With mild fascination, I’ve been following the rap career of Tom Hanks’ son, who goes by the name of Chet Haze. The 20 year-old Northwestern University student’s hip-hop ambitions first came to light last January when he released “White and Purple,” a homage to his school’s colors that was his own take on Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow.” Naturally, it was jeered and made fun of, and frankly I scoffed at it too. And then a few weeks ago he released his first original track and I scoffed again. “Who the hell does Tom Hanks’ son think he is?”, I thought.
But with the passage of time, Chet Haze has begun to grow on me. Not his music, mind you, but Chet Haze personally. After probably spending too much time trying to imagine what it must be like to be Tom Hanks’ son, I’ve begun to empathize with him a bit. Like, if you’re the son of an international celebrity, the world can be your oyster, obviously, but there’s got to be an enormous amount of pressure that can go along with that — so here’s this kid who loves hip-hop, his dream apparently is to be a musician, and people’s first instinct, myself included, is to rip on him for having such aspirations. Compounding this even more is that the infancy stage of his career is being played out in the public eye — he isn’t afforded the ability to work out his artistic growing pains in obscurity like the rest of us would be. That’s gotta suck so hard.
Am I wrong for sort of wanting to pull for this kid suddenly?
To be honest, his Twitter has been the thing that’s sort of turned me toward rooting for him. It’s typically a beacon of enthusiasm, hope and positive energy. The kid has dreams that he wants to see come true, and I can relate to that. His Twitter has made me like him in a way that I don’t other well-known children of famous people, namely Luke Russert.
Now, with all of that said, feel free to call me a jerkoff for pulling for this dude in the comments. In the meantime, here’s the video for his debut track, “Another Chance,” which was uploaded to YouTube last night…
