HONORS STUDENTS FROM CHICAGO RAP'S FRESHMAN CLASS
Alex Wiley, Saba, Spenzo, Taylor Bennett, and Zmoney all have new mixtapes that should light the fuses on their careers.
Alex Wiley, Saba, Spenzo, Taylor Bennett, and Z Money all have new mixtapess that should light the fuses on their careers.
It’s been more than two years since drill music and its best-known practitioner, Chief Keef, broke out of the south side, but a casual observer could easily get the impression that they’re still the only thing happening in Chicago rap. Two recent high-profile Web documentaries—World Star Hip Hop’s ambitious and messy The Field, which came out in January, and Noisey’s sensationalist and repugnant Chiraq, which ran weekly from January till March—both focused on the drill scene, and in February the folks at WTTW’s Chicago Tonight ran a story that sounded like they’d just discovered it.
Hip-hop fans around the country know better than to equate Chicago strictly with drill—and the reason they know can be summed up in a single name. Chance the Rapper is proof that a local MC can rocket to international fame without hitching a ride on drill. It’s been a year since
Acid Rap came out, and these days Chance makes headlines even when he’s not releasing music. When he was briefly hospitalized last month for tonsillitis and the flu, missing a Coachella date, Rolling Stone and Spin reported on it. He’s high-profile enough that Drake took a shot at him on “Draft Day.”
Fans in Chicago can tell you lots more about who or what’s coming next, of course. The bop scene took over the south and west sides last summer, and now it might break nationally— ebullient duo Sicko Mobb signed to Sony/ATV late last year, and bop king Dlow landed a deal with Atlantic after “The Dlow Shuffle” went viral this winter (in June he and frequent collaborator Lil Kemo perform at the United Center as part of WGCI’s Summer Jam). Calumet City singer-rapper Tink dropped an excellent mixtape in January called Winter’s Diary 2, and now she’s working with superproducer Timbaland. Lucki Ecks recently took time out from working on the follow-up to his brilliant 2013 debut, Alternative Trap, to open a few tour dates for Detroit rapper Danny Brown.
Zoom in one more level, and you get an even higher-resolution picture—you can see dozens of talented locals releasing material that could catapult them onto a bigger stage. For this piece I talked to five of them: Alex Wiley, Saba, Spenzo, Taylor Bennett, and ZMoney. These are far from the only rappers in town whose mixtapes could hit it big outside Chicago—it’s all but impossible to keep up with everyone—but they’re the most promising.
I FIRST MET THE PUCKISH Alex Wiley while working on a story about Kembe X—he and Wiley are both members of the Village collective. In fact, part of what got me interested in the Village in the first place was Wiley’s fast-paced, acrobatic rapping on Kembe’s 2011 mixtape Self Rule. Since then the collective has grown: Kembe is now working in LA, and rapper- singer Jean Deaux has collaborated with UK pop-rock band Glass Animals as well as Top Dawg Entertainment MC Isaiah Rashad (also part of the Village), who’s been touring with fellow TDE member Schoolboy Q.
Last year Wiley, who’s now 20, signed with local indie hip-hop label Closed Sessions and released his debut, Club Wiley, a psychedelic, maximalist mixtape stacked with high-profile guests—among them Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs, GLC, and his childhood pals Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper.
He’d prioritized flow over content, resulting in an abundance of playful, vigorous, and not especially thoughtful rhymes. Since then Wiley has become a more introspective writer, and he demonstrates his evolution on the mixtape Vil
lage Party, which comes out May 27.
AUSTIN RAPPER-PRODUCER Tahj Chandler, aka Saba, released his debut solo mixtape,
Get Comfortable, at the end of 2012, but the 19-year-old has been making music for more than a decade. He started playing piano when he was seven, and a couple years later, after hearing Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs,” he started recording rap songs on a four-track in his basement. “After that I was like, ‘OK, clearly this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life,’” he says.
At first Chandler was too shy to perform in public, but in 2011, a friend and collaborator who raps as Frsh Waters introduced him to the open mikes at YouMedia Center and Young Chicago Authors. “Going to open mikes probably has changed my life in a drastic way—you can’t rap in front of people and be a shy kid,” Chandler says. “It’s just a matter of going up there and having people believe in you. That was the first time I ever felt that for real—because we always made music, but it never left my basement until I was 15 or 16.”
