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    Sony Gives N.Y.U. $7.5 Million for an Audio Institute

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    A multifaceted new program at the university’s Steinhardt School will train students (on Sony equipment) for jobs in music and audio “that don’t exist yet.”Students at New York University who study the music industry and do research at the frontiers of audio have a new benefactor: Sony.A $7.5 million donation from the Japanese electronics and media giant, made through its personal entertainment business unit, will help establish the Sony Audio Institute, a multifaceted partnership at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. It is set to open this spring.N.Y.U. and Sony, which jointly announced their agreement on Tuesday, say that the institute is not a physical space. Rather, it’s an interdisciplinary approach to studying and researching the latest advances in consumer and pro-level audio tech — replete with Sony tools to facilitate. As part of the partnership, a studio space will be revamped with professional equipment from Sony and the institute will offer an array of internships, scholarships and programming, even letting students collaborate with Sony’s engineers and researchers.The institute will not, however, grant degrees. It will be part of Steinhardt’s degree programs in music business and music technology.“To have access to the researchers who are inventing the future of audio, as well as the businesspeople who are managing the introduction of those products, creates a great opportunity and a competitive advantage for our students,” Larry S. Miller, the director of Steinhardt’s music industry program, said in an interview.Miller, a former music executive, will step down from his leadership of the school’s music industry program in the fall to become director of the Sony Audio Institute, which has been established for an initial 10-year run. (It is unrelated to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a degree program under N.Y.U.’s Tisch School for the Arts.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Khalil Fong, Hong Kong Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 41

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      Singing in both Mandarin and English, he brought a soul and R&B sensibility to Chinese pop.Khalil Fong, a Hong Kong singer-songwriter who infused a soul and R&B sensibility into Chinese pop songs, died on Feb. 21. He was 41.His death was announced on Saturday by his record label, Fu Music. The announcement did not say where Mr. Fong had died or specify a cause of death, but it said he had battled a “relentless illness” for five years.Beloved for its soulful vocals and distinctive blend of soul and Mandarin pop, Mr. Fong’s music found an audience in Hong Kong, mainland China and much of the wider Chinese-speaking world.“Trying to introduce soul music, or soul R&B, was not the easiest thing,” he said in a 2016 interview with The South China Morning Post, noting that the genre was not widely embraced in the region. “One of the things I wanted to do was to introduce this type of music within the context of Chinese language.”He broke into the popular music scene in 2005, when Warner Music Hong Kong released his funky, syncopated debut album, “Soulboy.” In the following decade, he released eight albums and performed in stadiums and large concert halls around the world, wearing his signature thick black glasses.But Mr. Fong’s career was cut short by health problems, and in recent years he had largely retreated from the public eye. Inspiration never stopped flowing, however, and he sporadically released singles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Chrisette Michelle sang for Trump in 2017. The backlash lasted years: ‘I thought they’d never stop hating me’

