A lot of you know that last year, I did an artist spotlight on the artist named Chancellor Bennett, a.k.a. Chance the Rapper. Many of you didn’t even know who he was at that point in his career. At that point, he was fresh off of his third mixtape release entitled, Acid Rap. His fame was starting to grow, but I never knew he would get to be where he is today; he is continuing to enlarge.

After the release of Acid Rap, Chance went on a long tour, called The Social Experiment Tour. On that tour, he brought along many other musicians from Chicago that he grew up with as a kid: Nico Segal, the trumpeter (also known as Donnie Trumpet), and Peter Cottontale, the keyboardist, are just two of the many who were brought along. If you went to a show that was dubbed “Chance the Rapper”, you actually went to a show featuring what felt like a full on orchestra. Chance was beginning to look more into the overall sound of his music with using actual instruments instead of using a pre-made beat.

While on tour, since they were picking up such good vibes from each other, they decided to become a “band”. I put the quotes around the word band because they are not your typical band with a guitar player and a traditional singer. However, even though they are not traditional, they are good. Chance released a plethora of tracks that he recorded while on tour, but they were never officially made.

Near the end of his tour, Chance decided to tell the world that the band would be dropping a debut album called Surf. He said that it should be out in about two months, however, it ended up taking about six months for it to be released (I don’t look at this as a bad thing. I believe that those extra four months were necessary to make it as good as Surf ended up being).

Chance’s next course of action was to keep the world in the dark about what the music was going to be like. This continued for a couple of months, until the band released Sunday Candy, the only single off of the album. Sunday Candy is the song that made me believe that Chance the Rapper was here to stay. At this point in his career, he had released two mixtapes already, both very good. However, many rappers, after a certain amount of tapes/songs, begin to rap about the same content in the same fashion. Sunday Candy was completely different. It is more of a soothing song with two great rap verses in it. The orchestral effect of the overall band complements the lyrics of the song as well.

Then, the “short film” for Sunday Candy dropped. This was called a short film because it wasn’t just a video, it told a story and was choreographed perfectly.

On the video, long-time fan Nino Salamone told me, “This video was great. It was already a great song, but the video makes it better.” Nino continued, “I have been a fan of Chance since shortly after he dropped Acid Rap, and it is cool to see how his career is taking off.”

When Surf dropped it was great. He did not make sure all of the attention was on himself by not even appearing in most of the songs. The music went from jazz to hip-hop as it changed from song to song. It was a lot of great music and different genres all wrapped up into one.

While his music career has been taking off, he still never forgets about Chicago. During the final part of last school year and summer, Chance held open-mics for high school students in Chicago to show off what they do. He even got Kanye West and Vic Mensa to come put on a show at one of them. Along with the open-mics, he works with the little children and Chicago parks and museums to get kids involved in the community. He won the Chicago Outstanding Young Citizen award last year as well.

After Surf, he quickly announced his next tour, Family Matters Tour. Sadly, Chance has yet again decided to skip over Cincinnati. Hopefully one day he’ll make the trip.

Chancellor has been given a lot of blessings in his recent years, and towards the beginning of this academic year, he was lucky enough to receive one more. His long-time girlfriend gave birth to a baby girl. His daughter, as he says, changes the way he looks at issues in the world. She has also been featured in some of his new songs.

Recently, while on tour, Chance the Rapper has been hinting at the release of HIS (not the social experiment’s) third mixtape, which he continues to call “third mixtape”. He has been quoted saying that he will release it “when the time is right”.

The most recent news in Chance’s narrative is he appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert last Monday, the 26^th. He debuted a song entitled Angels. I love this song. I have listened to it probably 100 times in four days. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t heard it yet.

While Chance the Rapper’s career has taken off, he still has stayed true to his roots.

In an interview, he said, “I don’t really see myself ever needing a house in Paris or some freaky sh*t like that. I just want to get old in Chicago and be with my homies and make dope music and randomly come to Harvard and give a lecture. I thought you guys were troubled kids and shit and I was coming to talk to you about getting your lives together!”

If you haven’t checked him out now I would soon, or else you’re going to be hearing about him from someone else.

The Sunday candy video is at the top of this article and I would post a link to the Angels song, but Elder decided to block everything so you can look that up anywhere from Spotify, free on iTunes, Soundcloud, or youtube.