Earlier this week Chance the Rapper announced he’d take over U.S. Cellular Field in September with Magnificent Coloring Day, a single-day festival packed with high-profile musicians: Skrillex, John Legend, Lil Wayne, Tyler the Creator, Alicia Keys, Young Thug, 2 Chainz, and Lil Uzi Vert are on the bill (not to mention the “special guests”). Magnificent Coloring Day is the latest example of Chance using his pop-star power for the benefit of his hometown—and specifically for the benefit of kids on the south side. The promotional poster for Magnificent Coloring Day says U.S. Cellular Field is on “Chicago’s Southside”—this isn’t news, of course, but it represents an important statement of intent. Though the festival is for the whole city, it celebrates the youth of the south side, and it’s set up to be easier for them to experience. (Tickets are relatively cheap, starting at $35—Ticktetmaster’s ridiculous service fees add almost $13 to that price.)
All this is to say that the communities within the broader Chicago hip-hop scene bleed into one another and can be hard to sort out. That’s certainly easy to see in Stereogum’s description of the Save Money crew today: “The Savemoney militia, which once comprised Chance The Rapper, Vic Mensa, Towkio, Joey Purp, Caleb James, Kami De Chukwu, Sterling Haze, and many others, has dwindled in number over the years. Chance, Mensa, Towkio, and Purp along with honorary member D.R.A.M. are the main players.” I’m not sure where Robinson got his intel, but after I complained on Twitter, Save Money member Brian Fresco—who recently released the ambitious Casanova—chimed in with a gripe of his own. (His tweet: “very misinformed article @stereogum don’t ever mention SM core members n not say my name esp wen u including sumbody not in our shit.”)
People around here, whether hip-hop artists or just fans, could and do listen to both Chance and drill. I could make a long list of “positive” hip-hop shows in Chicago where DJs lit up the crowd with drill or trap tracks—hell, right before Vic Mensa debuted “U Mad” while DJing at Emporium last year, he had people freaking out over Keef’s combustible underground hit “Faneto.” Artists on either side of this false divide are capable of working with a wide variety of sounds and emotion; Keef’s solemn moan has done more to disrupt drill’s violence fetish than a boatload of half-hearted conscious tracks, and Vic’s militant edge on There’s Alot Going On is harder than a lot of tossed-off drill cuts. Creating a dividing line between drill and “posi” rappers also obscures the way people in different pockets of the scene influence one another, regardless of whether or not they’ve been close collaborators. Last week drill star Lil Durk dropped one of the biggest Chicago rap releases of the summer, Lil Durk 2X, and on “She Just Wanna” he raps, “Now you mad, Vic Mensa.” The Stereogum piece is symptomatic of the struggle to engage with what makes a specific scene interesting—even when summarizing what’s well-known, you’re going to miss something. This difficulty is hardly unique to Chicago hip-hop, but it’s especially acute here—there’s so much happening, and so many avenues to perform and release music. It’s even a challenge for those of us on the ground here—just read Chicago magazine’s recent blog post on protest music, which suffers from some of the same problems that befell the Stereogum article. I’m reminded of something former WHPK personality J.P. Chill told me when I interviewed him about Stony Island on the occasion of the Numero Group’s cassette reissue of the Chicago rap pioneers’ back catalog: in the early 90s, the Chicago hip-hop scene (and that includes breakers and graffiti artists) was much more tightly knit, in part because the community was so small. These days the scene is so huge you could ask two people to describe it and get totally different responses.
