Chance the Rapper was born Chancelor Bennett on April 16, 1993. He came from the West Chatham area in Chicago, Illinois, and during his high school years he considered a future in music. During his senior year, he used a ten-day suspension to record his debut mixtape, ’10 Days’, which was uploaded in 2012 and was well received locally.
The mixtape helped Chance to develop relationships with producersIn that same month, Chance curated and headlined the Obama Foundation community event at the Wintrust Arena in Chicago, where artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gloria Estefan and Aziz Ansari joined him on the stage. His work in Chicago didn’t stop there. In the following year, Chance purchased the Chicago journalism website Chicagoist from WNYC. He planned to relaunch the website in that same year, before eventually postponing it to 2019.