Names and faces
■ Chance the Rapper once sang the lyric “Brown boys are dying and none of ’em were for business / And all of ’em love they momma and all of they mommas miss ’em.” Long before he won three Grammys and acclaim for the mixtapes “Coloring Book” and “Acid Rap,” Chance was rapping about parenthood and racially motivated violence. Now the artist has two children of his own — Kensli, 5, and Marli, who turns 1 in September. “My kids are young,” he said in an interview with Parents Magazine. “Mainly, we’ve been teaching Kensli to love herself, to understand that her opinion is important, to understand that Black is beautiful and that Black power is her superpower. Marli, I’ve just been trying to teach her how to walk.” The Chicago MC has been invested in social change throughout his career. The day after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, Chance helped organize a protest in his hometown. Perhaps most notably, his nonprofit organization, SocialWorks, has been supporting Chicago Public Schools, the city’s school district, since 2016. Chance founded the youth-empowerment group with a $1-million gift, and now education weighs on his mind from a parenting perspective — especially as a debate rages around the reopening of Chicago schools in light of the coronavirus pandemic. “If we thought that teaching our kids how to read was hard, imagine teaching them that there’s an entire system of oppression that our society is built on, that they can either be complicit in or work to change,” he told Parents. “I think we have a pretty crazy opportunity right now to change the trajectory of humanity.”
■ Taylor Swift’s surprise album “folklore” is dominating the music charts, debuting at No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart this week, marking the best first-week sales of the year and giving the pop star her seventh No. 1 title on the chart. According to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, Swift’s eighth album sold 846,000 equivalent albums in the U.S. based on a combination of sales and streams. The last album to sell more units in a single week? Swift’s “Lover” album, released last August. The success makes Swift, 30, the first artist to have seven different albums sell at least 500,000 albums in a single week. Swift dropped “folklore” in a surprise form, announcing the album’s release a day before it came out on July 24. It features production and songwriting work from The National’s Aaron Dessner and frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff. With 289.85 million on-demand streams of its songs, “folklore” also marks the largest streaming week for an album by a female act this year. “Folklore” was only released digitally, but will be available as a CD on Friday.