Chance the Rapper has entered the news business by buying the Chicagoist website. He announced the purchase through a song on Thursday.
Chicagoist was among a network of city-oriented websites, including New York’s Gothamist, that found a following amid an appetite for a fresher, younger take on local news in the US.
The sites were abruptly closed in 2017 by publisher Joe Ricketts, a conservative mogul who also owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team, after staff voted to unionise.
New York public radio station WNYC later acquired Gothamist and affiliated sites.
“I look forward to relaunching it and bringing the people of Chicago an independent media outlet focused on amplifying diverse voices and content,” Chance said in a statement.
The 25-year-old rapper expressed his intentions quite differently when he broke the news in a song, ‘I Might Need Security’.
“I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist b*****s out of business,” he rapped on the song, one of four he released on Thursday.
On the track, whose chorus is a melodious rendering of the F-word, Chance attacks Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel over police brutality.
“Rahm, you done! / I’m expectin’ resignation / An open investigation on all of these paid vacations for murderers,” he said, in apparent reference to police officers who are suspended rather than fired for misconduct.
Chance, whose real name is Chancelor Bennett, has achieved striking success over the past two years despite defying industry convention by self-releasing all of his music.
In 2017, he donated $1 million for schools in the Midwestern metropolis amid a government funding crisis in a dispute with the Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner — whom Chance also lambasts in his new song.
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