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      The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands.Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”In 2017, Michele performed at a Trump inauguration in a shocking break from the music industry’s anti-Maga stance. She was met with considerable backlash from fans and from industry peers including Questlove, the Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader. Despite Michele’s extensive success working with rappers Nas and Jay-Z, the decision to perform for Trump cost her future gigs and more opportunities to collaborate with industry heavyweights.Now that some music stars have hopped on the Maga bandwagon, she can’t help reflecting on the price she paid for making the worst decision of her career. “I just remember sitting in a hotel lobby next to my manager, who was my husband of two years at the time, in tears, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just become a professor,’” she recalls. “The constant gnawing and chewing and shouting at me was so difficult.”You wonder if the outcome might have been different if Michele had a catalog to rival Snoop’s, or even a song as big as Drop It Like It’s Hot. A native of Long Island, New York, Michele, now 42, came to prominence during the neo soul movement of the mid-noughties, following Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie. Michele’s satin voice, jazzy vibes and overall versatility made her a sought-after hip-hop balladeer by everyone from the Roots to Rick Ross – the latter of whom appeared at last month’s inaugural Crypto Ball alongside Snoop and Soulja Boy. In 2009, Michele earned a performance Grammy for her third single, Be OK, which also featured will.i.am. All the while Michele remained open about the pressures she felt around her body image, becoming a champion of the #BlackGirlMagic movement.View image in fullscreenMichele didn’t enter the political arena; it landed on her in 2014, when Michelle Obama turned up for one of her shows outside Washington DC. She was not Michelle Obama that night, Michele recalls, “she was my homegirl. She came backstage and asked for a selfie with her mom and her aunt. She wore pink lipstick – like, happy, girlie pink lipstick. She knew all the words. She was a fan.”In 2016 Barack Obama added If I Have My Way, a groovy ballad from Michele’s debut album, to his summer playlist. Michele sang for the president at that year’s Democratic national convention and at his final White House state dinner, when the Obamas hosted Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. She takes patriotic duty seriously and eagerly. “When it comes to singing overseas for the troops or at the DNC, I don’t take it for granted,” says Michele. “I’m proud to be an American, always have been since I was a kid – and that’s a very difficult thing to say as a Black woman.”When Trump’s team invited her to perform at a 2017 inauguration event, Michele accepted – somewhat naively, as it turns out. She doesn’t support or particularly like the guy and was aware of the potential career ramifications. But she saw the gig as an opportunity to confront Trump and see if he kept the same racist, misogynistic energy in person. Even though there seemed to be some cover on the inauguration event’s performance lineup, which also included the gospel music stars Travis Greene and Tina Campbell (of Mary Mary fame), Michele, because of her more mainstream appeal, became the focus. Michele’s longtime supporters begged her to reconsider the gig. In response to reports that she was receiving at least $250,000 for her appearance – the true fee was closer to $75,000 – Questlove and Talib Kweli, both former collaborators of Michele’s, volunteered to pay her not to perform – which hurt. “Honestly, I had to stop paying attention after a while,” she says.The music industry was in no mood to party with Trump when he ran in 2016. Eminem openly criticized his policies. Queen’s Brian May condemned his use of We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention. Elton John turned down an invitation to perform at his 2017 inauguration. But few artists were as stridently anti-Trump as Snoop, a social justice advocate who once characterized the gang violence he grew up around in Los Angeles as a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Snoop set the rules of engagement, pre-emptively denouncing the Black artists who would perform for Trump’s inaugural as “Uncle Toms” and “jigaboos” – derogatory terms that insinuate a deeper racial betrayal. His 2017 music video for the song Lavender, a heavy-handed Trump allegory, features a society of clowns that is ruled by a character named Ronald Klump, whom he shoots with a toy gun. The video outraged Marco Rubio and other Maga Republicans and had Trump musing about the reaction Snoop might have gotten if he had made a similar video about Barack Obama.View image in fullscreenBut Snoop’s tune changed in 2021 after Trump pardoned Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the Death Row Records label that launched Snoop’s music career. (Harris had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for drug trafficking and attempted murder.) “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop said last year. “He has done only great things for me.”At the Crypto Ball, Snoop was photographed throwing up hand signs with Bo Loudon, a young Maga influencer who is close with Barron Trump; Loudon captioned the picture: “Welcome to Maga, Snoop!” The endorsement effectively consolidated Snoop’s metamorphosis from Murder Was the Case gangsta rapper to ubiquitous pitchman to all-American mascot. Reacting to the Crypto Ball gig, The View’s Ana Navarro likened Snoop to a “trained seal”. Other rappers who have performed for Trump have suffered backlash even as Carrie Underwood and other music industry standard-bearers have capitulated to Maga. (After Nelly performed at a separate inauguration event, the administrator of a popular Instagram page dedicated to his wife, the R&B singer Ashanti, stepped down, citing disappointment with the Hot in Herre rapper – who is also unapologetic.)Michele processed the scenes of Snoop with Rick Ross and Soulja Boy at last month’s inauguration ball with wonder. “My initial reaction was, ‘Isn’t it nice to see Black men dancing in America so unapologetically?’” she says. When she faced criticism for her own performance, “I guess I wasn’t so masculine in my way of saying, ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’” she adds. “I just did what I thought was right. I didn’t shout at anybody