Last May, The FADER spent a week with the rapper Vic Mensa in Chicago shooting our first video cover story, Down To Start A Riot. Mensa had recently joined Kanye West on stage at the BRIT Awards and was, along with the rest of his SAVEMONEY crew, teetering on the edge of breaking out in a major way. As Mensa's go-to producer and friend-since-grammar-school Stefan Ponce recalls, "He really did what he always knew he was going to do. Like, damn, this guy is really about to change his life."

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Citing the versatility of SAVEMONEY's sound and the breadth of their projects, the documentary's director Aaron Brown says that, "It was cool to see what [Mensa and the SAVEMONEY guys] were doing, because they were doing something that has a lot more dimension." Brown spent time with Vic in the studio, where there was work to be done and fun to be had; followed him through the streets of Hyde Park, where he recalls seeing the body of a slain classmate as a teenager and where he is now stopped by admirers on the street; and he filmed him freestyling on a subway platform.

"I had the idea of trying to explore the genre of documentary, just trying to pick the pieces apart of a rapper," Brown says of the dramatic subway station session. "I was thinking of an acapella verse as a voiceover in a documentary, that's what it was. Just trying to freshen it up. We've all seen a bunch of rap videos and a bunch of documentaries, so it was asking, how can we think about them as one thing."

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With nearly one hundred issues behind us, we are proud to present our first video cover story Down To Start A Riot featuring Vic Mensa and SAVEMONEY. Watch above, and check this space for more documentaries like this in the future.