he is from Chicago, and a friend of Kanye West, and a religious person, and a father, and an internet phenomenon, and a humble collaborator; his band, the Social Experiment, are also his longtime Chicago friends.
“Are there really this many Chance the Rapper fans in Greensboro?” he asks, and it sounds a lot like spontaneity, which in a 22,000-seat arena is practically the same thing.
Cultural ubiquity in 2017 requires more than a popular record.
Chance the Rapper has become a cultural nesting doll, occupying many spaces simultaneously and seamlessly. He is a national act who also maintains an intimately Chicago footprint. He is a broad pop culture figure who also remains woven into a tight, Chicago-centered collaborative circle. All of this is funneled through a constant online presence that is complex, promotional yet nuanced, agreeable yet opinionated, blunt yet familial. But that he’s done it without appearing cloying — that he seems approachable, eager to be all things to all people, and not too insistent — is his greatest feat. His brand is no brand, a shrewd marketing of independence that often seems a lot like a brand.
This is not the kind of mutability we associate with David Bowie or Prince, or even Andy Warhol and Madonna. His persona is not in flux. Rather, it’s a malleability of purpose itself. One day Chance is donating a fortune to CPS, the next he’s wearing a bear suit in a Kit Kat ad. One day he’s a rap star, the next he’s cooing to his daughter on Instagram. One day he’s defending Chicago against Donald Trump in an interview, the next he’s identifying as a Christian rapper. And each of these roles equally seem to be his career.
His Twitter commercial from early this summer, more than any of his records, felt like a career apotheosis, a stealth portrait of the artist as a young man in ascendance. In the ad, he’s backstage before a show, tweeting a call for requests. A second later, the internet roils with comments, arguments, ironies — his songs are overproduced, his songs are all good, he should just play “No Problems” on repeat. David Crosby requests “real instruments.” A defender replies: CPS got real instruments because of Chance.
For a commercial, it’s thorough, capturing the moment, and the challenges. Chance, whose career is in many ways an internet success story, is not immune to online fickleness. Chance, a cottage industry that is evolving into a corporation, is no longer an underdog.
Said Andrew Barber, founder and editor of the Chicago-based online rap music magazine Fake Shore Drive: “If there’s a theme spinning in the background of Chance’s career, it’s this: Protect Chance at all costs. He’s become a light in the darkness for Chicago music — maybe music period. I have never seen anything like the way people respond to him. He’s not on radio all day, he’s not even on Spotify charts usually. But he seems bigger than everyone. The other day my wife asked me why and I said, because he’s not really being shoved down anyone’s throat — this all feels completely organic.”
At the show in Charlotte a kid asked me what I was doing. I said taking notes. He asked if I was a Chance fan. I said I liked him, but thought there were better rappers. He said like who. I said, like Kanye West, like Kendrick Lamar, like Vince Staples, like —
He slapped my notebook from my hand, picked it up politely and handed it back.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Not really.”
At the PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, less than a half-hour before showtime, the line of fans to go backstage and meet Chance was still roughly 80 deep. For an extra $75, these people will get a Chance hat and Chance poster and a fast game of rock, paper, scissors with Chance himself, best two out of three. Chance sits behind a folding table, flanked by a scoreboard and an assistant wearing a whistle and a referee jersey. He holds his right elbow on the table top, outstretched, ready to spring. Then fans cycle past him, one by one. Some crack knuckles playfully. Some play absentmindedly, fixated on the celebrity before them. Chance throws his choices quickly, three times, in efficient succession, rock, paper, scissors, allowing maybe 15 seconds for each fan.
He smiles, makes eye contact, says little. No photos allowed. No autographs, either.
When Josh Massiah, 20, a student at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, walked in the room, he froze. He wore a Chance hat and Chance overalls (one strap unhooked). He looked as if he was cosplaying as Chance. Faced with Chance himself, it felt like a bad idea. He thought he looked nuts. He croaked: “Thank you for being you.”
Three rounds of rock, paper, scissors later, he was back in the arena.