and tell them not to say what they think.”In the main, the reputational damage to these men has been mostly cosmetic. For Snoop, the controversy has simply presented yet another occasion for him to play the part of America’s lovable scamp. Weeks after raising hackles at the inauguration event, he was back on stage for the NFL’s year-end awards show and for a television PSA that ran during the Super Bowl calling on viewers to “stand up to hate,” reigniting criticism of his inauguration appearance. Michele remembers arriving at a Super Bowl party at the Fountainebleau resort in Las Vegas as the ad was airing. “I’m still processing that commercial,” she jokes.Sometimes Michele thinks an overtly militant defense might have shortened her time in purgatory. “That was the most uncomfortable realization,” she says. “Like, if I’m not shouting and throwing my fist in the air, then it’s quite possible that I get ignored because I’m Black and soft. Look at Amber Rose. She spoke at the RNC, people were hard on her – and she just said, ‘Screw you,’ with that big, beautiful smile on her face. And people just backed up. The funny thing is: I don’t agree with her! I just watched it like, ‘OK, girl …’”Michele hoped to make a statement through the inauguration performance itself, but her messages were mixed. She sang a gospel song called Intentional, which calls for an unwavering belief in a divine plan – an argument evangelicals use to justify Trump support. She wore a maxi skirt replete with images of Black torture and subjugation by Jean-Michele Basquiat. In the end Trump didn’t make the performance, and she never got to meet him. By the time she walked off stage after the four-minute gig, “the death threats were starting,” Michele says. “I was afraid.”She thought she could make them stop if she just took a moment to explain herself – although, she admits, her first instinct was “to be completely silent and just go somewhere and mind my business for four years”. In an open letter pushed on social media, she said she intended her performance to serve as a “bridge” between Trump supporters and opponents. During an appearance on the Breakfast Club, Michele emphasized her Basquiat skirt again while reviewing the other rebellious nuances of her performance. But her attempts at subtlety were ultimately lost on the masses. “That was me overanalyzing everything, overthinking everything,” she says. “Because my parents are teachers, I want everybody to understand all the angles. My shouting came from insecurity, from needing people to believe that I did this for the right reasons.”By then the blowback against Michele was already fierce and unrelenting. She was dropped by her record label and by Spike Lee – who had one of her songs, Black Girl Magic, slated for the Netflix reboot of She’s Gotta Have It. Industry friends kept their distance. Her marriage eventually fell apart under the strain. The sneaker preacher Jamal Bryant called for a boycott of her music. He’d later apologize, but Trump’s camp never reached out to check on her. “Can you put a note in there asking them to reach out to Chrisette?” she asks me, laughing. “My team is waiting on a follow-up phone call.”View image in fullscreenBut it was the constant stream of death threats coming through her phone that really pushed Michele into depression and suicidal ideation. “We had security guards at my hotel doors,” says Michele, who also recalls being heckled on stage. “I wasn’t going to the grocery store by myself for years.” In October 2017 she shared that the fallout from her inauguration performance had caused her to suffer a miscarriage – and was further vilified for punctuating the news with a picture that was not of her actual miscarriage. “That was me at my most panicked, the point where I came close to doing anything to get people just to be nice to me for one second,” she says. “I thought people were never going to stop hating me. I didn’t think this would go on for years.”In a 2018 Facebook post, a year into Trump’s first term and just before the midterm elections, Michele posted a picture of herself between the Obamas and the Singaporean prime minister at the state dinner while calling on voters to rebalance the scales. (“When I look back at this moment it reminds me of what this country’s leadership should look like,” she wrote. “Diplomacy. Civility. Compassion. Love. Integrity. Gangsters don’t run this country. The people do.”) But it just became a reason for critics to come at her harder.Michele started treating her phone like a landline, switching it on every now and then for friends and family. “As a person in the public space, you think it’s your job to be connected all the time,” she says. “But it’s incredibly easy to disconnect.”But even as Black America disavowed Michele, many industry peers rallied around her. “Anita Baker was very vocal about making sure I had her number and about calling her if I needed anything,” she recalls. “India Arie did an entire interview explaining how I should be spoken to as a person, pulled me backstage and shook [the sense back into] me. Kirk Franklin was like: ‘The Black community owes you an apology.’ But Stevie Wonder was the most adamant to me about continuing in this music space because he’s been through so many things himself. These are the people who really wanted to make sure that I knew they were there for me.”She carried on quietly for years – performing around the country and even launching a podcast called Inner Peace Examination, dedicated to self-reflection – until a curious thing happened: the political winds shifted. Trump stormed back from his 2020 defeat to win re-election, this time with backing from tech billionaires. Corporate America rushed to scrap its DEI programs in a fit of anticipatory obedience. Just last month Obama and Trump were observed chatting warmly to each other while sitting together at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral – as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies for the past 17 years.Ultimately, Michele wishes she could have been like Snoop and told her critics to kiss off, and she also wishes she had never taken the inauguration gig in the first place. It’s another nuanced position that could threaten her ongoing career recovery and land her in hot water all over again – but at least now Michele knows she’s built for tough times. “For about four or five years, I hated the word resilient,” she says, “because it meant I got cancelled and got back up. But now I embrace it because it means you kept going, and people stuck with you and you’re here now.” More

