Chance The Rapper is the second rapper to hit the cover of the upcoming October/November issue of Complex. You can an excerpt below, or read the cover story in full here. His behind the scenes is below as well.
Things weren’t always so lovey-dovey between father and son. Prior to his success, Chance describes their relationship as strained, if not estranged. In a family that stressed the importance of education, Chance didn’t seem to care about school. He lays part of the blame for this attitude on Kanye West: “I was a mad impressionable kid, and every skit from The College Dropout was telling me how I didn’t need school. And I think that had a very big impact on how I treated it.” The one assignment he remembers turning in during senior year was an essay on why he didn’t want to go to college. The 10-day suspension for smoking weed didn’t help matters with his father. “I was like his bad son,” says Chance, whose younger brother, Taylor, is also a budding rapper. “At one point [my father] was like, ‘I might have to kill this nigga. He is too bad. I put this nigga in the world….’” Chance trails off, leaving the rest to the imagination. “He used to say that. Only way more violently.” Chance told the Chicago Reader that he once let three months pass without speaking to his father. The silence was broken when Chance’s friend Rodney was killed in August of 2011. “He picked me up from the hospital. It was a really crazy situation that we went through,” says Chance. “And from then, we just valued each other a lot more. He really started taking my music shit seriously.”
