Chance The Rapper quotes: bars on business and life.
“They don’t give nothing away. You gotta fight for your way.”
“I make money from touring and selling merchandise, and I honestly believe if you put effort into something and you execute properly, you don’t necessarily have to go through the traditional ways.”
“In order for me to continue to thrive, I need more artists to do it themselves. I don’t mean do it by yourself, like literally, like, ‘I’m doing everything.’ You can bring on your friends and professionals that you know and build a business where you’re the upper management. Where you’re the creative, and you are the last decision maker and you don’t ever have to feel compromised.”
“When you make stuff from the ‘you’ point of view, you really can’t go wrong.”
“You gotta try and flip stuff. Everything you get, you can turn into something else.”
“In the real world, we just people with ideas.”
“We only know what we know until someone knows better.”
“Depending on the story that you’re telling, you can be relatable to everybody or nobody. I try and tell everybody’s story.”
“I think our duty as American citizens is to be involved and engaged in anything that affects us. As an artist, I have to use my platform, and as a dad, a brother, and a black man, I have to be as socially woke and present as possible.”
“Some people might find this kind of talk disrespectful, but it’s exactly the opposite. The highest form of respect that we can pay to the people who came before us, the people who sacrificed for us and gave us everything, is to be better than them.”
“I realized that all of us have a responsibility to be greater than the people who came before us. We have a responsibility to be not as good as them or live up to their example, but to actually surpass them, even when it seems scary. We have to overcome that fear and be greater than our role models. We have to erase the fear and stigma behind eclipsing our heroes.”
“Living up to your heroes is amazing, but it’s not good enough. The difference between goodness and greatness is going beyond. You have to push forward and surpass their greatness in order to pay homage to their struggle.”
“I think I always knew I wasn’t gonna have a regular job.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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’ is many things. I’m constantly evolving.”
“I don’t make songs for free, I make ’em for freedom.”
“To me, I feel like basketball and hip-hop have always been kinda conjoined because they’re very similar in their competitive nature, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s about technical skill, and then there’s just God-given talent.”
“I’m lucky to be in a space where I’ve been accepted for who I am and celebrated for who I am.”
“I write a lot. There’s always just different things I’m thinking about.”
“When I write, I work off of a theme, an emotion, a narrative – thinking of it and then expounding on it.”
“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.”
“There’s a hunger in me that always wants to be creating and orating, telling people something and giving them information and getting feedback.”
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to do – work with my favorite writers and make something from scratch with them that we can feel like didn’t exist before we came in the room.”
“I can’t gain anything off of anyone else not succeeding.”
“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 f*ck with it. What’s the point?”
“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.”
“My dad is probably the most proud person when it comes to me, and we have a great relationship. If people have a compliment about my character, they usually say they can tell I was raised right, and that’s the truth.”
“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.”
“Everybody’s somebody’s everything.”
“Something I try to instill in others is to just be a good person. It’s a decision you make a million times a day. But if you just keep trying, good stuff comes to you in an ordained way.”
“I’m a patriarch now. I’ve got to go get the bread.”
“Fame or perceived success – it all comes from groupthink.”
“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”
“I’m still a very frugal person. But everything that does get spent is a reinvestment into my own music.”
“If I was to buy a suit, I’d probably go to Men’s Wearhouse – because you’re going to like the way you look; they guarantee it.”
“I still feel very young and a little undeserving and overwhelmed by a lot of the stuff that happens. I didn’t invent independence in any way; I didn’t innovate this idea. I’m following behind a lot of other people, and it takes a lot more of us to come together to regain our control and power as we should have it.”
“I’m a good man, and I’m gonna become a better man.”
“I’m sure at this point that I’m a good person. It’s not because of things that I do. It’s how I feel.”