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      in US Politics

      Lessons for Elon Musk from the original Doge | Brief letters

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      As Elon Musk’s unelected “Doge” troops slash and burn US federal departments (Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent, 12 February), it is ironic to note that the Doges of ancient Venice were always elected, and by a process that was designed to avoid wealthy families taking too much power.John JacobsAlton, Hampshire I agree with your correspondents about the difficulty of hearing the lyrics in musicals (Letters, 13 February), but there’s little mention of the problem in cinemas, where conversations are drowned out by background music. In the recent film about Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet perfectly captured the musician’s mumble. What words he actually said remain A Complete Unknown.Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Re the letters on analogue photography (14 February), there is a good compromise. I use a digital camera, which means I can go “snap happy”. Then I can look at all the images, select what I want and get them printed.Peter ButlerRushden, Northamptonshire I’m not entirely convinced that the Guardian style guide does a lot for women’s rights in advising that actresses should always be called actors (Editorial, 14 February). Why not the other way around?John OwensStockport, Greater Manchester My school report read: “Angela has influence, unfortunately in the wrong direction.” I became a probation officer (Letters, 16 February).Angela GlendenningNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire More

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      in Elections

      Drake’s New Valentine’s Day Album Pivots From Kendrick Lamar Beef

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      The Valentine’s Day release, a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, tries on different styles (acoustic pop, traditional Mexican) while only alluding to Kendrick Lamar.Following a Grammy Awards and a Super Bowl halftime show in which he featured heavily in absentia — at least as a punchline — life goes on for Drake, who released his first new album on Friday since his much-publicized beef with Kendrick Lamar.The album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate with success as an enigmatic R&B singer, pop songwriter and producer, was released via multiple record companies at a fraught moment: Drake is currently suing his own label, Universal Music Group, or UMG, for defamation and harassment.In a lawsuit filed last month, lawyers for the Toronto rapper, born Aubrey Graham, said that UMG’s release and promotion of Lamar’s diss track and No. 1 smash “Not Like Us,” which accuses Drake of pedophilia, was an example of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”Still, the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U” seemed to be business as usual, as UMG (and its Republic flagship) are credited with the release. The album is also credited to OVO Sound, Drake’s boutique label and the home of PartyNextDoor. OVO Sound is distributed by the Santa Anna Label Group, a subsidiary of UMG’s corporate rival, Sony Music.Representatives for Drake, who is on tour in Australia, and UMG did not respond to requests for comment.“Not Like Us” won five Grammys this month, including song and record of the year. A week later, it was the centerpiece of Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, in which Lamar rapped “Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young” but stopped short of performing the line calling Drake and his crew “certified pedophiles,” replacing the controversial designation with a prerecorded scream.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Harlem House Where Billie Holiday Lived Is Damaged in Fire

