Chance The Rapper Calls Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq “Some Bill Cosby ‘Pull Up Your Pants’ Stuff”
It’s been a great year for Chance The Rapper, as Tom noted in Status Ain’t Hood this week. Dude has just been killing shit on the regular, but perhaps the one thing he can’t kill despite how hard he tries is Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. The Chicago native already indicted Lee’s film as “exploitative and problematic,” but as Pitchfork points out, he isn’t finished.
Responding to Spike Lee’s comment that Chance hasn’t criticized Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel because his father works in the mayor’s office, Chano went in further on Chicago radio station WGCI today, calling the film “some Bill Cosby pull up your pants stuff” among some smart commentary attributing much of Chicago’s gun violence to PTSD:
The reason why we’re dying isn’t because there’s two head gangbangers that are into it. We’re dying because we all have PTSD, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder. Kids as young as seven, and younger than that, have seen people murdered in front of them. So that starts a paranoia in your mind that you’re walking around with. When you’re walking around and you feel like people are trying to kill you, you shoot when you get scared. That’s a problem that even I have. That’s a problem that a lot of people suffer. And I feel like he didn’t address that. He made it seem like we’re doing it because of gang life, and because our male ego is being compromised when we don’t fight. But that’s the smallest form of it.
After that, in true Chance fashion, he lightened the mood, caroling Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” and announcing the Warmest Winter initiative in which he hopes to raise $100,000 to provide children in Chicago with Winter Coats. As active as he is in his community, it is hard not to take his opinions seriously.
Check out the interview on WGCI in its entirety below.