President Barack Obama gave hip-hop artist Chance the Rapper a bit of career advice during a recent White House event.
In an August interview with GQ magazine, the artist said he joined other celebrities like DJ Khaled, Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj at the White House in April to discuss the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative and criminal justice reform.
“At the end [of the meeting], everybody takes a group photo, and he’s signing stuff. And he keeps pushing me to the back, and I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why he won’t sign my shit.’ And he makes me wait till the end, and then he brings me up to his office, and we had a really good conversation about what I was working on. He told me I needed to start selling my music,” Chance says.
“He’s a good man. Even if he wasn’t president, if his ass worked at, like, Red Lobster, he’d be just a good man working at Red Lobster,” the Chicago rapper added.
Chance’s third mixtape, “Coloring Book”, was released exclusively on Apple Music this spring and according to him it’s in heavy rotation at the Obama’s residency.
“Oh yeah. They’re bumping ‘Coloring Book’ hard up there. If you go up there, you’ll probably hear ‘Coloring Book.’ This is not a joke at all,” the artist said.
“Malia listens to ‘Coloring Book,’” he added, referencing the president’s oldest daughter. “And I send them stuff sometimes. I haven’t seen Malia since I was a kid. I think [Malia and Sasha] were both in school the day that I went up there recently, but Barack was talking about it. Or, uh, President Obama was talking about it.”
One of Chance’s tracks, “Acid Rain,” is featured on the president’s Spotify summer playlists.
On Tuesday, the 23-year-old rapper took to Twitter to clarify that he will not be at ESPN’s town hall about race relations after a rumor was started that he would be in attendance.
In a series of tweets, Chance wrote about “the responsibility of all media outlets to correctly label all killings by 1st responders as what they are: Murders.”
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