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      The jazz legend lived in the five-story building on West 139th Street as a teenager with her mother.A four-alarm fire on Wednesday evening severely damaged a building in Harlem where the jazz legend Billie Holiday once lived.The Fire Department said it received the call at about 9 p.m. and extinguished the fire, which spread through all five floors of the building, shortly before 1 a.m. on Thursday morning. No civilians were injured, though four firefighters sustained minor injuries. The cause of the fire is under investigation.“Due to the structural stability of this building, as it was vacant for many years and the amount of fire, we had to pull our members out of the building and go to an exterior fire attack,” Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of operations, said in a news conference.A portrait of Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall in 1946.Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesThe building is owned by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for maintaining the quality and affordability of housing, among other duties.“Even before the fire, HPD had been actively working with our partners to plan the complete rehabilitation of this building through our preservation programs, relocating tenants to safer housing as part of that process,” Natasha Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said in an emailed statement to The Times.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Irv Gotti: Key Milestones in the Life of the Rap Mogul

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      The producer, who died on Wednesday, built Murder Inc. into one of the most influential record labels of the early 2000s. His career was marred by a federal investigation and trial.Irv Gotti, who founded the record label Murder Inc. and helped shape the sound of hip-hop and R&B in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he shepherded the careers of Ja Rule and Ashanti, died on Wednesday at 54.Here is a brief look at how the rap entrepreneur and record executive worked his way from humble beginnings in Queens, N.Y., to the top of the charts before his momentum was marred by a federal investigation into the label in which he was charged with money laundering and acquitted.A Childhood in Queens, N.Y.Gotti was born Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr. in Queens, N.Y., in 1970. He was the youngest of eight children, according to “The Murder Inc Story,” a documentary about his life that aired on BET in 2022. His family, which he described as one that didn’t have much money but had plenty of love, recalled him as a “clown” who loved performing, dancing and entertaining, sometimes even for small change.His foray into music began as a preteen, when he played for hours with a turntable and a mixer that his siblings had purchased for him. By the age of 15, he had begun to make a name for himself as a D.J. at local parties.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Smurfs’ Trailer Shows Rihanna as Smurfette and Promises New Music

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      The first preview of the animated feature shows the singer in her “blue era” and assures fans that new songs from her will be featured on the soundtrack.Music superstar, beauty mogul, fashion designer and … Smurfette? Rihanna’s next big role may not be what you were expecting.On Thursday, Paramount released a trailer for “Smurfs,” giving us a first look at the singer as the elflike, blonde-haired, blue-skinned creature. In an animation style that blends smooth 3-D rendering with elements that evoke the classic hand-drawn cartoons, Smurfette leads her cohort into the real, live-action world on a quest to Paris to find Papa Smurf after he mysteriously disappears.The trailer begins with Rihanna, in human form, addressing the audience.“I can’t wait for you all to see it this summer,” she says, with sunglasses largely covering her Smurf-blue eye shadow. She had teased the trailer in an Instagram post on Wednesday, which was a short video captioned “in my blue era.”The animated movie also features an ensemble cast including Nick Offerman, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Sedaris, Nick Kroll and Dan Levy, and is directed by Chris Miller, who previously helmed “Shrek the Third” and “Puss in Boots.” It will be a musical-comedy reboot of ‘The Smurfs’ film franchise, which last had an installment with “Smurfs: The Lost Village” in 2017.In addition to playing Smurfette, Rihanna is a producer on the movie. But, in what will most likely be the biggest news for her fans, who have been clamoring for more music since her album “Anti” was released in 2016, the trailer ends with a message advising people to “presave” the movie’s soundtrack, which will feature new music from Rihanna.It also says the movie will include the song “Higher Love,” recorded by Desi Trill and featuring DJ Khaled, Cardi B, Natania and Subhi.“Smurfs” is set to release on July 18. More

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      in US Politics

      Rapper Rhymefest on Trump, Kanye and David Cameron: ‘There’s a political realignment happening in the US’

