July 20--Vic Mensa is coasting through the first half of his Friday soundcheck at Cerise in Virgin Hotels Chicago. The distracted hip-hop artist from Hyde Park -- who is sporting a sleeveless T-shirt and tight-fitting red pants tucked into black boots, all of which show off his skinny frame, making him look more like a rocker than rapper -- is singing into the microphone in one hand and focusing on his cell phone in the other.
Mensa later gets off track and sings the chorus from PartyNextDoor's "Recognize," only he changes the unprintable lyrics for the amusement of his friends and handlers in the room.
"You got nuggets, I got chicken," sings Mensa (real name: Victor Mensah), before belting out, "I want you."
Just as Mensa starts to take the soundcheck a little more seriously, longtime friend and fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper enters the room. Chance greets Mensa while he's in the middle of singing and, during another song, headbangs directly in front of the guitar-playing Mensa to get him to laugh. It works.
Mensa's manager says more than 9,000 people RSVP'd for the Hennessy-sponsored Pitchfork Music Festival after-party that night at Cerise, located on the hotel's 26th floor. It speaks volumes of Mensa, who performed at Pitchfork Saturday, and his rising popularity. Unfortunately, it looked like there would be a lot of disappointed people, as the space could not fit more than 300.
"Your older brother is trying to get in," Mensa says to Chance after checking his phone. "Can you get him in? Figure you (should) ..."
The 22-year-old Mensa's focus builds toward the end of soundcheck. He closes his eyes for parts of it and tunes out everything other than the music.
Earlier Friday he released his collaboration with dubstep superstar Skrillex, "No Chill," on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show. Mensa asks "Practice? What the (expletive) is practice?" on "No Chill" -- a reference to Allen Iverson's famous "Practice" press conference rant. Skrillex showed Mensa the Iverson rant this year, which Mensa had never seen up until that point. How is that even possible?
"I've known Sonny (Skrillex) since Coachella three years ago," says Mensa, now in a gym down the hall from Cerise that has been converted into a green room. "We always kept in contact. This year we planned on getting in the studio between Coachella dates. He had just made this beat with Jahlil Beats, and we got into it. We made that ... on the spot. We put that together with Mike Dean. He came out to Chicago and revamped it.
"Me and Sonny are real cool. We go out skating. That's just my man. It's just real natural."
Mensa has also collaborated with Kanye West on multiple occasions. West brought Mensa and singer Sia with him on stage at the "Saturday Night Live" 40th anniversary special in February to perform "Wolves." Two months later Mensa signed with Jay Z's Roc Nation Records, which will release his debut studio album that he says is "90-something percent done." The spotlight is shining bright on Mensa at the moment -- maybe a little too bright. He opted not to check social media that day to see the public response to "No Chill" to avoid any potential negativity.
"I'm going to keep it real," Mensa says, "I deleted Twitter and Instagram off of my phone yesterday or two days ago. I just post through my manager's phone. I'm not so concerned with people's opinions. It's nice to know, I guess. But I'm in a position where a lot of people are hating on me whatever I do. So I'm focused on the present. I'm trying to live in the moment. I'm curious, but I didn't want to let other people's judgements influence the way I feel. More so, I care about people's opinions that I care about."
The former Whitney Young High School student has been rapping since he was 15 years old. He used to sell pot and shoplift before tasting fame with his band, Kids These Days, which performed at Lollapalooza in 2011 and on "Conan" in 2012. They broke up in 2013 when they were unable to agree on the band's direction. He described performing as a solo artists at Lollapalooza last year and Pitchfork this year as "triumphant."
"We didn't really think about Lolla and Pitchfork until we were old enough to sneak in," says Mensa, who will appear Aug. 1 at Studio Paris's Lollapalooza after-party. "Our parents didn't buy us tickets. It seems like a lot of the time, the people who grew up going to those festivals were from Lincoln Park and private schools and had trust fund vibes."
With his after-party show less than three hours away, Vensa exits the gym and presumably heads to his hotel room, but not before swinging at a punching bag on the way to the elevator. A woman on the elevator, someone who apparently knows him well enough to bust his chops, tells him he isn't strong.
"I'm not strong," Mensa says, "but I can fight."
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