![]() But as the chaos unfolds, Lyrical Lemonade’s A&R, who goes by Lil Jake, pops in with an update about DaBaby’s uncertain status as a performer at this year’s Summer Smash, before they all rally to come up with a solution to the potential crisis. To the untrained eye, it appears that absolutely no work is getting done. Weed smoke wafts through the air and Lil Tecca’s “Ransom” plays loudly through a stack of speakers in the corner as Bennett and his team swap stories about seeing DMX at Rolling Loud. ![]() on a Thursday afternoon at the Lyrical Lemonade office in Chicago, and a wild game of basketball has broken out in the aging warehouse space. By 2020, it will extend to three days, but one thing about Summer Smash will stay the same: it will always be a Chicago event. The festival’s second year expanded to a full weekend, drawing 20,000 fans each day. In the summer of 2018, Bennett took it upon himself to bring something new to the city and announced Lyrical Lemonade’s inaugural festival, Summer Smash, which drew 11,000 attendees in one day. Then I had to kind of build up my own structure and break through the wall.” I just couldn’t do the shows at a certain point because I had nowhere to throw them. “I tried to bring so many shows to Chicago, and venues would pass on them. “We need this city to open their arms and establishments to allow the scene to continue to thrive,” he says. For some people, it’s beneficial to move out of Chicago once you’re in a position to do so, but I think that there is also something to say about trying to give back to the city.”īennett explains that many of the city’s venues have grown wary of booking hip-hop acts in recent years because of a fear that violence will break out at shows, which has dampened the area’s once-vibrant live scene. “I am in a position where I can help possibly make Chicago that next city, the next L.A., in terms of resources and hubs,” he says, “and really just make people more aware of the music culture here. Then, in 20, he began working with artists like Famous Dex, Lil Pump, and Ski Mask the Slump God, and soon became the go-to video director for an entire subgenre that was exploding from SoundCloud pages into the mainstream. In its early stages, Bennett’s YouTube channel was dedicated to Chicago show recaps, local cyphers, and documentaries about the city’s hip-hop scene. ![]() It was all happening right in front of your eyes, and it was the craziest thing.” “You'd see Vic Mensa just walking down the street. “I remember the day 10 Day came out and Chance did his release party at Leaders,” he says, recalling the era that made him fall in love with Chicago rap. He brought his camera wherever he went and documented the scene, which included rising artists like Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Mick Jenkins. As soon as he got his driver’s license, Bennett got in a routine of making the hour-long trip to the city every weekend. ![]() Years before it became a full-time job, Bennett launched Lyrical Lemonade when he was a high school student in the small Illinois town of Plano, looking in from the outside on a vibrant Chicago hip-hop community. The growing list of artists who have been launched to mainstream success after landing videos on the Lyrical Lemonade channel includes Juice WRLD, Lil Xan, Blueface, and Lil Pump. Anchoring his work around playful animation and a run-and-gun production technique, Bennett has become the most in-demand director for an entire generation of rappers. His YouTube channel, full of music videos that he still edits himself, has gained a reputation in the industry as one of the most reliable places to discover the next big stars in rap, and it’s followed by over 10 million subscribers. He has built his Lyrical Lemonade company into an empire that now includes an events business, a media outlet, a production house, and a beverage distributor. It’s uncommon for a music video director to get as much fan mail as Cole Bennett does, but the 23-year-old has already proven he’s anything but a traditional director. “They know I really like The Simpsons, so they just send me stuff,” he says with an appreciative grin. They were mailed to him from a fan-one of many packages he receives from young admirers around the world on a regular basis. As Bennett plays with a Homer Simpson figurine, he reveals that the toys weren’t a self-indulgent purchase. The latest addition to the space, which he calls “the nostalgia room,” is a box of memorabilia from his favorite TV show, The Simpsons. ![]() Cole Bennett is crouched inside a tiny room of his Lyrical Lemonade office in Chicago, excitedly showing off a collection of vintage toys and old Nintendo 64 games. ![]()
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