“I expected more,” he said, “but it’s fine, it’s enough. When I was in high school my mom got sick” — an autoimmune disease — “and at that time I first heard Chance and felt a connection. I was going through a lot of doubt and uncertainty and change. Chance wants to do things different. I admire that. He’s about self-expression, creativity. That encouragement had been missing in my life. I guess he helped me out. I like him.”
The reasons fans gave for connecting with him were uncommonly specific: Their sister is gay, Chance supports LGBT rights. They record their own music for SoundCloud, Chance is the Elvis of SoundCloud. He comes from middle-class roots, they do too. He’s their “underground find,” shared by a small group of 1 billion fans just like them. Josh Gomez — who drove to Charlotte from Miami because tickets for backstage rock, paper, scissors were sold out across Florida — said, “I’ve watched how he treats his daughter on Instagram, and it’s touching. I see him as a human being, before anything else.”
Chance occupies this virtual space as much as any arena. Here, on Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud — where he has 12.2 million followers, between those three platforms alone — he releases albums for free and maintains independence. He also notes the lack of a Jerk Taco Man on 79th Street, and calls Chicago “DuSable’s Dystopian Bohemia,” and replies to fans, and sings excitedly about his daughter, and attends birthday parties, and checks out a mural of himself at Mahalia Jackson Elementary in Auburn Gresham, and promotes every magazine cover and award bestowed on him. Most prominently, he showcases social work. Which, without a corporate team pushing it, comes across not as bald self-congratulations but a series of dispatches to a tight-knit network: Chance speaks at a career day, Chance donates $1million to CPS, Chance arranges free audio engineering class for Chicago students, Chance hosts day care …
In March, Chance met Gov. Bruce Rauner to discuss school funding — as son of Ken Bennett, former deputy chief of staff to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and deputy assistant to President Barack Obama, he’s connected. But rather than gloat over his access, he tweeted disappointments about the meeting. In Charlotte a teenager told me she hated Rauner. I asked why she cared about the governor of Illinois. She said he’s dismissive.
“Everything about Chance seems to ask ‘How can I impact my people?'” said Chicago artist Faheem Majeed, whose acclaimed work addresses civic responsibility. “And none of it feels strategic — yet ironically it can come off looking like that because it’s so smart, you know? His works can be beneficial for a lot of different reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think some people should be rich when they know how to help others.”
Indeed, if Chance the Rapper is a model of authenticity, it’s partly because the guy contains multitudes, sharing as much in common with the art world as with the music industry. His joining of celebrity, substance, art and purpose often seems closest to social practice, a sometimes vaguely defined genre of contemporary art that explores connections between an artist’s work and civic responsibility. In many ways, Chance, a Kanye protege, is more philosophically akin to Theaster Gates, the celebrated Chicago artist whose practice is defined by the scores of South Side buildings he’s rebuilt and repurposed, merging aesthetic and social justice concerns with real-world solutions.
“Remember, someone like Warhol, before it was smart for artists to acknowledge social work, did similar stuff anonymously,” Gates said. “These days it gets a label: social practice. Could you call Chance’s work social practice? Yes. He puts money where his values are. But the work, musically and otherwise, speaks for itself. It says individuals matter, that people can do things if governments won’t. I’m reminded of that in Chance.”
Chancelor Bennett grew up near 79th Street and Princeton Avenue, in Chatham, not far from Auburn Gresham. “Pop music is about the erasure of the specific,” said Kevin Coval, who taught Chance in workshops at Jones College Prep (and is founder of the Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival), “but Chance has become very much a particularist.” On last year’s “Coloring Book,” in the melancholy singalong “Summer Friends,” for instance, he name-checked his local Blockbuster Video, Harold’s Chicken, nearby beauty supply shops; he wrote of wearing socks on pavement and ice cream trucks, but also, because shootings ramp up with warm weather, “our summer time don’t got no time no more.”
You can hear those lyrics while walking along 79th — in your head, from the windows of passing cars. The details (except the Blockbuster) are still there. Then you turn down Princeton and you see why Chance wears the battered side of Chatham with a relative lightness. The street is pleasant, century-old checkerboard bungalows in long rows, families pushing strollers, young women reading books with one hand and walking dogs with the other. It’s not the image of gentrification so familiar on the North Side but rather, a real community. “Welcome to 79th and Princeton” reads a neighborhood block club notice, warning “No ball playing, car washing, loud music, car repairing, horn blowing.” The neighborhood is rougher than it looks, said Tajuana Bibbs, who grew up across the street from Chance. “But it is beautiful — never in a million years, from Chance’s house, which was nice and full of politicians, would you expect a rapper. It was amazing to me.”
