Chicago native Chance the Rapper unloaded on Spike Lee Friday, calling the director’s latest film Chi-Raq “exploitive” and “offensive” and criticizing the director’s recent statement that his film would “save lives.”
The rapper, real name Chancelor Bennett, began a series of Twitter missives by re-tweeting a user who suggested that Chicagoans purchase pirated copies of the film when it is released on December 4.
“Let me be the one from Chicago to personally tell you we not supporting this film out here,” Chance followed up.
In his tweets, Chance took aim at Lee’s comments to the Hollywood Reporter last month, when the director said his aim with the film, which is a modern day retelling of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, was not to win awards, but rather to “save lives.”
Lee had said:
There’s people being shot on the streets of Chicago daily. It’s not just Chicago, it’s happening in cities all over America. It’s happening in L.A., New York — what’s Baltimore called? Bodymore, Murderland. What’s Philadelphia called? Killadelphia. There’s a major part of this film that’s about guns in our country. What is it going to take for we as people, and supposedly the most civilized country on Earth, to stop this madness? The NRA is not bigger than the United States of America.
The rapper also slammed the central plot of Lee’s film, which sees the protagonist, a Chicago woman named Lysistrata, orchestrate a citywide “sex strike” in an effort to halt the gun violence gripping the city:
Finally, Chance ripped Lee, a New Yorker, for making a film about his native Chicago:
Chi-Raq begins streaming on Amazon Instant Video on December 4. Check out the trailer below.