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      View image in fullscreenChe Smith is your favorite rapper’s favorite wordsmith. As Rhymefest, the Chicago native announced himself as a formidable battle rapper, verbally sparring with Eminem and other stars in the late 90s. He co-wrote some of Kanye West’s biggest hits, not least the Grammy-winning Jesus Walks, while carving out his own exemplary career as a conscious emcee. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Glory, the Selma film soundtrack theme he co-wrote with John Legend and Common, a fellow Chicagoan.Even as the successes piled up, Smith, 47, never stopped thinking about his humanitarian obligation to his home town of Chicago, cut down to a metonym for urban violence and rot.This year, when Chicago held school board elections, the first in the city’s history, Smith decided to run as an independent because he believed his experiences and relationships in the art and music community could prove beneficial.“I had my eye on this,” says Smith, an imposingly sage presence who commands attention whether on the stage or the stump. “I knew how historic an elected school board would be to Chicago, the last major municipality that did not have the democracy of an elected school board.”Pitted against a pastor, a non-profit CEO and a former district principal, Smith won with 32% of the vote. Once sworn in, he hopes to use art to expand students’ horizons. “In terms of Stem – science, technology, engineering and math – why are we not adding arts to make Steam?” says Smith, a former teaching fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “I know it sounds cliche, but if you’re taking a trigonometry class and learning angles, and you’re in art class learning angles, it could make you better at trigonometry.”Smith’s twinning of commercial artistry with activism separates him from his rap celebrity peers who’d sooner shovel money into a foundation and occasionally turn up to hand out school supplies.View image in fullscreenHe might have become one of those check-writing celebrities if West’s mother, Donda, hadn’t intervened. “One of my biggest teachers,” Smith says of the late mentor he called Miss Maya, for Maya Angelou. “We would [come to campus] and play music for her when we’re 14 or 15. When she would hear us talk about shooting or selling dope, she would ask, ‘Is that really who you are? And if you get famous, is that who you want to be? Because if that is who people perceive you as, you’re going to have to live inside that character for the rest of your life.’”Smith and Ye (as the artist is now known) have been friends since they were teenagers, bonding over music. They came of age as Chicago was emerging as a hive of socially conscious rap and hip-hop force to rival the coasts. With Common and the producer No ID as guides and Twista and Lupe Fiasco pushing them, Smith and Ye emerged as a dynamic duo – the former putting weighty words to the latter’s chipmunk soul beats, inspiring generations of homegrown talents that run from Chance the Rapper to Earl Sweatshirt.In 2011, Smith and Ye founded Art of Culture, a youth mentoring non-profit where Smith teaches writing and leads cultural retreats around the world. It was originally named Donda’s House. But differences of opinion over how the non-profit should be run drove a years-long rift between the two. Things are better between them now. “What we do have is brotherhood,” Smith says. “And I think we as human beings in America have to learn how to have brotherhood and village without always expecting somebody to make our dream come true.”View image in fullscreenSmith’s imagination has carried him quite a distance. Unlike Ye, who was raised middle-class, Smith grew up poor and was raised by a single mother who had him at 15. He recounts some of this in a 2015 Showtime documentary called In My Father’s House. In it, Smith is driven to reunite with his father, absent from his life since age 12, after purchasing his childhood home. Despite dropping out of high school to pursue music, Smith gravitated to Donda and other individual teachers in his neighborhood – not least the Rev Jesse Jackson, who opened up the south side headquarters of his Operation Push civil rights organization for Wu-Tang concerts and rap shows featuring local artists.After seeing that combination of song and social responsibility play out so seamlessly up close, with Donda’s “sage counsel” still ringing in his ears, Smith committed himself to a more practical brand of rap realness. “When you hear lines like ‘we all self conscious / I’m just the first to admit it’ [from Ye’s All Falls Down], that didn’t come from how brilliant we are as artists,” Smith says. “That came from teachers that trained us how to be authentic. We have great teachers here that work with you in art. And the same way that was done for me, it’s my duty to serve in that way for up and coming artists.”Chicago city politics are notorious for being a vipers’ pit of sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners wheeler-dealing, defined by major party crony favor-trading for the better part of a century. The standard was set by Richard J Daley, the imperious mayor fabled to have fixed the 1960 presidential election for