Chance The Rapper is on Twitter teasing new music and it sounds like fans are in for a strong return. The rapper retweeted a short video by rapper Vic Mensa titled “The Return” and featuring a short clip of Vic in front of the board playing the new song. Mensa tweeted, “I think we got […]
Two years removed from the 2020 uprisings over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it doesn’t seem like much has changed in the US. Calls to defund police departments across the nation were more or less ignored (or outright defied), and in just one month, the number of headlines reporting police shootings of citizens is frankly kind of alarming.
Thus, Chicago rapper Supa Bwe has returned with his first new song of the year, reuniting with his old friend Chance The Rapper to remind us that “ACAB.” The new song, built over a plodding beat and featuring additional guest appearances from 7000 and Maryland underground rap rising star Redveil, takes the corrupt institution to task, with all four rappers calling out the overall failure to honor the “protect and serve” motto throughout the past few… well… forever.
According to Supa Bwe’s Instagram, the song is the first single from his upcoming project No Thanks, which is also his first project since 2019’s Jaguar. 2019 also contained “Rememory,” Supa’s last collaboration with Chance The Rapper, on the Just Say Thank You EP. Meanwhile, Chance recently expanded his own collaboration catalog, teaming up with Dionne Warwick on the soul legend’s “Nothing’s Impossible.” While he hasn’t been as busy on the music front since dropping The Big Day in 2019, there’s no time like the present for him to get busy on a follow-up.
Listen to “ACAB” above.
We don’t talk enough about the meteoric rise of Chance the Rapper. Just 10 years ago, Chance was known less as “the rapper” and more as Chancelor Johnathan Bennett, a Chicago high school student who had been suspended for 10-days for marijuana possession. That 10-day suspension gave Chance the opportunity to drill down and focus on his passion for rap, giving the world his debut mixtape 10 Day, a release that put Chance’s name on everyone’s radar and even garnered comparisons to fellow Chicago rapper Kanye West.
He followed up that release just a year later with the modern classic, Acid Rap, and then the beloved ColoringBook, which led to more critical acclaim, a record label bidding war, and multiple tv appearances. Chance showed up on everything from The Eric Andre Show to Ellen DeGeneres, eventually landing a dual role as host and musical guest on SNL (he was also the Obama family’s favorite rapper and regular guest). By the decade’s end, Chance would score a small role in The Lion King, befriend and collaborate with his hero Kanye West (producing Kanye’s best late-period song, “Ultra Light Beam”) and serve as the new host of the relaunched Punk’d.
Even your grandma knows who Chance the Rapper is. And while that doesn’t sound like the coolest flex, it certainly signifies just how huge Chance has really become.
If those bonafides aren’t enough to convince you, Chance has now landed the ultimate collaboration — his very own Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor — Mint Chocolate Chance. Now Lil’ Chano from 79th sits alongside other cultural giants like Jerry Garcia, Phish, and Stephen Colbert as his new flavor joins Ben & Jerry’s permanent roster of flavors.
But is Mint Chocolate Chance any good? We tried the new ice cream flavor to find out!
Mint Chocolate Chance, perhaps unsurprisingly, features a cool and refreshing mint chocolate base with chunks of brownie bites inside. Think mint chocolate chip ice cream with the chips replaced by giant pieces of soft, fudgy brownie. The flavor was apparently inspired by Chance’s childhood practice of mixing his favorite mint chocolate chip ice cream with his mother’s homemade brownies.
“It amazes me that no one thought to combine brownies and mint chocolate chip and I can’t wait to share it with everyone,” Chance said of the new flavor.
He’s right — how the hell is this a new flavor? It seems like one of the most obvious flavor combinations of all time! So it shouldn’t surprise you when I say that it works, because Mint Chocolate Chance is goddamn (forgive me Chance) delicious. The ice cream is wonderfully rich and creamy, it’s so thick and dense that it actually bent my spoon the first time I tried to scoop it out of the pint. Use an ice cream scooper. The brownies are sourced from New York’s Greyston Bakery, which prides itself on its use of real quality ingredients, and that commitment to craft shines through here.