When I spoke with fans, the grace notes from his often-recounted backstory — a smart, political family, a prestigious Jones College Prep education, his first album (“10 Day”) written while suspended for 10 days for marijuana possession, using the internet to pitch it directly to music lovers — were recalled over and over, as if it were the origin of Spider-Man. Even Melinda Kelly, chairman of the Chatham Business Association, told me she admired how closely Chance’s tale sounds like their own mission, “a spirit of independence, entrepreneurship and innovation — not dependent on the usual sources.”
In the song “Angels,” he says he’s got Chicago “doing front flips/ when every father, mayor, rapper jump ship” (a small dig at Rahm and Kanye); for the video, he speeds across the skyline like a superhero, landing on a CTA train in the Loop, singing about cleaning up the streets so his daughter can play. The video for “Sunday Candy,” shot on a West Town soundstage, is a clever puppy dog of a thing, its 1950s malt shop backdrop as artificial as a fifth-grade musical, its camera lingering over the real feet dancing gleefully.
The eye behind those videos is Chicago filmmaker Austin Vesely, who grew up in northwest Illinois, and cites his influences as “The Godfather,” Metallica and “Star Wars.” He said, “We want to make something unexpected each time. I’ll send (Chance) a text saying ‘We should do a video with you on the top of a train,’ and he’ll come to me with a big picture: ‘How about a musical, one shot, obviously done on a stage.’ He’s not satisfied to repeat the usual genre formulas, and neither am I. So, maybe you smile.”
The result is an aesthetic of joy, unfolding at a seemingly intuitive pace, spilling from a small local circle of musicians, artists and filmmakers, Vesely, Lee, rapper Vic Mensa, bandleader Nico Segal, singer Jamila Woods. For instance, Chance and Vesely’s next project? “Slice,” a horror comedy shot in Joliet, inspired by Chicago author George Saunders and acquired by A24, the quality-minded film company behind “Moonlight” and “Ex Machina.” Chance plays a disgraced werewolf/deliveryman. A release date hasn’t been set. It was filmed in 2015, and has nothing to do with music, Vesely said.
Of course, ubiquity also means cracks are inevitable.
Already, there’s a breezy Cheerios ad (“Good Goes Around”) that somewhat co-opts Chance’s Christmas-morning delivery and the candied cheerfulness of Vesely’s videos. On his spring arena tour, Chance sold a T-shirt that read “You’re a Chance fan too!?!” which only highlighted how quickly the artist has outgrown his days as an underground, word-of-mouth phenomenon. (When you’re the face of Twitter and Kit Kat commercials, feigning household name status is a little disingenuous.) Most curious, a July story from Spin, in which Chance’s manager Pat Corcoran reportedly pressured MTV News to drop a serious, mildly critical essay — he described the piece as “an editorial misstep.”
The story was dropped.
The love affair continued.
Barber predicts a long career for Chance, “not held to music.” Lee of the Chicago Children’s Choir says the positivity of the Chance ecosystem is real and savvy: “How many angry musicians get successful and find themselves with nothing to sing?” They’re right. Earlier this summer in Wisconsin at the Eaux Claires music festival on the Chippewa River — a 3-year old event organized by members of The National and Bon Iver — acts included John Prine, Paul Simon and Wilco. But the draw was Chance.
Cottonwood trees delivered a June flurry. Nicole Horsford and Joy Blackwell of New York stood beneath a tent and waited for Chance to take the stage. “I guess Chance is akin to the perfect Chicagoan,” Horsford said. Blackwell laughed and nodded: He’s like a young Kanye, with a lot of promise still to come. Indeed, a few moments later, as at many stops on tour, when the lights went down, but just before Chance took the stage, a track from Indian-Canadian rapper Nav played for the audience, its pointed refrain pregnant in the air:
“I ain’t nothing like these rappers, they won’t last.”
Twitter @borrelli
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