John F Kennedy. Decades later the same political machine would put Barack Obama in the White House.It’s only in the last few years that the Chicago Teachers Union has emerged as a major political player, funneling more than $23m into Illinois candidate Pacs since 2010 – investment that culminated in the 2023 election of the mayor, Brandon Johnson, a former public school social studies teacher. In 2023 CTU and its affiliate unions spent nearly $6.5m on Chicago elections, more than any interest group.Smith wasn’t the strongest candidate to represent district 10 – a craggy south side outcropping where a handful of high-performing schools are sprinkled among the failing and condemned. His given name alone, Che, taken from the Marxist revolutionary, writes its own attack ads; his Muslim faith provides the exclamation point.“I have a brother that walked across 15 countries, through the Darién Gap, who lives in my house,” Smith says when I ask him how the immigration crisis is affecting city schools. “Chicago has been having low birth rates, 10,000 less children for the last 10 years. That means there are hardly any children to enroll in public schools.” The new arrivals, he argues, keep the schools filled and funded.Then of course there’s the matter of Smith’s music career, another potential reason for voters to not take him seriously. Broadly, Smith takes offense at the way musicians are treated in the political arena, as if they’re only good for kicking off rallies. It pained him to watch Lil Jon deliver Georgia’s roll call at this year’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. “Lil Jon’s father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a military nurse,” Smith says. “He can relate to people whether they’re low information or high information, and he’s not the only one. Kanye is the son of a Fulbright scholar. Lupe’s mom was a community activist. Chance’s parents are political operatives in the city. Why wouldn’t you let them reimagine policy? It’s a missed opportunity, but we artists have to take it upon ourselves not to wait to be handed power.”Smith might have waited longer to make his move if Mark Ronson, a close collaborator and one-time label boss, hadn’t pushed him to write an open letter to the former British prime minister David Cameron after the then Conservative party leader took exception to the hip-hop-coded content on BBC Radio 1 in 2006, saying it “encourages people to carry guns and knives”.“David Cameron – someone who I have very little, if anything, in common with – inspired me to know what my influence was as an artist and leverage my cultural currency for social and political justice,” recalls Smith. “But he said something that made sense in our meeting: ‘I turn on the radio, and all I hear is sirens, gunshots and violent rhetoric. I thought it was a national emergency. What am I supposed to do with that as a political leader?’“I thought he had a point,” Smith goes on. But what I had to tell him is that his politics created that warning shot he heard on the radio.”View image in fullscreenHe believes one reason Cameron ultimately lost power is because he “was never really in tune with the people on the street”.Keen to live up to his independent tag, Smith put $100,000 of his own nest egg into his school board bid – which was notably not endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union. He says his victory is a credit to a grassroots coalition that ran the gamut from “the streets” to former university students – whose votes he counted as a “‘very good’ professor rating”. He further appreciates that some of the same people who voted for him also voted for Donald Trump – a man who once disparaged Chicago as a “war-torn” city of Black people and Latinos “living in hell”.“Votes for Trump went up across the board in Black communities and Latino communities,” Smith says of the rightward shift in deep blue Chicago. “They voted for a deconstructor of systems. There’s a political realignment happening in America, and I don’t even think the institutions have caught up with it. There are a lot of people that long for the dismantling of the system for the opportunity to build it anew.”Smith has a lot he wants to tackle in his first term – busing, strategic partnerships, the district’s $1bn budget shortfall. That doesn’t seem like it leaves much room for making or performing music. But because school board politics is essentially pro bono work, he’ll have to find the time. “You have to ask yourself, why are these interests putting millions of dollars into running candidates for a job that doesn’t pay?” he says.There was a time in the not too distant past when Smith thought his raptivism could have lasting impact only if he were on a similar fame level to Ye, and not just a dope lyricist. But after his landmark victory, Smith feels like he’s finally meeting the political moment that was laid out for him long ago and is encouraging his industry peers to take similar authorship. “It’s not enough to make a song anymore,” he says. “You gotta make a song and then create a reality from it. It’s time to take all those raps and all those words and start to walk through them and create a better society from the imagination of the music. That’s what I’m doing.” More