A lot of times ice cream fillings, while always appreciated, are of subpar quality. It’s easy to hide grainy cookie dough or a subpar almond under layers of sweet, rich ice cream, who’s going to notice? Me, that’s who. So I’m really loving how good these brownie bites are, they are somehow still soft despite being totally frozen. It’s not quite as delicious as adding a warm fresh-baked brownie to your bowl of ice cream, but it comes pretty damn close. The mix of brownie and mint tastes like the best Andes mint you’ve ever had.
If your mouth is watering but ice cream is something you can only stomach a spoonful at a time, you’ll be happy to know Mint Chocolate Chance is also available in non-dairy form. The dairy-free version is made utilizing sunflower butter, which helps to keep the ice cream dense and creamy and not weird and icy like most dairy-free ice creams tend to be. The flavor isn’t quite as good though, it’s a bit duller in comparison to the OG Mint Chocolate Chance. Maybe that’s something I wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t eating them side by side, but I’m not about to sit here and tell you they taste nearly the same, they don’t really.
As is the case with most celebrity Ben & Jerry’s flavors, a percentage of sales of Mint Chocolate Chance will go to charity, in this case, Chance’s own five-year-old non-profit SocialWorks, which concerns itself with empowering Chicago youth through arts, education, and civic engagement, with programming that focuses on education, homelessness, mental health, and performing and literary arts.
Chance, who cut his teeth at open mics at libraries and after-school programs alongside fellow Chicago rapper Vic Mensa, has come full-circle in his career. Scoring his own delicious ice cream flavor from one of the most well-loved ice cream brands in the country feels like a fitting trophy as he approaches the ten-year anniversary of his first mixtape.
The Bottom Line:
A great addition to Ben & Jerry’s permanent lineup but opt for the dairy version over its less flavorful dairy-free counterpart. Imagine the thickest, creamiest mint chocolate ice cream you’ve ever had with big fudge brownies bites in each bite. Simple. Easy. Delicious.
Jimmy Fallon is a menace and he must be stopped. His new show, That’s My Jam, riffs on some of the musical segments from The Tonight Show, which he also hosts, but also adds a head-to-head challenge aspect for its celebrity contestants with added, over-the-top consequences for the losers — and sometimes, even the winners, as Chance The Rapper and Joseph Gordon-Levitt learned in last night’s series premiere.
Chance and JGL, and their opponents, Alessia Cara and Josh Groban, were shut into their own isolation booths for a challenge called “Say It, Don’t Spray It,” in which the challenge is to sing along to a hit karaoke-style until the music suddenly drops out and the lyrics must be completed. Forgetting the lyric will cause the microphones to spray the team that misses the lyrics with water while getting it right will cause the other team to get hosed.
For the final round, the chosen song was Bon Jovi‘s “Livin’ On A Prayer” sung by both teams. The music drops out just as Jon belts “we’ll make it, I swear” and JGL absolutely nails it — only for him and Chance to catch a faceful of H2O just as they begin to celebrate. It turns out, there might be a few kinks to work out of the system. To make up for the mistake, Alessia and Josh get splashed as well — although the “Here” singer is just small enough to avoid the worst of it — so justice was (sorta) served.
Watch Chance The Rapper and Joseph Gordon-Levitt get accidentally hosed down in the clip above.
Jimmy Fallon’s got a new game show called That’s My Jam coming to NBC, and in a sneak preview last night, audiences got a glimpse of what’s in store when the show airs beginning next week/year. The show, which is inspired in part by comedy bits from Fallon’s version of The Tonight Show, pairs celebrity teams to compete in musical challenges from the previous show such as “Mixtape Medley Showdown,” “Slay It, Don’t Spray It,” and “Wheel of Musical Impressions.” (Remember Drop The Mic and Lip Sync Battle? Shows like this always have viral promise.)
In the sneak peek, the teams consist of Alessia Cara partnered with Josh Groban and Chance The Rapper paired with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so the stage is already set for some hilarious shenanigans. Competing in a Musical Genre Challenge after Chance pulls the lever on a massive video screen, he spins the wheel again and ends up with Country Rock as the genre for a remix of hip-hop staple, Nelly’s “Hot In Herre.”
As the band strikes up a suitable instrumental, Chance gets really into character, affecting an Elvis-inspired “country” voice (which he even uses on the ad-libs!) and goes for broke to the delight of the studio audience, his fellow competitors, and of course, the host, who sings along with that signature Jimmy Fallon grin plastered across his face. Watch the hilarious clip above.
