Joey Purp: "Photobooth" (via SoundCloud)

Memorial Day weekends serve as a distilled snapshot of Chicago’s divide. On the North Side, you have copious amounts of wealth and social prosperity: neighborhood street festivals, rooftop barbecues, beach parties. On the other side you have the “othered” sides, specifically the West and South Sides; over this past long weekend, more than 60 people were shot across the city, largely in those areas. For many, that’s just another sad number, one that has lost much of its meaning amid an endless tally. But not for Joey Purp, who has a unique perspective on his city’s triumphs and woes.

The 22-year-old rapper grew up absorbing the fractured narratives of Chicago, bouncing between neighborhoods as disparate as the North Side’s Wrigleyville and the West Side’s Humboldt Park. Purp is mixed—his mom is white and his dad is black—and the complications of race have informed his worldview. “I’ve always been part white to someone, part black to someone else,” he says. “I’ve always noticed the type of people I was around more because there was never [a time] when race wasn’t a topic.”

And if Purp is a man of many binaries, so too is his music. He grew up on rap and rock—he names the Velvet Underground as his favorite band—and he smashes ideas from both into one another on his latest project, iiiDrops. (Please note: He does not like the term “mixtape.”) The production on iiiDrops flips back and forth between lush, horn-laden instrumentals and clipped funk that recalls the genre-flouting work of N.E.R.D. and the Neptunes. “My responsibility as an artist is to [experiment] in everything,” he says, “to break the walls down between different sounds and expectations that come with labels like ‘rapper’ or ‘Chicagoan.’”

In the four years since his debut release, The Purple Tape, Purp has become a father, gaining a sense of purpose through his maturation. While he takes on a varied mix of topics throughout iiiDrops, from frivolous and fun to strikingly serious, “Cornerstore” serves as the heart of the project. It is also, unequivocally, a signal of what he once was—a Chicago boy—and what he is now: a voice for the voiceless. “And white kids deal with problems that we never knew to bother/Arguing with they dads, we pray we ever knew our fathers,” he raps on the song. In his lyrics, he invokes a more universal “we,” centering collective stories rather than merely his own.

Joey Purp: "Cornerstore" [ft. Saba and theMIND] (via SoundCloud)

“I feel like it’s important in music to not just talk about violence—and if you are talking about violence, to talk about why it’s happening,” he says. “You’re not just talking about the pressure of growing up without things. You’re talking about what you had to do in order to find things.”

Chicago artists have a tendency to push against the city they call home. They aim to escape, to branch out from the city’s punishing borders and to find legitimacy on the coasts and abroad. At this point, Purp is not adhering to that trajectory, but rather utilizing pieces of his past to craft a smart and sharp delineation of his home and who he is. “There’s an aura around our city where everybody tries to leave, but that’s only because no one thinks that they can get out,” he says. So while iiiDrops will likely elevate his status within the world of music, Purp is aiming to follow in the recent successes of Chance the Rapper, who has managed to keep Chicago close while entering the wider world (and who shows up for a guest verse on the iiiDrops highlight “Girls @”).

Joey Purp: "Girls @" [ft. Chance the Rapper] (via SoundCloud)

Purp and I meet on Memorial Day at Soho House Chicago—a private club in the West Loop, the city’s foodie playground—his thick, curly hair stuffed under a baseball cap. He arrives about 20 minutes late with his beautiful girlfriend, and we head to the club’s private theater to talk. Later on in the day, he’ll be heading to the South Side for a family cookout.