Chancellor Johnathan Bennett, known professionally as Chance the Rapper, is an American hip hop recording artist from the West Chatham neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
We’ve put together this huge collection of what we believe to be the best Chance the Rapper quotes to motivate you!
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45 Chance The Rapper Quotes
1. “Chance the Rapper’ is many things. I’m constantly evolving.” – Chance The Rapper
2. “Everybody’s somebody’s everything. I know you right. Nobody’s nothing. That’s right.” – Chance The Rapper
3. “I don’t know how to attack that question. Obviously violence doesn’t come from music, that’s stupid. That’s not the answer, that’s not right. But music can be very influential especially on a viral basis.” – Chance The Rapper
4. “I think even before I knew I wanted to be a rapper, I wanted to be an entertainer. I was really into Michael Jackson as a kid.” – Chance The Rapper
5. “I would think the open mic thing would be musically how he affected me, him building that space for me. And, also, in his passing, taught me that’s my job. I’m not a mentee anymore. I’m not a young artist in the same place; I’m not hungry for the same things. [The] gratification of being donned a great rapper isn’t as important as giving people the resources they need in order to make the statements they want to make.” – Chance The Rapper
6. “Kanye took me from a kid who listened to music to a kid who lived music.” – Chance The Rapper
7. “One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I’m sure it was ‘Smooth Criminal.’” – Chance The Rapper
8. “The first time I heard about Kanye, I was at Edwardo’s Natural Pizza in Hyde Park. I had this little Walkman thing, and it would play the radio. I think I heard “Through the Wire” first, and I was so into the soul sample. Like, the high-pitched—it was just some different shit that I wasn’t used to. I didn’t even know he was from Chicago. I remember listening for like, the next two hours, trying to find out who it was. Then they played “All Falls Down,” and the radio station was like, “This is Kanye West.” And I went, “Well, I’m into Kanye West.” A couple of weeks later I got the album, and then I found out I wanted to be a rapper.” – Chance The Rapper
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There’s not really a responsibility at all to tell people of your accomplishments, but I think in Kanye’s situation, it’s Kanye West.” – Chance The Rapper
10. “A cool and diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.“ – Chance The Rapper
11. “Fame or perceived success – it all comes from group think.” – Chance The Rapper
12. “I don’t really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.” – Chance The Rapper
13. “I think I always knew I wasn’t gonna have a regular job. I don’t think I really knew I was going to be a rapper until sixth grade. Even then, it was still kind of—I was in sixth grade. I was always saying I was going to become a rapper.” – Chance The Rapper
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14. “I write a lot. There’s always just different things I’m thinking about. Like, it’s getting warm outside right now, so I’m thinking about the summer and what comes with that and everything.” – Chance The Rapper
15. “Musically, from before he passed, he’s just been a huge influence, and teacher, and molder of me [from] when I was 14 years old. A father figure not just to me but everybody who grew up in that community: No-Name, Vic, Nico, Saba, Mick—anybody. As a man, also, he’s just taught me a lot of things about your role and how you speak to people. He’s just a great man.” – Chance The Rapper
16. “People wanna say that they’re part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We’re raised to believe that there’s something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I’m saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!” – Chance The Rapper
17. “The idea of ‘talking white,’ a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it’s not black and that it’s actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.” – Chance The Rapper
18. “There’s nothing like doing a show at home. When you do a show in Chicago, there’s just a certain love that you don’t feel anywhere else; it’s like home base.” – Chance The Rapper
19. “Both of my parents graduated from high school, both attended college, both have government jobs now. They’ve always been very adamant about me finishing high school and finishing college.” – Chance The Rapper
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“For me, performing is the biggest part of being a rapper. There’s nothing like the feeling of screaming your story to people.” – Chance The Rapper
21. “I don’t really see myself ever needing a house in Paris or some freaky shit like that. I just want to get old in Chicago and be with my homies and make dope music and randomly come to Harvard and give a lecture. I thought you guys were troubled kids and shit and I was coming to talk to you about getting your lives together!” – Chance The Rapper
22. “I think it’s important for me to be qualified to have an opinion on it, and it be informed, but I don’t necessarily think using my platform is always the right thing. It’s more important for [people] to have information. I don’t necessarily always have information. If they’re getting it directly from an uninformed source, or they’re getting it from a source that they don’t really have a filter on in terms of how they take it in, it kind of becomes more propaganda.” – Chance The Rapper
