The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them.

"Can we go smoke a cigarette?" Vic Mensa asks.

We're inside Hyde Park Records, on 53rd Street, one of the 24-year-old rapper's favorite teenage hangouts, catching up with the Roc Nation signee before he packs up his hometown apartment and heads for Los Angeles to record—though he's not sure when he'll move. "I am in between right now," he says. "I'm pretty much always in between."

Fresh off the 4:44 Tour with Jay-Z, Mensa is back at his boyhood hang to do research for a new music project. He says he's experimenting with African sounds, Radiohead-style chords, and Lil Wayne-esque flows. He's scooped up an armload of obscure vinyl—including the 1984 spoken-word LP Our Time Has Come by Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson.

Mensa grew up in Hyde Park—his family lived in Kenwood at 47th Street and Woodlawn. Chicagoans have been able to watch him become a star almost overnight.

Vic Mensa at Hyde Park Records, one of his favorite teenage hangouts

Morgan Elise Johnson

In 2010, he nearly electrocuted himself on an elevated transformer trying to scale a fence to sneak into Lollapalooza. The next year he was onstage with rebellious indie band Kids These Days, and he's appeared three times as a solo artist since then. Last year, Jay-Z tapped Mensa as his latest protege and took the south-side MC on a two-month arena tour.

Hyde Park has changed since a teenage Mensa went for gyros on 53rd Street—that strip is now a shopping district with gastropubs, a sushi joint, and a new skyscraper.

"A lot of the places I went to as a kid here on this street don't exist anymore," Mensa says. "Ribs 'n' Bibs [was] next door. Across the street was Hyde Park Gyros. The owner of Hyde Park Gyros always showed me a lot of love when I was a kid. It's getting kind of gentrified here, you know? It's like they want to make it into a Lincoln Park type of area."

Hyde Park Records, though, remains. The indie shop took over the space in 2004 from a 2nd Hand Tunes that had been a neighborhood institution since the 70s, and it's helped Mensa develop his diverse musical taste. On this visit the woman behind the counter, Angel Elmore, a Participatory Music Coalition member, is surprised to see him again so soon—he recently dropped in to buy a Christmas gift for Dion "No I.D." Wilson, a key architect of modern Chicago rap and now an executive vice president at the Capitol Music Group. Mensa makes a beeline for the back of the store to listen to the albums he's picked out—research for his new project.

"When did I start coming to Hyde Park Records?" Mensa asks himself. "Probably when I was like 11 years old. I would get high, get a gyro across the street, and then come sit in here and listen to records all day."

His teenage bad-boy act eventually got Mensa banned from the store. "I was stealing records in my big fucking Timberland jacket. Then the weather thawed out and all I had on was a hoodie, and I tried to do the same thing," he said. "[When] I came back, they was like, 'So you gon' bring that record back or what?' They banned me. Now I gotta try to buy a lot of shit to even out my karma."