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Photography By: Stephanie Koch

It’s been a banner year for coming up Chicago rappers as young acts like Tree, Alex Wiley, and of course Chance The Rapper have gotten national attention. Vic Mensa’s year has been a little bumpier: His band Kids These Days broke up after releasing one album (the Jeff Tweedy-produced Traphouse Rock) and he’s had to deal with endless comparisons after Acid Rap blew up for his friend and fellow Save Money crew member Chance. But Vic’s proper solo debut INNANETAPE dropped on September 30 and has earned him renewed attention on the back of tracks like “Orange Soda.” INNANETAPE is a strong showcase for a budding solo artist, displaying a variety of songwriting talent from the easygoing near singing of “Orange Soda” to the melancholy ode to Chicago’s fallen “Holy Holy.”

Like Chance, Vic has avoided signing to a label after the Kids These Days breakup, but he’s still making moves, wrapping up a tour with J. Cole and getting ready for another set of shows in January with U.K. electronic duo Disclosure. Besides touring, Vic is currently reworking some of the INNANETAPE tracks like first single “Did It B4” for rerelease and putting together some of the songs that got cut from the tape. XXL caught up with Vic to talk about his early days tagging on Chicago’s South Side, The Beatles’ influence on INNANETAPE, and why his haters need to step up their game.—As told to Eric Thurm

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On Growing Up In Chicago’s Hyde Park:

Vic Mensa: It’s not that different from growing up on the rest of the South Side, but in a lot of ways it’s very similar. Not necessarily right here [at the University of Chicago]. Hyde Park is divided more or less into two halves, geographically but also in terms of class. University Hyde Park is a completely different Hyde Park than where I spent a lot my formative hip-hop type years. I don’t really get along well with the university’s context. More often than not they just tear down things that mean shit to me.

But growing up in Hyde Park was dope as fuck though. I spent a lot of time up here and I spent time on 53rd, that’s where I got introduced to so much hip-hop. It was just fun to come through and sneak into the Lab School and talk to bitches and shit. I had a lot of fun growing up in Hyde Park. We threw water balloons at kids. I painted my name on the outside of an abandoned church. I tried to shoot a video inside that church. I had the wildest story of coming out of there and getting chased by the cops. I climbed up to the top of the roof, jumped over a couple of rooftops and climbed down a fire escape and like shimmied away GI Joe style and a bunch of university students who were in the church taking Tumblr pictures all got arrested.

I went to a Jewish preschool in Hyde Park. I didn’t know it was Jewish, but it was cool. A lot of kids there weren’t Jewish. I think it’s cool for kids to grow up like that, since kids don’t know about race. Once they get older then they start to adopt more of their race roles and prejudices. But Hyde Park was a good place to live for all kinds of people together.

On Graffiti:

Vic Mensa: That was part of my childhood, for real. The first time a girl was trying to fuck me I was at the [Hyde Park graffiti] wall, I definitely got like arrested over by the wall before, ran from the cops. Did my first piece over at the wall. Found out about J Dilla at the wall.

This is one of Kram’s pieces. That’s a kid I know in the neighborhood, ridiculously smart, very troubled. You know, he just had a lot of problems with drugs, and with jail.

And then there was JAM Crew, which was a crew I was a part of when I was on graffiti. Those were all my big brothers in JAM Crew, all my Hyde Park people.

This is a KTD tag from back when Kids These Days was around. That’s some shit I wrote on a long time ago. “Save Money KTD.” And DARE, rest in peace, that’s the guy that “Holy Holy” is dedicated to. Rest in peace Killer Cam.

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On Chicago’s Gun Violence:

Vic Mensa: I get tired of playing the Cornel West role with Chicago violence, because I just do. But people always ask me about it, and it’s a complex issue, it’s not really something that can be easily answered. And so I tend to just get prompted into going into it, and it’s difficult because the violence is a representation of poison in the community, and in a lot of different facets.

It’s just a lack of love and appreciation for life. Throughout public schools and households and just in neighborhoods, you get treated with hostility from a young age. Black kids get suspended, statistically, so much more than white kids. So they teach us from a young age that we are bad. The 3rd grade equivalent of being a criminal is being a bad kid, being suspended from school. You get convinced that you are bad so fuck it, you adopt that role. That’s who you’ve been told you are, so that’s who you are.

So many young mothers and fathers don’t really exist in a lot of situations, and a lot of mothers besides being kids themselves find themselves kind of resentful of the situation they’re in, and just not mature enough emotionally to deal with it in a positive way. So they’re beating on their kids, cussing them out, and just all around hostility builds into a hostile person once that person is of age to reciprocate that energy to the world. You give off what you’re given. Wealth stands within itself, it propagates itself, and the same is true of poverty.

