The problem is that my generation was pacified into believing that racism existed only in our history books.
Chance The Rapper
I’ve come to understand that art is awesome and beautiful because it’s a reflection of life – but it’s just a reflection, and the real thing is my daughter.
Chance The Rapper
I hate eating vegetables. The only vegetables I eat are lettuce on a burger.
Chance The Rapper
I’m a good man, and I’m gonna become a better man.
Chance The Rapper
Something I try to instill in others is to just be a good person. It’s a decision you make a million times a day. But if you just keep trying, good stuff comes to you in an ordained way.
Chance The Rapper
My favorite artist in the world is Michael Jackson, and he revolutionized the music video aspect of music.
Chance The Rapper
There’s so much positivity in the world and your day-to-day life that to go as far as to say that you hate something or you wish it didn’t exist and all the bad things in the world happen to you and only you, it’s a joke. It’s not real to have that much hate in your heart.
Chance The Rapper
I feel like LeBron James is an amazing basketball player, but he’s also a community person.
Chance The Rapper
God and my dad gave me the gift of gab. I know how to finagle.
Chance The Rapper
I can’t gain anything off of anyone else not succeeding.
Chance The Rapper
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I’m sure it was ‘Smooth Criminal.’
Chance The Rapper
There’s always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you’re not hard, if you’re not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you’re not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.
Chance The Rapper
The whole point of ‘Acid Rap’ was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it’s all original music and it’s got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What’s an ‘album’ these days, anyways?
Chance The Rapper
I want to be more involved outside just my community of Chicago.
Chance The Rapper
When you make stuff from the ‘you’ point of view, you really can’t go wrong.
Chance The Rapper
I like the fact that some of your favorite Broadway musicals are not made into movies.
Chance The Rapper
I still think that God means everything to everyone, whether they understand it or not or can see for themselves.
Chance The Rapper
I know for a fact that we’re not pushed or promoted to speak about God with fervor.
Chance The Rapper
I was a mad, impressionable kid, and every skit from ‘The College Dropout’ was telling me how I didn’t need school.
Chance The Rapper
I’m a young dude from Chicago who grew up with Kanye as my image of hip-hop. Finding your voice in a room where you have to challenge Kanye is scary – but it’s also life-affirming.
Chance The Rapper
I don’t really have control over my direct impression on people anymore. I used to be the person putting my CD in people’s hands. But I’m kind of a mainstream artist now. Not by choice.
Chance The Rapper
I didn’t know love until I had my daughter. I didn’t know its bounds.
Chance The Rapper
When I write, I work off of a theme, an emotion, a narrative – thinking of it and then expounding on it.
Chance The Rapper
I had already been making music for my whole high school life, and ’10 Day,’ which took me a whole year to finish, was about working with a lot of different producers and learning all of the aspects about being a rapper, from shows to recording to studio etiquette to marketing.
Chance The Rapper
I’m lucky to be in a space where I’ve been accepted for who I am and celebrated for who I am.
Chance The Rapper
There’s a hunger in me that always wants to be creating and orating, telling people something and giving them information and getting feedback. There are so many questions that I’m trying to ask, and I’m still so far from being done saying what I gotta say.
Chance The Rapper
I think the music industry is something that’s very separate from music. So, by always staying on the music side of it, I’ve found success.
Chance The Rapper
If you can give away free music, you can give away free electricity, free water. Those tiny jabs at a larger infrastructure are what make revolutions.
Chance The Rapper
I think that’s always the goal of art, is to make people ask themselves questions.
Chance The Rapper
For me, performing is the biggest part of being a rapper. There’s nothing like the feeling of screaming your story to people.
Chance The Rapper
I think it’s so dope that I’m here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that’s thriving. People are so happy Chicago’s shining that everyone is willing to say ‘I represent Chicago.’ That wasn’t always the case.
Chance The Rapper
I don’t necessarily think, as a person of influence, that it’s always my job to influence people regarding my opinion.
Chance The Rapper
People don’t want rap to be anything other than it is. But genres expand. My contributions, no matter how they sound, will always be rap, because they’ll always be black.
Chance The Rapper
I’m definitely tired of playing ‘Acid Rap.’ I’m definitely tired of playing ‘Juice.’
Chance The Rapper
I don’t know where people think I’m from, but I’m from Chicago. It’s really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, ‘There’s two sides to it, and it’s a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.’ But it’s really just a very scummy place where people don’t have respect for other people’s lives.
Chance The Rapper
I don’t think I ever wanted to be like Kanye in personality. I think I definitely want to, have always wanted to, have his boldness or assurance in myself.
Chance The Rapper
I think there’s a lot of taboos in hip-hop that people try and stay away from. I think a big one is, people are afraid to speak about God to a certain extent, and I think if you’re not free to speak about God, then you’re not free.
Chance The Rapper
Everything you write as an artist is about your legacy and your catalog and how you would look in a museum.
Chance The Rapper
I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That’s why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time, they didn’t take me seriously for who I was. By, like, eighth grade, I was really rapping.
Chance The Rapper
I used to always rock a cap when I was in high school and get them taken away. It was an excessive amount. Like, so often that, at the end of each school year, there would be a box of all the confiscated caps. After they gave back a few caps to other kids, they would just give me the box because the rest were all my hats.
