Che Smith is your favorite rapper’s favorite wordsmith. As Rhymefest, the Chicago native declared himself 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, most notably the Grammy-winning “Jesus Walks,” while building an exemplary career as a conscious emcee. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for “Glory,” the soundtrack theme for the Selma movie, which he co-wrote with John Legend and fellow Chicago native Common.
Even with all the successes, the 47-year-old Smith hasn’t stopped thinking about his humanitarian obligation to his hometown of Chicago, reducing it to a metaphor for urban violence and corruption.
This year was the first school board election in Chicago’s history, and Smith decided to run as an independent, believing his experience and relationships in the arts and music community would be helpful.
“I had my eye on this,” Smith says. He’s an imposing, wise-cracking presence who commands attention both on stage and on the stump. “We knew how historic an elected school board would be for Chicago, the last major municipality without an elected school board democracy.”
In a race against a pastor, a nonprofit CEO and a former district principal, Smith won with 32% of the vote. After taking up the position, he hopes to use art to broaden the horizons of students. “If you look at it from a Stem perspective: science, technology, engineering, mathematics, why not add art to make Steam?” said Smith, a former professor at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Political Science. “It may sound cliché, but if you take a trigonometry class and learn about angles, and you learn angles in art class, you might get better at trigonometry.”
Combining commercial artistry and activism sets Smith apart from his fellow rap celebrities who are quick to pour money into foundations and occasionally show up to hand out school supplies.
If West’s mother, Donda, hadn’t intervened, he might have become one of the celebrities to write a check. “One of my greatest teachers,” Smith says of her late mentor, who referred to Maya Angelou as Miss Maya. “When we were 14 or 15, we were (coming to campus) playing music for her. She would hear us talking about shooting and selling drugs. And she asked, “Is that really you?” And if you become famous, is that who you want to be? Because if people perceive you that way, you have to live in that character for the rest of your life. ”
Smith and Yeh (as the artist is now known) have been friends since they were teenagers, bonding over music. They came of age at a time when Chicago was emerging as a socially conscious rap and hip-hop hub to rival the coast. With Common and producer No ID as their guide, and Twista and Lupe Fiasco behind them, Smith and Ye emerged as a dynamic duo. The former has heavy words on the chipmunk soul beat of the latter, from Chance the Rapper, and Earl’s sweatshirt.
In 2011, Smith and Yeh founded Art of Culture, a nonprofit organization that mentors youth, with Smith teaching writing and hosting cultural retreats around the world. It was originally named Donda’s House. But disagreements over how the nonprofit should be run led to a long-standing rift between the two. Now things are better between them. “What we have is a brotherhood,” Smith said. “And I think we as Americans have to learn how to build brotherhood and community without always expecting someone else to make our dreams come true.”
Smith’s imagination has taken him quite far. Unlike Ye, who grew up middle class, Smith grew up poor and was raised by a single mother at the age of 15. He talked about it in part in the 2015 Showtime documentary In My Father’s House. In the story, Smith is driven by the desire to reunite with his father, who has been absent since he was 12 years old, after buying a house in his childhood. Despite dropping out of high school to pursue music, Smith was drawn to Donda and other unique teachers in the neighborhood, especially the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Reverend Jesse Jackson opened up the south headquarters of his civil rights organization, Operation Push, for Wu-Tang concerts and rap. A show featuring local artists.
After seeing the combination of singing and social responsibility play out so seamlessly up close while hearing Donda’s “sage advice,” Smith decided to pursue a more practical rap reality. Dedicated. “When you hear lines like, ‘We’re all self-conscious/I’m the first one to admit it,’ (from ‘Ye’s All Falls Down’), it doesn’t come from our talent as artists. No,” Smith says. “It came from teachers who taught us how to be authentic. We have great teachers here who work on their art with you, just like they did with me. It is my duty to serve up-and-coming artists in this way.”