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On Influences And Cohesion In INNANETAPE:

Vic Mensa: I was really influenced by Big L Elvis Costello and Blood Orange for “Run” specifically, Andre 3000 and Outkast generally. I was listening to a lot of The Love Below. And a lot of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for album construction and fluidity and cohesiveness.

In the days leading up to the release, I was worried that it would come out and that it would have some of the same problems that Kids These Days’ Traphouse Rock did, which was that that album was seen as being too all over the place and not consistent and cohesive enough. So I took special measures—the same way I did with Traphouse Rock, but I definitely did a lot of specific things to make sure INNANETAPE blended together with all these sounds and styles, but still blended together as an album.

So the way the drum break from “Welcome To INNANET” solos out at the end and speeds up to the tempo of the drum break from “Orange Soda” and snaps into it seamlessly. These are two very different songs, sonically, but I was able to give off the impression of tying them together through doing something like that. It makes it feel like one project and one album.

I just tried to lead the listener into every twist and turn I was taking, because I took a lot of them. “Hollywood LA” has an outro that blends into “Holy Holy,” so just a bunch of shit like that. Even at the end of “Run,” I had my homie, who’s not really a bass player, shout out to Slaydrian, play some punk rock-type bass on there before Thundercat was on the song, and at the end there’s a slide out of it. I tried to cut “That Nigga” into the end of “Run” mad quickly, just the slide there. You’ve just got to make sense of the chords as it slides into something a bit higher.

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On Questions He’s Never Asked:

Vic Mensa: I just wish people would ask me more random shit, like what you like to eat for breakfast in the morning, shit like that. Niggas ask me the same questions all the time. A lot of people write shit about me, they don’t really know shit. All they know is that I’m like, Chance’s friend or some shit. But I like fucking bacon and egg sandwiches, man. I just love bacon and egg sandwiches, dog, for real. All types, but like bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches, that’s my shit, with like an over easy egg, yolk runny. Sometimes that shit will get in my beard, that’s nasty, but that’s what I like to eat.

One thing people don’t ask me about enough because they don’t know, is how fucking good Save Money is. Like Joey Purp, Kami De Chukwu. These niggas are like, very good rappers. Very, very good rappers. Purp is on “Fear And Doubt” off the tape.

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On Producing:

Vic Mensa: I don’t necessarily have the direction all figured out. I just do what I feel, and a lot of the time it’s different on different days, especially because sometimes, with samples, I just sample all types of shit, just because I listen to so many types of things. I don’t really listen to a lot actively these days, but I’m very versed in a lot of different types of music, so it’s like, I could be sampling Chubby Checker, “The Twist,” vinyl, and sampling an old Isley Brothers song, which is what I sampled for “Did It B4.” I doubt it would ever get cease-and-desisted because I chopped it so much. Any sample I use, I just completely rework it to be way different from a straight groove.

I would’ve put “Did It B4,” one of my first beats, in the later half of the tape, somewhere near “Run” and “Yap Yap.” I didn’t want to have too many songs, but I also let people influence me too much, which is something you never want to do as an artist. It’s so much better to just follow your gut. And when I dropped that song the response was kind of mixed and mild, which I thought was unexpected, it was weird. I’m a rapper, I’m a student of rap, and I was a student of rap before I was a rapper. I really know rap, and I really know that I was rapping pretty good on “Did It B4.” I thought it was interesting—I thought that the guitars, the beat, and the chaos of it was cool. But it didn’t connect with people like that, and I kind of let that and other people’s opinions and shit influence me a bit too much in regards to that song. But I’m working on it right now with Michael Uzowuru and Om’Mas Keith before the tour. So I’m going to rerelease it, probably with Leather Corduroys on it, and that’ll be dope.

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On What’s Next:

Vic Mensa: A year and a half: Superstardom. That’s what we’re gonna go for. I’m splitting time between my mama’s house, my girlfriend’s crib in LA, my manager’s crib in LA. There are a lot of places I stay. I don’t live in LA though. I’ve just been working with my people, you know, and also working with a bunch of new people. It’s not an LA thing, it’s not a Chicago thing, it’s not a New York thing. I’ve just been given a lot of support by people that appreciate what I do, understand it, and want to see me win, and they connect me with good people everywhere. So that’s really all it is.

I have an idea in my head of a Gorillaz-esque song with live drums that I want to make. I don’t know what song it is, but I’ve been thinking about it for some time. Stylistically, I’m not really sure. I’m writing a song to an LCD Soundsystem joint right now, I forget what it’s called. I’m probably just going to drop some of these other songs—they were really album cuts, they weren’t like singles. I’ll probably drop them somewhere, because I just want them to see the light of day. Because there’s a lot of other dope shit I did for the album.

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