Let’s take it to the beginning. Vic started his career as frontman for band Kids These Days, an eclectic group of students drawn from various Chicago high schools. In 2011, while Chief Keef and drill music were bubbling out the cauldron, Kids These Days provided an alternative image of the city’s youth: bright, jazzy, and intellectual.

Enter Chance The Rapper. Chance and Vic met as freshmen in high school. Chance likely looked up to Vic, who was already playing South by Southwest and Lollapalooza with Kids These Days. Chance cultivated hype, in part, by working with Vic. Their dynamic tilted over time—as Kids These Days collapsed in 2013, Chance released Acid Rap.

Anyone old enough will remember the Twitter frenzy surrounding Acid Rap—the project was immediately hailed as a classic, and Chance was crowned the golden boy of Chicago. Vic, in an interview with Complex, recalled the sinking feeling in his gut as he heard one of its lyrics: “And I still get jealous of Vic / And Vic still gets jealous of me.”

“[Chance] was right because I was jealous,” Vic said. “Here he was doing what he wants to do and I’m sitting here with a band that was breaking up, with people who want nothing to do with me, and feeling creatively stifled. It hit hard because there were plenty of times that he was jealous of me.”

This was the beginning of a lifelong pattern. Vic was once the coolest kid with the brightest future, but Chance stole his thunder. Vic hunkered down and responded a few months later with Innanetape, but by that time, it was clear who was in who’s shadow: “If you like Acid Rap,” bloggers wrote, “You’ll like Innnanetape…”

As a brilliant, goofy rapper with a kaleidoscopic sound, Chance had raced ahead in the lane that Vic created. Everything Vic was supposed to do, Chance did first: Chance dropped the classic mixtape first. Chance appeared on a Kanye album first. Chance won a Grammy first. Vic started the wave, but Chance became famous first, and anything Vic did would look derivative.

So Vic went the other direction. He shaved his head, embraced a “bad boy” image, and started (cringely) talking about fighting in every interview. In the run-up to his debut album, 2017’s The Autobiography of Vic Mensa, he made an appearance on the show Everyday Struggle, where he called host DJ Akademiks a bitch to his face. Vic was angry about Akademik’s coverage of the violence in Chicago. Akademik’s memetic mockery might have been out of pocket, but it wasn’t much different from most other Instagram coverage, and it felt more like an attempt for Vic Mensa to burnish his “tough guy” credentials.

As Vic would learn, using DJ Akademiks—one of the least threatening people in the industry—as a punching bag doesn’t make you look hard. It makes you look like a bully. Akademiks became one of the most important bloggers in the modern era. His Instagram account is often rising rappers’ best way to get their music in front of a captive audience, a technique later brilliantly exploited by 6ix9ine. Vic Mensa may have won the battle, but DJ Akademiks won the war.

It was the first of many missteps. Vic went on to beef with podcast host Adam22, another internet kingmaker, cynically deploying #MeToo accusations against him. He beefed with 6ix9ine, who memorably proclaimed “No one can name a Vic Mensa song” on Angie Martinez’s radio show. But his biggest mistake was to diss the late XXXTentacion in a BET Cypher, seemingly gloating over his recent death—“Your favorite rapper’s a domestic abuser / XXX, we all know you won’t live that long.” It was made more disgusting by the fact that Vic had admitted his own past abuse of his ex-girlfriend—“I ended up in the closet with my hands around her neck,” he once rapped.