Pretty soon, Chance the Rapper is going to have to change his name to Chance the Really Good Dude Who Seems to Take Every Opportunity to Do the Right Thing, Giving Hope to People Like Me Who Think This World Is Cold, Cruel and Filled With People Who Would Put a Puppy in a Blender and Crush an Infant’s Windpipe With Their Bare Hands, and Oh, He Also Raps Sometimes.
The Chicago native took time out of his busy schedule of building a résumé for sainthood to do some more positive shit that both you and I say we need to do for our community, but both of us know good and goddamn well we aren’t going to no damn city-budget-planning meeting. But Chance the Great Human will. Because he’s better than us.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Chance showed up at a Chicago City Council meeting Tuesday to oppose the city’s plans to spend $95 million to build a police training academy. Wait ... I think the last sentence has a mistake.
I’m pretty sure Chicago is not spending damn near $100 million on law enforcement. Besides shooting black kids in the face and being nowhere to be found when other black kids shoot black kids in the face, do Chicago cops even do anything? You don’t need $95 million to build a face-shooting center. What are they spending that money on? Faces? I think that figure was actually supposed to be $9.50. Let me check.
Nope, it’s $95 million.
Anyway, Chancelor Bennett ... damn, even his real name is better than ours. If my name was Chancelor, I wouldn’t even use a nickname. You can’t have a name like Chancelor and not be excellent as fuck. And handsome. All Chancelors are handsome. Look it up. Chance patiently waited for his turn to speak, but when his turn came, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and tiny genital wart on Satan’s third penis (he has five), stood up and left.
Many speculate that Emanuel is tired of Chance the Angel Heart’s activism, but my investigative reporting told me that Emanuel had a medical emergency—specifically, that Emanuel’s layer of humanoid skin was beginning to blister because his evil soul was going into anaphylactic shock after being exposed to Chance’s goodness.
Our Lord and Rapper Chance noticed, but instead of calling Emanuel “the clear liquid that pusses out when you rip a scab off too early,” like a certain writer who writes for The Root once did while Rahm was sitting in the same room, Chance took the high road.
“I guess the mayor had to step out, but it’s cool, it’s cool, because I’m here to talk to you guys right now,” he said in that voice that sounds like fried chicken cooked in a cast-iron skillet. “It’s a very simple thing you guys have to do. We should understand financially that this proposed plan doesn’t make sense. We don’t have $95 million; there are a lot of different services that need to be funded.”
Chance went on to scold Emanuel and the City Council, informing them that he was working with Orr Academy, which had done far more with $100,000 and was right down the street from the proposed bullet-in-the-face learning annex (I don’t think that’s the official name). Perhaps the most pertinent question came at the beginning of his part of the public-participation segment, when he asked the alderman, with all the sincerity of a grandmother who finds her grandchildren outside cooking Pop-Tarts on an open flame (no, that’s not a personal story): “What is y’all doing?”
“It would be awesome, though, if we could get them pools at their school or a new library or a museum or any of the things that are proposed in the budget for this $95 million cop academy, ” said Chance the Golden Soul. He later added: “Obviously, schooling is my big thing. But there’s a lot of ways to transform the city that don’t have anything to do with police training.”
He didn’t use the word “motherfucker” one time, but went on to say: “You guys have a lot of power. ... That’s the reason I showed up at 8 a.m. It’s because I feel like maybe, if you guys just hear me say it, it might make a difference.”
Wait. He showed up at 8 a.m.? What is he? Chancelor the Better Than Us ended his speech, but not before offering to take pictures with anyone who wanted to get a photo. Before you even comment on how you would have done the same thing—stop lying. It’s past noon now and there’s still a little bit of breadcrumb in the corner of your left eye. Chance hoped that his voice could lend some logic and understanding to the debate, but did it work?
Nope. The City Council decided to fund the face-shooting facility anyway, because ... evil.
But you can still watch Chance fight for his community in the video below.