Take a chance on rap

The crowd an artist attracts is telling.

In this day and age people willing to pay to listen to music are just a small sampling of the artist’s fan base. The culture surrounding an artist is truly reflected by the
people who actually turn up at their performances.

Last Thursday night, Mac Miller’s tour promoting his latest album came to Houston’s Warehouse Live. Making the rounds with him were four opening acts, and the second to last act was actually the one I came to see.

Chance the Rapper, a 20-year-old from the South Side of Chicago, was my personal headliner.

Many rap songs on the radio today and the lives of the artists themselves that produce this music seem to justify the idea that rap is angry, inappropriate and unpalatable.
Thus, rap as a genre gets stereotyped and dismissed as a whole by those no truly familiar with it.

With “Acid Rap,” his second mixtape, Chance the Rapper has set out to do something totally different from his peers, for his peers.

Chance the Rapper, born Chancelor Bennett, graduated from Jones College Prep High School in Chicago and attracted a loyal, local fan base starting with open-mic rap events in high school.

Local students help film his music videos and perform backup at his shows. His lyrics lend shout outs to local figures and call out Chicago-specific issues. Both of his mixtapes are free online, and his two back-to-back sold-out shows in Wrigleyville at the end of May charged only $13 per ticket.

Nine days earlier, he played a free show in a tent in the middle of the city.

He’s a hyper-local guy, and he seems to be everyone’s friend or friend of a friend. As the title of his website and his name say so simply, Chance just raps. The people, his peers, love it.

In Houston, a city with its own rap tradition and youth culture, little of this carries over to the mainly white, high school crowd, and little of it matters.

The people at this show in particular were there to see Mac Miller, a Pittsburgh rapper with a unique rap style. Mac has been established in the music world longer, with a much larger discography and much more relatable lyrics, fondly and sometimes not so fondly referred to as “white people rap.” People not only know him better, but relate to him. It’s not bad, and it’s not wrong. It’s just different. It’s telling.

During Chance’s set, few knew the words, despite his music’s accessibility. The words they did know were those spoken slowly, those with universal meaning, those without “that Chicago lingo” Chance mentions in crowd favorite “Smoke Again.”
During “Everybody’s Something,” a nostalgic and heartfelt examination of Chance’s young life thus far, the audience joined in with gusto for the expletive concerning Fox News at the end of the first verse.

In the final three verses of “Pusha Man,” the song turns solemn when Chance raps about the reality of violence in his hometown and society’s complicity by ignoring it. The crowd, unfamiliar with his lyrics, casually listened but missed the point.

It’s not that audiences don’t care. It’s that they just don’t know.

After having seen both sides of this cultural divide, it makes sense. Good rap gets its meaning from its people, both its producers and consumers.

Chance’s words mean something to Chicago kids, and Mac has made his words mean something more relatable, something Houstonians can embrace.

There is an amazing opportunity to let someone teach you what life is like where they come from, and that’s what Chance does when Chance raps.

— aledaily@indiana.edu