Vic Mensa’s show is here, and he brought one of his longest friends, on Chance the Rapper, for its debut.
The Vic Mensa Show, an offshoot of Mejia popular Instagram video series, premieres today with Chance as its inaugural guest. The 24-episode season will release new episodes every Wednesday.
In the chat, the two traced their friendship back to around age 14, when Mensa showed up to an open mic at Jones, a selective enrollment public school on Chicago's Near North Side, to rap. He had come from Whitney Young, a similar selective enrollment school across the city. He spotted Chance in the lunchroom that day, though he admitted he didn't yet have the microphone technique to back up his ambitions.
From that first encounter grew the Save Money collective. Among the early milestones he recalled: a studio session built around a song called "Lord Release," with studio time his father paid for.
The friendship was tested early. When older students at Chance's school were reportedly threatening him, Mensa showed up with roughly 25 people from Whitney Young. The confrontation turned physical. "Some n***as was in goddamn suits and shit, like some n***as came from out South, long story short, you know, found them, beat they ass, for fucking with Chance, you know what I mean," Mensa previously said on All the Smoke. "It was just like, so we've been locked in since childhood."
That loyalty found its way into Chance's 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, on the track "Acid Rain": "And I still get jealous of Vic / And Vic's still jealous of me / But if you touch my brother / All that anti-violence shit goes out the window."
Mensa built the show out of his Webby Award-winning Orange Tree video series, which he said "illustrated for me the transcendent possibilities of conversation: a space for the discussion of radical ideas, humor, honesty and vulnerability."
The series is produced with Mass Appeal through Mensa's production company ORANJ. Episode 2 arrives next Wednesday.
