Chicago’s independent musicians stepped up their activism in 2020

With concerts and tours on hold for most of the year, the city’s music scene doubled down on mutual aid and fundraising for community groups.

By JACK RIEDY

The major-label music industry is doing its best to pretend the pandemic is over. Despite an accelerating death toll, high-profile artists and organizations have spent the last half of this long year bringing audiences into indoor venues for award shows (the AMAs), album-release parties (T.I.), and even full concerts (Trey Songz, Chase Rice, Great White).

Thankfully most musicians have respected their fans enough to prioritize the common good above the familiar rush of a crowd. In Chicago, as in so many other American cities, independent artists have watched their neighbors struggle not only with COVID-19 and all the inequities it exacerbates but also with racist police violence and a callous or hostile government response to their su ering. They’ve seen a trickle of government aid arrive, often inaccessible to the people who need it most and pathetically inadequate to the scale of economic hardship caused by the pandemic.

Like many other working Chicagoans, these musicians have decided to step in to help their communities directly. None of them has been able to tour or support themselves with shows, but some have put even writing and recording on hold to focus on mutual aid. Others have continued to release music but used their album cycles to raise funds for vulnerable

Rapper Femdot, who’s friends with Muse, was inspired by the Grab-N-Go to launch a grocery delivery program called the Scholars Slide By through his nonprofit, Delacreme Scholars. “After volunteering with the People’s Grab-N-Go distribution site, we started thinking about, What about people who can’t get here? How can we make sure that people who couldn’t reach these sites still get food?” Femdot says. “We have a platform—why don’t we use it to help connect some of the dots and work in conjunction with great initiatives already going on?”

Femdot, born Femi Adigun, and a crew of 25 to 50 volunteers delivered groceries “no questions asked” throughout Chicago and nearby suburbs every other weekend from June till September. In total, the Slide By served 457 families, with an average size of four people, buying what each one needed by soliciting shopping lists.

The two rappers used their social media pages to spread the word among their fans. Their mutual-aid projects sometimes shared leaders and volunteers with each other and with Feed the West Side, launched by John Walt Foundation executive director Nachelle Pugh, Pivot Gang cofounder Frsh Waters, and photographer Qurissy Lopez. But Muse and Femdot both refrained from releasing music over the summer—not till late September did Muse drop his first song of 2020, a remix of his 2019 track “Shotgun” that added a Femdot feature.

Many other musicians continued to release music but used it to raise money for community organizations, activist groups, GoFundMe campaigns, and more—especially on the Fridays when digital music retailer Bandcamp passed along its share of sales revenue to artists and labels. (Full disclosure: I’ve written freelance articles for Bandcamp’s editorial site.)

Nnamdï Ogbonnaya, who performs as Nnamdï, released the album Brat in April, but because he couldn’t hit the road to promote it, he just kept recording in his home studio. In June, after protests began in Chicago in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began releasing the results as Bandcamp exclusives.

In addition to Brat and July’s instrumental album Krazy Karl, Ogbonnaya released three singles and an EP that he explicitly used as fundraisers. “I was following a lot of activists and Black Lives Matter pages for Chicago, they were always posting resources and ways to help people,” he says.

June’s Black Plight , three hardcore songs about racist police violence, was the topselling item on Bandcamp for an entire week, and Ogbonnaya donated the proceeds to Assata’s Daughters and EAT Chicago. Other beneficiaries of his releases include the Chicago Community Bond Fund, the Illinois Prison Project, Brave Space Alliance, and grassroots food drives run by his friends on the south side. Ogbonnaya estimates that he raised $12,000 “for different organizations that I think are doing amazing work.” Sooper Records, the indie label he co-owns, also gave $1,500 to My Block, My Hood, My City in June.

Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of