23. “I’d say it’s very forward. Everything you write as an artist is about your legacy and your catalog, and how you would look in a museum.” – Chance The Rapper
24. “My father always told me that my legacy would be my children. And I think the most important thing about creating is the way that your music interacts with people, and the period that it’s released in, and the periods that will have it after your death, and how it’ll work in the world.” – Chance The Rapper
25. “Probably playing a Game Boy or saying some jokes. I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That’s why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time they didn’t take me seriously for who I was. By like, eighth grade, I was really rapping. Freestyling at lunch and all that shit. Cafeteria, playground, on the school bus, at parties and shit. Everywhere, man.” – Chance The Rapper
26. “The weird thing about rap is that you don’t get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it’s probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: ‘This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.’ But in rap it’s not until you’re dead or retired that people think about it like that.” – Chance The Rapper
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27. “What’s better than followers, is actually falling in love.” – Chance The Rapper
28. “Depending on the story that you’re telling, you can be relatable to everybody or nobody. I try and tell everybody’s story.” – Chance The Rapper
29. “I always thought about how it would affect my future family. But I’m definitely more awake and understanding of the world and its functions now that I am a father.” – Chance The Rapper
30. “I like to think of my music the same way because a lot of my stuff is about my ideal world, and how I want things to function. I have a daughter who’s going to be raised in this world, and my music and my art are powerful tools in getting that to be formed the way I want it to. So I guess when we talk about legacy, I would do anything to make sure that my legacy lives on and is a healthy one, but I still look at it a little differently. I don’t think the legacy of the music is necessarily what I think about when I think of mine.” – Chance The Rapper
31. “I think it’s so dope that I’m here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that’s thriving. People are so happy Chicago’s shining that everyone is willing to say ‘I represent Chicago.’ That wasn’t always the case.” – Chance The Rapper
32. “In the real world, we just people with ideas.” – Chance The Rapper
33. “My favorite artist in the world is Michael Jackson, and he revolutionized the music video aspect of music.” – Chance The Rapper
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“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.” – Chance The Rapper
35. “The whole point of ‘Acid Rap’ was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it’s all original music and it’s got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What’s an ‘album’ these days, anyways?” – Chance The Rapper
36. “What’s wrong with me is what is right with me I am madly, insanely, in jealously in perfect love!” – Chance The Rapper
37. “Don’t make the music that they like. Make them like the music that you make. It wouldn’t be cool if you were just making it so that they fuck with it. What’s the point?” – Chance The Rapper
38. “I asked my mom for The College Dropout, but she wouldn’t get it for me. This chick I used to see in grade school’s mom bought it for me.” – Chance The Rapper
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39. “I made the decision that I was going to make rap music in, like, fourth grade, so it’s been something I was saying for a long time.” – Chance The Rapper
40. “I was at my grandma’s house, in her bedroom. She was just chilling there. I remember I was sitting, and I had to do this “Young Authors” book project. You know about those? It was fourth grade, after Dropout came out. I made a book of poems, little illustrations in them. Poems, you know? But they were really raps.” – Chance The Rapper
41. “It wasn’t until I left that I realised it’s not weird to grow up in certain cities and, by the age of 27 or 28, for all of your friends to still be alive. I can think of a lot of kids that I knew in Chicago who were supposed to grow up but didn’t.” – Chance The Rapper
42. “My grandmother is a huge part of my life. She’s just a great woman; a woman of the church. [She’s] a huge influence in my life in terms of my faith and my ideas of love, and women, and family roles: matriarchal role, patriarchal role. She’s very involved in my music and very attentive to what I do. She always wanted a song, so me and Nico, he’s Donnie Trumpet, we both are very close to her. We were making the project, we made the record for her, and we decided we wanted it to be the only single. We did it like that.” – Chance The Rapper
43. “Sometimes the truth don’t rhyme.” – Chance The Rapper
44. “There’s a hunger in me that always wants to be creating and orating, telling people something and giving them information and getting feedback. There are so many questions that I’m trying to ask, and I’m still so far from being done saying what I gotta say.” – Chance The Rapper
45. “You’re always going to have the same tools, primitive tools that people are going to touch and use to make different tonal sounds. That’s the hustle: You gotta try and flip stuff. Everything you get, you can turn into something else.” – Chance The Rapper
Summary
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