Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com, which includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history as well as a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods.
Vince Lawrence: I think that Chicago being divested from the mainstream record business has created a different standard of excellence for artists that are requesting support. The record business will sign ten acts, knowing that one of them will cover the cost of all. But with a typical investor in Chicago, rather than try nine shots at the apple, they just want to get one that works.
We decided that our desired customer was this kid from Hyde Park who wore Izod. So we said, “Let’s throw a party that requires you wear that for admission. Or at least require that you wear that to get a discount.” And we had Farley (Farley “Funkin” Keith was his name at the time), Jesse Saunders, and a bunch of other DJs. Our party would go to three or four in the morning, and it was a pretty awesome time.
It was a great time to be a young Black person trying to do something, because you could. And it seems that all of us that were involved in that are, in one aspect or another, self-employed businesspeople to this day. v
