CHANCE THE RAPPER might only have graduated from High School in 2011, but he has already dropped two critically acclaimed mixtapes: 10 Day and Acid Rap. The latter was downloaded 50,000 times within 24 hours of its release and garnered praise from Kanye West, James Blake and J. Cole (a bootlegged version has even found it's way onto the Billboard charts).I'm sitting in a booth at Lou Malnati's Pizzeria in Chicago with Chance the Rapper's manager, Pat. He's got a rugby-player build and shoulder-length blond hair. He orders a Shirley Temple, which arrives, minutes later, filled to the brim with glistening maraschino cherries. Chance walks in. He moves like a mixture of clown and robot. Duck-footed in bright red Adidas sneakers, he's jerky and just a little too aware of his movements. His rail-thin girlfriend, Kirsten, trails him. His first statement 'on the record' is screamed into the Dictaphone: “Fuckballs!”
It's weird to think that the awkward youth before me has earned high praise from the top tiers of the Music Industry. In three days he will embark on a 40-date US tour with Mac Miller followed by a 23-date European tour with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. His Lollapalooza after-party sold out in 47 minutes, the fastest sellout for one of Chicago's premier hip-hop venues, Reggies.
"The dopest feature on Acid Rap is probably Twista," he tells me when I ask him which artists he admires. "We had a little show at a shoe store, and when I got there, Twista was performing. I had to go on next and when we were passing by he was like, 'You killin' it right now!' And I was like, 'Oh my God - you're Twista!' After the show he was telling me he listened to my shit and he was talking about how he knew 'Brain Cells' word for word, and all my old shit. When me and Vic [Mensa] were working on that 'Cocoa Butter Kisses' track, I was like, 'You know who would be raw as hell on this song? Twista.' I called him and he was like, 'Send it right now.' It was crazy because he was really into it, like, 'Can you hear what I'm saying in this verse? Can you get the verse? Do you like this one part? Should I change this? Is it good enough?' Like, what bro? You're Twista! It's A-OK with me."
"I do think that there's some sort of structure in the way that everything is," he says regarding the events that led him to this point in his career. "I feel like we're very in control of our own destiny, but I don't know if that necessarily means that we're loose in the world or there's nothing controlling us. What are the chances that this kid named Chance, who graduated from high School with a 1.3 GPA...I've seen some really crazy shit happen. I've been a part of some really crazy shit and am still a part of some really crazy shit. I don't know if I could that it's all up to Chance."
Wait -- "'Chance' or 'chance'?"
"That it's all up to me. I feel like there's gotta be something — somebody — somewhere putting people in the same room as me or putting J. Cole in the same elevator as me, making me say, ‘Alright, I’ll go here.’ Don’t you ever have that intuition moment of, like, a sixth sense telling you to go somewhere?”
My stomach grumbles and our cheese sticks arrive. Our waiter (whom Chance likens to the bad guy in the first Spiderman movie and therefore dubs 'Scumbag') brings over some ketchup. "I'm a ketchup and cheese stick guy," he says with a grin, squirting a red mound onto his plate.
“Most of the shit that happened for Acid Rap was in the last three or three-and-a-half weeks before the tape dropped. Those last few weeks I was like, ‘Oh shit! I have a tape that’s supposed to drop in less than a month! I have to finish all of it now,’ so I just stayed in the studio, like, every day. It takes me a long time to write — sometimes six or seven hours to write a verse. I spend so much time scratching shit out and stuff, but I also have really bad ADD so I can’t pay attention to shit for too long. I used to be prescribed Adderall, but I never used it.”
Chance is definitely easily distracted. He reads Twitter throughout our interview, scrolling constantly as we talk.I sneak a peek at the screen, and texts are coming in from J.Cole (in extra-large font because Chance "can't fucking see at all.") The two are making plans to hang out later, but then his phone dies so he tells me about the first album he got into.
“Kanye is the reason I make rap music. The College Dropout was the first album I ever owned — the first piece of music that was mine, that my mom bought for me and gave to me. I've never been to a Kanye concert. I had tickets twice, but I missed both of ’em. Both times I got in trouble. I used to be in a lot of trouble when I was a kid.”
That wasn't so long ago. Chance the Rapper came up with his mixtape, 10 Day , when he was suspended for ten days in his senior year of high school after being caught smoking weed in the school parking lot. So really, all that troublemaking might have been for the best. What kinds of mischief did her get up to while creating Acid Rap?
"I did 'Chain Smoker' and 'Lost' on acid," he admits. "I never wanted it to be like 'I'm a good rapper because I do acid'. I was going through something at the time and I feel the music is supposed to document who the artist is as a person, and their outlook on life at that moment."
If we dropped acid together, he says we'd listen to James Blake and Hiatus Kaiyote. We'd also listen to Acid Rap while he'd "point out all the crazy things that you never noticed about it, and all the weird things that I put under the track, like the little subliminal messages. I'm telling kids to kill their parents!" He's joking, I hope.
“What sucks is that when you’re an artist and you get known, more people know you for your music and know you for a certain aesthetic, and the world kind of pushes that on you. So, every time I meet people they only want to talk to me about acid or they want to give me some free acid. It’s cool when you first get into it, but then you kind of realise over time it’s not necessarily who you are. It might be something you do, but it’s not at all who you are.”
He stops and stares at the piece of pizza on his fork. I ask if something's wrong. "Yeah, the tomato was looking weird. I was thinking about whether or not I was...Thank you," he says, and eats it anyway.
"I think I've kinda gotten to a point in my life where I'm happy a lot without dropping Acid," he says. I ask if it has anything to do with his girlfriend Kirsten, whom his song 'Interlude (That's Love)' was written for. Chance says they've been dating for "years and years and years"; Pat says six months. "Tomato, tomahto," Chance replies. "A week and a half. No, I'll stop making joke." Kirsten changes the subject to shaving her legs and Pat recommends laser hair removal.
"I might do it to my pubes," Chance declares. "I got, like, some serious problems going on with entanglement...I thought that was funny. As it came out of my mouth it sounded grosser and grosser." He picks up a pen to sign the bill, but instead stops and shouts, "I don't sign autographs!"