Chance The Rapper
When you’re a Chicago artist, to play Lollapalooza, that’s not a normal thing. It’s artists on a path to a certain place that do that. Chief Keef did it; Kids These Days did it; Cool Kids did it. And I’m the next Cool-Kids-Chief, if you will.
Chance The Rapper
Both of my parents graduated from high school, both attended college, both have government jobs now. They’ve always been very adamant about me finishing high school and finishing college.
Chance The Rapper
I go broke a lot… I go broke a lot because I have this understanding that whatever I put out there, if I really am doing what’s right, it’s going to be rewarding, you know?
Chance The Rapper
I think politics is a reason why a lot of stuff doesn’t get done. There’s a lot of favors, and a lot of people are held back by their intentions of being re-elected or the things that they owe their party or constituents.
Chance The Rapper
I want to tell people to read ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli – check that one out. It’s just changed my attack so – I think so much more inwardly.
Chance The Rapper
‘Chance the Rapper’ is many things. I’m constantly evolving.
Chance The Rapper
Taylor Swift is just dope. She is an ill songwriter.
Chance The Rapper
Fame or perceived success – it all comes from groupthink.
Chance The Rapper
You can love somebody through anything when they’re your child, and now that I understand that, it makes me work better with people; it makes me more understanding of how much dedication and love I can put into each line. There’s no throwaway lines.
Chance The Rapper
My parents always wanted me to go to college.
Chance The Rapper
With ‘Acid Rap,’ I allowed myself to be really open-minded and free with who I allowed into my musical space. I wanted to make a cohesive product, but I also just want to make a bunch of dope songs inspired by whatever sounds I liked.
Chance The Rapper
I’m light skinned, and I used to lean on that because that’s something a lot of black people pride themselves on, and it’s weird.
Chance The Rapper
I just need to take better care of myself. I try to push it as far as I can.
Chance The Rapper
I hate that when you introduce yourself, and you’re a rapper, sometimes you gotta say, ‘I’m a musician.’ Or, ‘I’m an artist.’ ‘I’m a recording artist.’ ‘I’m a vocalist.’
Chance The Rapper
My daughter, when she was still in utero, she had, they call it atrial flutters. It’s kind of like an irregular heartbeat. But when you’re in utero, it’s real hard to detect and also to treat.
Chance The Rapper
I always wanted to be more of a person that people enjoy. Somebody that will make you laugh. I’m talking about just my personality, not necessarily how my music sounds.
Chance The Rapper
Anything is respectable in its own realm.
Chance The Rapper
I’ve never met Eminem; you don’t meet Eminem. He has his own secret service.
Chance The Rapper
Music can kind of make you one-dimensional. People see what’s on the surface and what you rap about, and they make their decision on who you are from there.
Chance The Rapper
I made the decision that I was going to make rap music in, like, fourth grade, so it’s been something I was saying for a long time.
Chance The Rapper
Jeremih has been my favorite artist to collab with.
Chance The Rapper
I don’t really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.
Chance The Rapper
It wasn’t until I left that I realised it’s not weird to grow up in certain cities and, by the age of 27 or 28, for all of your friends to still be alive. I can think of a lot of kids that I knew in Chicago who were supposed to grow up but didn’t.
Chance The Rapper
The weird thing about rap is that you don’t get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it’s probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: ‘This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.’ But in rap it’s not until you’re dead or retired that people think about it like that.
Chance The Rapper
I think even before I knew I wanted to be a rapper, I wanted to be an entertainer. I was really into Michael Jackson as a kid.
Chance The Rapper
Depending on the story that you’re telling, you can be relatable to everybody or nobody. I try and tell everybody’s story.
Chance The Rapper
Kanye took me from a kid who listened to music to a kid who lived music.
Chance The Rapper
My come-out record, ’10 Day,’ was the thing people were supposed to hear and figure out ‘he’s good’ or ‘he’s not good.’ ‘Acid Rap’ is the comeback tape, and it asks way bigger and better questions than, ‘Is he good at rapping?’
Chance The Rapper
People wanna say that they’re part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We’re raised to believe that there’s something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I’m saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!
Chance The Rapper
The idea of ‘talking white,’ a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it’s not black and that it’s actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.
Chance The Rapper
People always tell me I’m the complete opposite of Chief Keef and act like I’m supposed to stop him from making his music. But I like Chief Keef, so it’s always super awkward. I just make music I like.
Chance The Rapper
There’s nothing like doing a show at home. When you do a show in Chicago, there’s just a certain love that you don’t feel anywhere else; it’s like home base.
Chance The Rapper
I make my money off of touring and merchandise. And I’m lucky I have really loyal fans that understand how it works and support.
Chance The Rapper
I don’t see myself ever being in a position where I need to sign to a label.
Chance The Rapper
I would say almost 60 percent of working with Kanye – let’s say 53 percent of working with Kanye – is speeches.
Chance The Rapper
Every song on ’10 Day’ is a completely different sound – the cadence, the flow, even the production – because I like so many different types of music and because my taste is so refined. ‘Acid Rap’ is another tape where every song sounds different.
Chance The Rapper
My parents are super cheap.
Chance The Rapper
I’ve always been able to defend Kanye.
Chance The Rapper