Chance The Rapper Almost Signed to Sony

Tethered to Chance the Rapper's tremendous success is the fact that he is doing it all as an independent artist. His last release, Coloring Book, even made Billboard history as the first album to chart within the top ten off the Album 200 chart off of streaming alone. In a recent chat with Bakari Kitwana as a special guest at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, though, Chance revealed that he almost took that major label money after the success of his mixtape 10 Day.

"I remember I had a label meeting with this woman who I really respect, and don’t want to paint her as a bad person at all," he said. "A woman named Sylvia Rhone, who’s at Sony Music. That was the one deal I was going to take. I don’t really talk about it enough, but there is this deal that I was going to take in 2012 after my first mixtape, 10 Day. I was getting courted by labels and I remember I went to this meeting. I got flown out to New York."

Chance then details the reactions of Rhone and L.A. Reid upon hearing his music and the feelings he had knowing that they liked it. His father, Ken Bennet, called him though, advising him not to take the deal. "They were talking about printing up contracts then, and my dad called me and was like, 'Son, I know you’re in New York and you’re doing something really important, but remember: don’t sign anything.' And I was like, 'Damn, is he in this bitch?' And moral of the story, I didn’t sign that shit."

So there it is. Chance's trajectory within hip-hop could have been vastly different if not for the intervention of his father. Watch the full conversation in the video up above.

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