Before Travis Scott and Cardi B were considered hip-hop’s consummate pitch people, Chance The Rapper was the poster child for brand partnerships. In recent years, he’s fallen back a bit as he embraced family life as a husband and father of two, but that doesn’t mean he won’t still do the occasional deal — especially when it’s for a good cause.
His latest is a crossover with ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s which will see him grace a new flavor of the ice cream. It’s a mint ice cream loaded with fudge brownie pieces and it comes in both dairy and non-dairy versions. According to a press release, the new flavor was inspired by Chance’s childhood experiment with adding his mom’s brownies to mint ice cream, which wound up becoming his favorite. A portion of the proceeds will go to his SocialWorks non-profit, with both versions coming to stores in early 2022.
From a musical standpoint, we haven’t heard much from Chance this year, but what we have heard has been marked by notable collaborations. Early this year, he reunited with longtime his Chicago brother Vic Mensa for “Shelter” with Wyclef Jean, their first work together in years. Meanwhile, more recently, he made good on the promise of collaborating with R&B legend Dionne Warwick, sharing “Nothing’s Impossible” in November.
Back in December of last year (where does the time go?), Twitter helped create the unlikeliest of connections when legendary R&B singer Dionne Warwick tagged Chance The Rapper to tease him about his stage name. After Chance finished freaking out about being acknowledged by the music icon, she invited him to “rap together,” leading to Chance telling Stephen Colbert that the pair had collaborated on some new music. Now, with just a month to go until Christmas, the duo has shared the results: the uplifting ballad, “Nothing’s Impossible.”
Created in collaboration with Chance’s non-profit Social Works and the forward-thinking foundation Not Impossible, the new song popped up on YouTube through Empire Distribution and counts Chance’s Chicago-based collaborators Smoko Ono and Peter Cottontale as producers and composers along with Damon Elliott. The R&B star, who recently made a surprise appearance on SNL, handles the comforting chorus and bridge.
Chance was really enthused about the collaboration last year, telling Colbert, “I was very surprised that she knew who I was. But it was awesome… It feels like my first taste of fame. I went to Starbucks the other day and they’re like, ‘Are you the guy who got tweeted by Dionne Warwick?’”
It looks like Freddie Gibbs finally got those Chicago Bulls tickets he wanted — and he walked away with a player’s jersey as a bonus. And, as it turns out, the person he has to thank for it all is the one who was blocking him from getting the tickets in the first place: Chance The Rapper.
Last week, the Gary, Indiana MC lamented his inability to secure tickets to a home game (Gary is much closer to Chicago than Indianapolis, where the Pacers play, despite Chicago’s location in a different state), tweeting, “Can’t get no f*ckin bulls tickets cuz they give em all to Chance the Rapper.” He pointedly reminded the Bulls account of his longtime fandom and needled the Windy City native, joking that “Chance a bucks fan and y’all give him 30 tickets.”
Can’t get no fuckin bulls tickets cuz they give em all to Chance the Rapper
— Big
(@FreddieGibbs) November 3, 2021
Chance a bucks fan and y’all give him 30 tickets @chicagobulls it’s cool see y’all Monday
— Big
Shit crazy I was going to the game when them niggaz was trash
— Big
However, earlier this week, Gibbs did manage to make it out to the Bulls’ home game against the Brooklyn Nets, where he met up with Chance himself after taking in the game from some courtside seats. “Chance took my tickets, but he gave me a couple,” he goofed in a video posted from the lounge, where he hung out with The Rapper. However, Chance had a different story for fans: “I don’t got no tickets, so please don’t let n****s tell you I got your tickets,” he pled. “Keep it straight they didn’t have no tickets for Freddie and they blamed it on me.” Gibbs piled on the pressure, though, referring to Chance sharing the tickets as one of his many acts of charity. “He do good for the community,” he teased. “He gave a n**** two. I appreciate it.”
Chance buy up all the bulls tickets rich ass nigga pic.twitter.com/CxWGNLG38B
— Big
Big Lord
pic.twitter.com/d3YvqH7dNC
— Big
To commemorate the occasion, Gibbs came away with one hell of a souvenir of the event as well: Bulls guard/forward DeMar DeRozan‘s jersey, which the Comptonite shared with Freddie after the game.
Love bro @DeMar_DeRozan
pic.twitter.com/dghUmqyKME
— Big
