When Vic Mensa bounded onstage in Chicago last week, he was a rock star. Maybe this is a Chicago-specific thing. When I saw Mensa open the Coachella mainstage a couple of years ago, he was just a pretty-fun presence, a young and vaguely anonymous rapper doing whatever he could to fill up that enormous stage and ensure that a few of the kids in that vast throng remembered his name after the weekend was over. But in Chicago, showing up as a surprise guest during his friend Joey Purp's Pitchfork Festival set, Mensa was a conquering hero. The Chicago after-school freestyle-cipher scene that produced Mensa also gave us Chance The Rapper, a transcendent talent who's inevitably come to overshadow his whole circle. But that scene is functioning just fine even with Chance off headlining every festival in existence. Last weekend in Chicago, Mensa careened across that stage with Purp, Towkio, Knox Fortune, Peter Cottontail, and assorted friends and well-wishers, all of them looking overjoyed to be there, holding the stage at the same festival where they'd once been kids in the crowd. Away from Chicago, Mensa can come across like a half-corny industry plant, a label's attempt to make its own Chance after realizing that they couldn't sign the real Chance. But in the flesh in his hometown, Mensa looked like a whole lot more than that. And on The Autobiography, his long-awaited debut album, he's more than that, too.