“Help me with this; I’m lost.”
Thats how New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick begins his opinion piece challenging the decision by the Chicago White Sox, a professional baseball team, to make Chancelor Bennett, known better by his stage name, Chance the Rapper, the team’s ambassador. Mushnick disagrees with the White Sox’s recent decision to make Chance their “team ambassador,” a position that combines the fans of hip-hop and those of baseball.
Mushnick says he “spun the Google wheel” and it “landed” on Chance’s song Smoke Again, which he claims to be “dehumanizing gangsta rap.” However, by “randomly” selecting a single song, Mushnick avoids fulfilling his obligation to fully understand who Chance is as an artist. Not all of Chance’s beliefs are represented through one single song, and if they were, I guarantee Chance wouldn’t pick Smoke Again as the one that does. If Mushnick were to pick a couple more songs, he might land on Sunday Candy, Nostalgia or Wanna Be Cool, a song that advocates for individuality and uniqueness in a time where everyone is too focused on being the same and fitting in to be “cool.” In fact, when googling “Chance the Rapper songs,” Smoke Again doesn’t come up in the first 10 articles. This seems to argue that in order to make his insular opinion, Mushnick searched “Chance the Rapper Smoking Weed Song”- an activity that Chance no longer participates in.
It’s sad that Mushnick fails to recognize what thousands of people, including the White Sox organization, Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel do: that Chance is striving to improve the lives of millions. Sadly, readers of this opinion piece may come to an unfortunate conclusion: that Chance is hurting Chicago when the truth is in fact the complete opposite.