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Yesterday local MC Vic Mensa sent me on a wild goose chase. Sort of. When the former Kids These Days member and cofounder of rap collective Save Money retweeted a fan photo of a few CD-Rs of Mensa’s brand-new debut mixtape, Innanetape, placed upright next to rows of books at the library, I took it upon myself to close my laptop and take a trip to the Harold Washington Library to investigate. I love a good scavenger hunt, and this was a good one—the spines on each book in the photo gave me a good clue, and after jotting down the name of an author whose novels help prop up one of the CD-Rs (Jodi Picoult) I set out for the library, eager to find a copy. Perhaps I was a little too eager, because rather than seek out more clues or even look into the possibility that the library in the photo was anything other than the Harold Washington, I just took off running. Even though I came up empty after scoping out the library stacks on a few different levels, I appreciate that Mensa employed this particular method for promoting Innanetape. Sure, he wasn’t the one who actually dropped copies of the CD in the library—he asked fans to do that for him—but it’s still an unusual way to engage with fans on the ground, and I imagine that, like me, anyone who decided to hunt down a CD-R had fun doing it.
