Chance The Rapper is more successful than at least 99.9 percent of rappers, but like many young artists, there were those who tried to dissuade him from pursuing his art as a career. Chance guested on The Tonight Show yesterday, and during his conversation with Jimmy Fallon, he revealed that his father originally didn’t want him to be a rapper.
Fallon asked Chance if everybody was supportive of his rap growing up, and he responded:
“Uh… I don’t know if they were supportive of it, but it was understood. It was a thing that… People knew that I rapped, since I was a kid. […] My dad actually really… right when I got out of high school, we kind of… as parents do when their kids graduate from high school and they don’t go to college or get a job, it’s kind of like a friction thing. But after we separated for a while, we got back together and he really helped guide me in terms of the amount of work and focus that I needed to work on it from the business side, and he’s still doing that to this day. But in the beginning, my dad did not want me to be a rapper, for sure.”
They also chatted some about Chance’s musical origins, with Chance telling Fallon that he used to perform as Chano, which he called a “terrible name,” when he was in high school.
Watch the full conversation above.