Chicago politics has been defined for the better part of a century by the bargaining of favors by the cronies of the major political parties, and is notorious for being a viper’s den of sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners wheelhouse deals. The standard was set by Richard J. Daley, the legendary and domineering mayor who won the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. Decades later, the same political machine put Barack Obama in the White House.
The Chicago Teachers Union has emerged as a major political player in recent years, pouring more than $23 million into Pax candidates in Illinois since 2010, an investment that will culminate in the 2023 mayoral race. Brandon Johnson, a former public school graduate who has reached the Social studies teacher. In 2023, CTU and its affiliates spent about $6.5 million on Chicago elections, more than any other interest group.
Smith was not the most likely candidate to represent District 10. District 10 is a rocky southern outcrop dotted with a small number of high-performing schools among schools that are accused of failing. His real name alone, Che, taken from a Marxist revolutionary, has written its own attack ads. His Muslim faith gives an exclamation point.
“I have a brother who walked across the Darien Valley and crossed 15 countries, and he lives in my house,” Smith said when I asked him how the immigration crisis was affecting the city’s schools. “Chicago’s birth rate is low, and the number of children has declined by 10,000 over the past 10 years, which means fewer children are enrolled in public schools.” He said new students keep schools filled. , claims to have been funded as well.
Then, of course, there’s the matter of Smith’s music career, another potential reason why voters don’t take him seriously. Broadly speaking, Smith is angry that musicians are treated in political arenas as if they only serve to start rallies. It was painful for him to watch Lil Jon roll call Georgia 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’s able to relate to people both low- and high-information. And he’s not alone. Kanye is the son of a Fulbright scholar. Lupe’s mother was a community activist. Chance’s parents are political operatives in the city. Why not make them reconsider their policies? It’s a missed opportunity, but we artists need to embrace ourselves and not wait for power to be given to us. .”
Smith believes his close ally and former label boss Mark Ronson had not pressed him to write an open letter to former British Prime Minister David Cameron after the then Conservative Party leader took exception. I could have waited for you to take more action. In 2006, he said on BBC Radio 1 that hip-hop coded content “encourages people to carry guns and knives”.
“David Cameron is someone I have very little in common with, but he has inspired me to recognize his influence as an artist and use my cultural currency for social and political justice. ” Smith recalled. “But he said something meaningful in our meeting: ‘When you turn on the radio, all you hear is sirens and gunshots and violent rhetoric.’ I thought it was a national emergency. Political leader. What should I do with that?”
“I thought he had a point,” Smith continued. But what I had to tell him is that his politics created that alarm bell you heard on the radio. ”
He believes that one of the reasons Cameron ultimately lost power was that he was “completely out of sync with the people on the street.”
Wanting to live up to his independent status, Mr. Smith poured $100,000 of his nest egg into a school board bid that was particularly unpopular with the Chicago Teachers Union. He credited his victory to a grassroots coalition ranging from “the streets” to former university students, and said he counted the votes as “a ‘very good’ rating from the professor.” He also appreciates that some of the same people who voted for him also voted for Donald Trump. Trump once derided Chicago as a “war-torn” city where blacks and Latinos “live 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 the dismantler of the system. There is a political realignment happening in America, and I don’t think the system is even keeping up with it. They want to dismantle the system so they can have a chance to build a new system.” There are many people who do.”
Smith has many things he wants to address in his first term, including busing, strategic partnerships and the district’s $1 billion budget shortfall. That doesn’t seem to leave much room for making or playing music. But he will need to find time, since school board politics is essentially unpaid work. “You have to ask yourself why these interests are putting millions of dollars into fielding candidates for jobs that don’t pay,” he says.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Smith thought that he was more than just a dope lyricist and that his fanaticism could only have a lasting impact if he was on the same level of fame as Ye. It was there. But after his landmark victory, Smith feels like he’s finally reached the political moment that was reserved for him long ago, and he’s encouraging his peers to follow suit. I encourage you to do so. “It’s not enough just to write songs anymore,” he says. “You make a song and then you have to create a reality from it. It’s time to take all those raps and all those words and walk around with them and start creating a better society from your musical imagination.” That’s what I’m doing.
