Chance The Rapper guested on an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast on Friday (July 17), and during the chat, he revealed that now-presidential candidate Kanye West once considered running for mayor of Chicago.
Chance was asked about his support of Chicago mayoral candidate Amara Enyia, and he responded, “The story of how I ended up working with Amara Enyia is so layered and crazy. I don’t think I ever told anybody this, but I found out about Amara Enyia through Kanye West. He called me right before he was about to move back to Chicago, and he told me that he was thinking about running for mayor of Chicago.”
He was then asked if he would have supported Kanye’s mayoral bid, and he responded, “I don’t think so, honestly, because, at the time, I think our views were a little bit…” The host chimed in, “Divergent,” to which Chance responded, “Yeah. But I think both of us have changed in a lot of ways since then. I think that we do agree a lot more on things now.”
Chance then explained why Kanye didn’t end up running for mayor, saying, “He called me back the next day and said he could not run for mayor, because you have to live in the [city of Chicago] for a certain amount of time. And, basically, he was, like, ‘I’m looking into other people: Have you ever heard of Amara Enyia?’ Amara was not a well-known candidate, and she had some extremely progressive, almost radical ideas about governing Chicago. That included defunding police and co-op grocery stores and gas stations. It was like a bunch of stuff that I had never heard before. She didn’t have campaign dollars or any big donors or anything. I met with her, and I just fell in love with her ideas. I completely and totally put everything I could into backing her campaign. And that sh*t didn’t work out. She ended up having to drop out.”
Listen to the full episode below.
