Even before we will likely see him nominated at the Grammys, Chance made a big splash at the 2016 MTV VMAs, where he had his interviw with the network video-bombed by none other than Beyonce.
That's one way to make an entrace on live national TV.
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He formally kicked off his career with the song "Windows." It got him some attention in Chicago's hip-hop scene, and Chance spent another eight months tinkering with the rest of the album. When "10 Day" was finally released in April 2012, the album got over 400,000 downloads on the music-sharing site DatPiff and got Chance a cult following.
In July that year, Childish Gambino raised Chance's profile even more by featuring him as a guest on his song "They Don't Like Me."
Chance performed "Sunday Candy" and "Paradise" from "Surf" on "Saturday Night Live" on December 15, 2015. He was the first unsigned artist to do so.
In 2014, Chance worked on five songs on Kanye West's 2016 album "The Life of Pablo." He provided guest vocals for "Ultralight Beam," rapping "I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail/He said let's do a good ass job with Chance three/I hear you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy/Let's make it so free and the bars so hard/That there ain't one gosh darn part you can't tweet."
Like he's done for many other artists, Kanye raised Chance's profile — and gave him the liberty to continue without a record label backing him. Chance made a second appearance on "SNL," performing "Ultralight Beam" with Kanye on the night "The Life of Pablo" dropped.
In May, Chance released "Coloring Book" on various streaming platforms. Kanye appears on the upbeat opening track, "All We Got," and Lil Wayne, T-Pain, Justin Bieber, and Future drop verses on other songs on the album. An artist signed with a record label would never be able to release an album like this for free, but Chance did.
His song "No Problem" is about how much Chance wants to keep record labels far, far away from his music. The album is widely considered to be one of the best of the year so far. And despite being streaming-only, it became a top-10 hit on the Billboard chart.
Now that he's good friends with Kanye and "Coloring Book" is a success, the music industry has to accept Chance whether they want to or not. The Grammys changed its rules to make streaming-only albums eligible. Chance the Rapper is only 23, and he's running out of barriers to break.
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