That “we” mostly refers to Pivot Gang, a west-side crew that includes Chandler, Frsh Waters, Joseph Chilliams, John Walt, MFn Melo, Sway Swala, Kevo B, and Smack. Their impressive debut mixtape, Jimmy, came out in the fall. (“Jimmy” is Frsh Waters’s real first name; he’s in prison, but nobody would say why.) Chandler’s got big plans for Pivot Gang: “I want to be like a supergroup, a super boy band.”
SPENZO
“I WAS BORN INTO a family of music,” says Demarius “Spenzo” Johnson. His mother sang in the choir at Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, and his stepfather is DJ Deeon, whose raw, raunchy ghetto- house records helped establish the untouchable reputation of southside label Dance Mania in the 90s. “When he’d do parties I would go with him,” Johnson says. “I would take the speakers with him.”
The 18- year- old MC says his lineage has had a big influence on his sound. “Wife Er,” a catchy club anthem with a beat by Young Chop (most famous for producing Chief Keef ’s “I Don’t Like”), has a dreamy, f l oating blanket of synths whose heavenward surge feels just a bit like gospel, and Johnson’s nonchalant lyrics about casual sex wouldn’t sound out of place in a ghetto-house track. Johnson originally dropped “Wife Er” on the 2013 mixtape In Spenzo We Trust, and it’s since become his biggest song—Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah has been listening to it before games, and Johnson says he’s seen people singing along with it at clubs. “You can’t pay people to recite your lyrics,” he says. “So I just listen, and it make you feel some type of way.”
TAYLOR BENNETT
EVERY WEEKDAY AT 6 AM, Taylor Bennett wakes up, puts on his uniform—khakis, suit jacket, white dress shirt, red tie, black shoes, black belt—and heads to the Bronzeville campus of the Urban Prep Academy. At 4 PM, after his classes end, he goes straight to a studio; lately he’s been working on his second mixtape, Mainstream
Music, which came out May 4. The 18-year-old has a deal with his parents to put school first for now, but once he graduates in June he’ll pursue rapping full-time for a year; if his career doesn’t take off, he’ll go to college when that time’s up. His dad, Ken Williams-Bennett, isn’t worried: “I expect to see big things out of him,” he says.
Williams- Bennett has good reason to be optimistic: his other son is Chance the Rapper. Bennett is used to hearing about his brother, but he doesn’t let that get in his way. “My pops told me something that was super important right before I made Mainstream Music, and I think it helped me out a lot,” he says. “He told me, ‘Stop worrying about if you’re gonna sound like Chance.’ My voice might sound like him, but we’re two totally different people.” On his debut mixtape, last June’s The Taylor
Bennett Show, his fiery, mischievous raps make him sound like a running back cutting through a defensive line—he sticks to the ground, in contrast to Chance’s aerial acrobatics. And Bennett has exhibited impressive growth on the recent singles and one-off freestyles he released to promote Mainstream Music. On April’s “New Chevy,” a single featuring King Louie, Bennett rap-sings over an alluring R&B piano melody with an assured, easygoing flow.
ZMONEY
“IT’S 90 PERCENT BUSINESS, 10 percent rap,” Zernardo “ZMoney” Tate says of his music career. “That’s why I’m in the place where I’m right now.” When he says “place” he’s referring not only to his position as a 21- year- old rapper who makes $ 2,500 a show ( or at least says he does) but also to where we meet— westside soul- food restaurant Emma’s, which he opened in December ( it’s named after his grandmother).
The simple, homey interior of Emma’s stands in sharp contrast to Tate’s big-money look— he’s wearing a stylish leather jacket loaded with zippers, several tasteful gold chains, a couple enormous rings, and a chunky, flashy watch. His love of luxury is all over his music too. On “Ferragamo,” from last year’s Rich B4
Rap, he lists brand names he wears. Tate is working only aboveboard angles now— he’s got his restaurant, and he’s hoping to open a car wash and launch a couple clothing lines. And then there’s his burgeoning hip-hop career.
“At first I was looking for somebody to put some money behind and invest in, ’cause I’ve always had an ear for music,” he says. “But it turns out I was the guy who I was looking for.” Sometime this summer he plans to drop three mixtapes at once, collectively titled 3mpire. He’s teasing that release with a compilation of new and previously released material called The
Greatest Trap Show on Earth, which is supposed to be out by the time this is published. v