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Alex Chapman: The D.I.Y. Hip-Hop Artist
AGE 22
HOMETOWN Chicago’s North Side
NOW LIVES In a two-bedroom apartment in the East Village, which he shares with a roommate, a friend from college.
CLAIM TO FAME As a lithe, towering undergrad at New York University, he garnered attention last year when, in the wake of Macklemore and Lewis’s MTV Video Music Awards performance of “Same Love,” he posted on SoundCloud “Gay Rap Song,” a hip-hop track. “Everyone was hailing Macklemore as the face of gay rights in hip-hop culture, when he’s this straight guy with a fiancée,” said Mr. Chapman, who graduated Wednesday and performs under the name Chapman. “It upset me that there was no voice from a real person who has gone through any of the experience that a young gay person goes through.”
BIG BREAK When Mr. Chapman was still a teenager, he appeared on a YouTube series called URB Presents, interviewing musicians like Wiz Khalifa, Big Boi and Skrillex, who had yet to be crowned the king of dubstep. “I like to think I broke him,” Mr. Chapman said jokingly (the video has been viewed over three million times).
LATEST PROJECT Last October, Mr. Chapman released an EP called “XL Life” and has since opened at parties with DJ Total Freedom in Los Angeles and Scary Spice in New York. But his focus these days — apart from his recording and a music column for Interview magazine’s website — is a Friday dance party, Duh, which lures a mixed, fabulous young crowd to the new downtown hot spot Up & Down.
NEXT THING Mr. Chapman is making a music video for his song “Switch Hitta” and working on a mixtape called “iChap Volume 2” in which he will sing and rap over beats from Timbaland and the Neptunes, the music he grew up with. And he is working on a full-length album that will stray from hip-hop. “I’m going to try to get some electric guitar in there,” he said. “I’m going to rap, going to sing, everything. It’s going to be a reflection of my growing up in Chicago, like Kanye West’s ‘College Dropout.’ ”
SELF PROMOTER: While he recently splurged on a “nice mike,” Mr. Chapman remains dedicated to D.I.Y. recording: just him and his laptop in his bedroom. And despite interest from record labels, managers and publicists, Mr. Chapman is keeping his business in-house, at least for now. “I do everything myself,” he said. “I’m my p.r. I’m my management.”
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