Knox Fortune steps into the spotlight
The Chance the Rapper producer’s journey expands with solo debut, ‘Paradise.’
If you ask Knox Fortune, perhaps the least interesting item on his résumé is winning a Grammy Award for his work on Chance the Rapper’s “Coloring Book” album in 2016. But his brief brush with one of the music industry’s crustiest institutions did produce a couple of funny/embarrassing anecdotes.
“You have to pay a lot of money to go to the Grammys — $500 — and I had no money, but I was looking more forward to the after-party,” says Fortune, who has collaborated with a many of Chicago’s brightest talents and recently released his debut solo album, “Paradise.”
Fortune, a.k.a. Kevin Rhomberg of Chicago-adjacent Oak Park, was blown away to see Quincy Jones and Don Cheadle at the after-party. And Snoop Dogg was there too.
“I was celebrating very hard, I would say,” Fortune says, “so I go up to Snoop and say, ‘I just won my first Grammy!’ and he was, like, ‘Great.’ Later, I realized he had never won a Grammy,” despite being nominated 17 times.
If anything, the somewhat self-deprecating encounter only underlined Fortune’s skepticism about the Grammys.
“I didn’t grow up with aspirations to be a superstar,” he says. “I was just interested in making cool stuff and never considered the possibility of winning one or having a friend who did. When it did happen, I thought this is cool, but this is not my end goal. It’s way cooler to make an album that people really love, not the [Recording] Academy.”
The response to “Paradise” suggests that Fortune has, indeed, succeeded in making something cool, a catchy, genre-free pop album that includes cameos from Joey Purp and Kami but is centered on his androgynous vocals and offkilter soundscapes and melodies.
Knox Fortune was the stage name suggested to Rhomberg by hip-hop artist Vic Mensa soon after they met a few years ago. Back then, Fortune was an easygoing kid from the suburbs who would venture into the city to skateboard. His soundtrack could be anything from Slayer to the Beastie Boys, and after playing around with music software on his family’s computers, he became adept at sculpting sound collages into songs and dance beats.
When he was introduced to Mensa and trumpet maestro Nico Segal by a mutual friend, Fortune found a new home.
“Meeting them, I realized there were people my age taking this stuff seriously,” he says. “They opened my eyes to what was possible to do on a professional level. Vic was the first person who took me to a studio. I didn’t know what that meant. But I had a lot of material, and it was a little more dance-centric than they were used to hearing.”
Fortune didn’t really know how his tracks fit with anything else that was happening in pop music. He had no formal music training, and he felt out of his depth when he met Segal and the other trained musicians in the now-defunct Kids These Days.
“But Nico really encouraged me,” Fortune says. “When I first started making stuff, people would say this sounds strange or off key, and Nico was telling me to embrace that: ‘Don’t let other people change your perception of music based on what is technically right.’ ”
That initial meeting paved the way to collaborations with countless artists rooted in Chicago hip-hop: Leather Corduroys, Mensa, Chance, Towkio, Kami (the acclaimed “Just Like the Movies” mixtape). Fortune not only produced much of Joey Purp’s 2016 breakthrough mixtape, “iiiDrops,” but also was Purp’s DJ on a world tour.
“I traveled the world with Joey, we were in China and Copenhagen, and it’s, like, ‘What the hell?’ ” Fortune says. “Vic fitted us together, me and Joey. It’s lame to say it was fate, but Joey and I became friends instantly, and in my experience with him, he doesn’t hit it off right away with everybody. Touring with him definitely helped my comfort level on stage.”
That is coming in handy as Fortune is playing shows for the first time as a frontman, a role he could never have envisioned for himself a few years ago.
“My dad came to a show [in December] and told me he didn’t know I could sing,” Fortune says. “I thought that was funny. I didn’t intend to keep it a secret from anybody. But when I was 21 I thought I couldn’t be a solo artist. I’d be between sessions making my own stuff, and people would ask, ‘What, bro, this is you? Why are you engineering people’s sessions?’ It took a million people telling me that for me to realize that being a solo artist wasn’t a ridiculous idea.”
“Paradise” bares only trace elements of Fortune’s other production work. Even though most of the producer’s collaborators have been hip-hop artists, his first full-length project sounds like the work of a pop omnivore, blending electronic music, soul, chamber pop, psychedelia and whatever else fires his imagination.
“The music I make is eclectic because the music I consumed is eclectic,” he says. “My parents listened to rock music, but I grew up in a much different era; skateboard music wasn’t broken up into genres. And it’s becoming more evident that the future of music is to become more genre-less.
“I don’t have a genre home. I didn’t deliberately do it, but I do follow what my instincts are telling me. I was talking to a friend about how I have to unlearn music. I listened to old beats I made, and I realized I was getting too concerned about being ‘correct.’ I had to go back into what feels right. Music is all feeling. Technique can be important, but emotion is the bigger deal.”